Hi my name is Joe and I'm a scrapaholic. My scrapping started in the long, long ago when I was a young kid. I remember gathering up aluminum cans and taking to the automated recyclers that you just pour them in and it spits out the money. Oh yeah and trying to dodge the bees and yellow jackets while you pour them in. The summer after I graduated high school a few of my buddies and I decided we were going to try and do a mass collection of cans. I wish I could remember how much we had but I want to say it was like 300 lbs. I worked at Firestone for about a year and a half and saw how much money their scrapper was making and when I left there for a job at a dealership I started scrapping myself. I have been at this dealership for almost 11 years now and my "business" has grown tremendously since my start. I went from about 21,000 lbs the first year to over 40,000 lbs at least every year since. My best year so far was over 72,000 lbs and 439 lbs of that was aluminum cans. I used to have to borrow my cousin's 8' trailer, then I got a 10' tandem axle and now I have a 12' hydraulic dump trailer. I used to have an issue with other scrappers coming on our lot and "stealing" my scrap but it seems that I have pretty much ran all of them off. Of course I could probably attribute that to the fact that my dealership has provided me a 20' container to lock up my "goodies." I have gone from just getting scrap from the things I worked on in the shop to working in parts and getting a bunch of old parts, everything from the shop, and stuff from our body shop. I also have acquired a few sources that call me when they have stuff for me and that has lead to more and more people that call me and a good bit of stuff just appears in my scrapping corner of our lot. I'm always looking to learn how to better my money as far as how to dismantle and how to classify everything I get. I have started dealing with e-scrap in the past few years and the bad part about that is I threw out a bunch of circuit boards before I found a buyer and figured out it was worth saving. My philosophy is if someone will buy it from me then I will save it. I have even started saving pallets to sell. Scrapping used to be just a little extra income and now it is more of an addiction. If I see something on the side of the road I will stop and pick it up and I'm not afraid to jump in a dumpster. A lot of the guys in the shop and most salesmen here throw way too much metal away even though they save some stuff for me so I'm in our dumpsters daily. Thats just a little about me. Happy scrapping.
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Originally Posted by mikeinreco
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