Heya!
New here, obviously. I've got a big interest in scrapping, and some time on my hands, so I'll introduce myself (and perhaps one or two of you will give me some friendly advice).
Long story short, I'm a fairly regular 29 year old guy living on the Gulf Coast. I lost my job last month, and things are getting super tight. One of my roomies went and sold a few big bags of cans and came back with $50 cash, just for some drinking money.
That got me thinking... "If this guy has a job, but still enough time to get all these cans together to make some easy money on the side, what could I do, doing this full-time?"
I've been reading about scrapping for a few days now, and I still feel lost. I always figured you'd just bring in a ton of metal, they'd smelt it, then pay you. Noooo way. They apparently want you to sort that stuff out, and not just by the type of metal! Apparently, there are different types of bronze, and copper, and so on. So I'll be spending dozens of hours here reading into this stuff. My buddy works for a guy that owns a ton of property, so he's always bringing home old appliances, metal cookware, old electronics (TVs, computers, etc). I mean - the garage is full. He told me to do whatever I want with the stuff - he just hates throwing anything away.
Well, aside from that awesome flow of metal, I have another buddy that just gave me an old Suburban. It was old and raggedy, and the engine finally blew. He lost the title years ago, and doesn't care enough to go through the process to recover it, simply to sell it to the junk yard for $150. So, he told me to part it out and give him a small percentage of the money. I doubt many people are going to need or want many parts from a raggedy, old truck like that, so I'm thinking I'm going to take the entire thing apart. Hood, doors, sides, ALL OF IT. I'd assume I'd be able to make some cash from that.
Well, on a final note, I'm also going to be looking into either hooking up with someone locally that has a smelter, or trying to buy my own equipment. There are some metals that my brother's father-in-law wants to buy from me at spot value so he can hoard them (his big thing right now is copper). So, I'll eventually be looking into smelting my own ingots.
That's me and why I'm here, in a nutshell. If anybody has any useful input, advice, reference material, or just wants to say "hello," I'll be around!
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Welcome to SMF! Be sure to cut the cat out of the suburban, I think it's worth another hundred or so, depending if it's original. Do you have a sawzall and other tools you'll need? On those appliances unbolt the motors and cut all the wires you can reach. First check if there's any market for better than scrap. Not everybody does, but some people get lucky with that. They're barely worth $5 as scrap, if you can get $10 or $15 for parts, why not.
Originally Posted by happyscraper
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