I've been self employed all my life, my father when introducing me to a new acquaintance would say this is my son Gill, never worked a day in his life and lives the life of Riley.
If it were only that simple, we scrappers work hard for our money. Anyhow I'll hang around awhile to learn what I can about my new interests which are nickel alloys and give advice whenever possible.
I'm 62 years old and spent most of it dealing in scrap, thought I would retire from it in 2002 but boredom finally caught up with me.
Trying to keep it on a small scale, bought an old skid steer loader ( Mighty Mac ) with a blown gasoline engine, that I'm now retrofitting a Kubota diesel into.
Built a car trailer with a 10,000 lb electric winch for pulling on cars and other scrap, which I just finished up last week and taken in a couple of loads already with another ready to go come Tuesday morning.
Spent the last two years refining precious metals gold, silver, palladium and a small bit of platinum from e-scrap. My real intent here in learning about precious metals is to recover the platinum group metals from the catalytic converters I have collected over the past couple of years.
From the electronic scrap I must inform you that you or I will never get rich from it, perhaps those living near or in larger cities will have more success.
A spin off of my refining hobby, is renewing my interest in photography by learning alternative processes such as making contact prints using platinum and palladium.
Then for kicks I;m rebuilding a Massey 35 with a 3 cylinder Perkins diesel, and have a Mitsubishi Pajero to boot around in.
Have a 14 x 40 metal lathe, mig, tig and stick welder as well a plasma cutter, the plasma is used daily. I have a homemade ball mill and two hammer mills, one is 2 hp and the other is 7.5 hp.
I hear you asking - Hammer Mill what is that used for. Well originally these were used on a hog farm for milling feed.
From electric ranges, washing machine a dryer timers for a short list there are silver contacts inside, when I collect these I use a claw hammer to rip he rear cover off then smash the timer or rheostats to get at the contacts.
The contacts are mostly silver plated onto a rivet then affixed to a spring type bar, when I have several pails of these saved up, I feed them through the hammer mill dislodging the contacts and breaking up any plastic. Because the specif gravity of silver is greater than copper or plastic separation via gravity is a simple task.
In the beginning I hand picked the silver plated rivets off.
Enough of what I do, time to read the forum and see what you folks are up to.
Regards
Gustavus
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