Greetings from CT. New to scrapping and could use some tips.

Hello everybody. This is Matt from CT here. I've been doing a bit of scrapping lately and am glad I found this forum because I could use some good advice. One of the more recent loads I did were about 20 wheelchairs and legrests/parts that I got from work. I took these home before I scrapped em and zipped off the plastic wheels, other plastic parts etc. Got $55 for that load. One question I have is that I see people dumping stuff at the scrapyard without stripping it at all.. washing machines, bikes etc with the plastic and rubber still attached. Should I even bother? Another load I recently did was a complete aluminum swimming pool. I manually removed every piece of tin, screw etc. This load filled the back of my Dodge Dakota pretty packed. Brought in $142. I thought it would have been more for all the work I did cleaning it all up. And I just finished stripping the copper out of a huge industrial electric motor..Baldor. What A PITA it was..probably have a good 4 hours or more into die grinding, sawzalling and beating the copper windings out of this. Unfortunately the copper is coated. This motor had to weigh almost 100 lbs..I have all the copper in a large tin and it feels like it weighs over 10 lbs for sure. What Can I expect to get for this? Should I have left this complete? As it was a hell of a lot of work. Sorry for the rambling just could use a few pointers as I would like to get more into scrapping..just dont want to get burned.

Welcome to the forum you'll fin a lot of good info on here. As for your thread what it comes down to is how you value your time. For example my yard gives me $.25/lb for motors so 100 motor is $25. If you break it down which I've done before your 10lbs #2 copper is $2.50/lb my yard and 90lbs #1 steel $230 GT so that would be about $34 (for me not worth it). So its all stuff your gonna have to figure out. Good luck and welcome.

Welcome from South Dakota.

Mechanic said it best. You could have left the screws in the aluminum pool but would have been paid a little less for the aluminum. Large motors like you had I would have sold whole, smaller ones are easyer to get the copper out of. Things like wheel chairs and bikes I would only take aluminum parts off, if the wheels are steel leave the tires on if the rims are aluminum then take them off most are extruded aluminum and pay more than sheet aluminum. On the aluminum bike wheels you would also have to take the spokes off and put them in with the steel.

Thank for the responses fellas! Actually the wheels on all the wheelchairs were plastic. Yes that motor was a ***** to get the copper out of I'll never attempt that again. Must have taken 10 hours totally not worth it. How do they figure how much of your load is fluff? I know they don't want to pay you for the weight of it. Or do they just give you a lower overall price per lb. next think I will be working on is building some sort of a headache rack and side rails for my truck (Dakota quad cab) probably not the best for scrapping but it will have to do because it's got the seats for the kids in the back. A trailer would be nice