Pictures of my Yard!

I took some pictures of my yard the other day and figured I would share.. Since the pictures the white cube van met its firey fate when my father was cutting the rear end out of it.. lol and our shred pile (bale pile) grew quite a bit. Lots of cars and some prepped/oversize scrap as well. I have only been buying scrap for 2 years but I am coming up in the world one piece of junk at a time ! Let me know what you think.



http://www.mcnutts.com/gallery/

yard? YARD?? that aint no yard! That's a whole neighborhood!

Ya lol.. I am just working on everyones car.. want me to fix yours too?

lol, uhmm, no thanks, i'll take care of it, thank you First time i saw that sign said "don't even THINK of parking here" i about cracked up!

Have you seen the TV show Hoarders?

Starbits

So are those two heavy melt piles? I see two diesel tanks and possibly two propane tanks. Why buy explosive material? Where is the prepared plate pile? I see an unprepared pile of what appears to be tires mixed in with heavy melt? Why buy material that will catch on fire and you have to dispose of? Why isn't the yard bare this month with the prices up I shipped a 1,000 gt already this month and still have two days and two weeks left to it? Do you have a rail siding or are you shipping strictly by truck? Where is your material handler at those piles could be allot neater and better sorted if you had bigger equipment. Those piles of cars could be 45 high if you stacked them right. Do you have a car crusher or logger/baler? Just some questions and opinions I have don't take it personally.

Originally Posted by PistoneScrapProcessing

So are those two heavy melt piles? I see two diesel tanks and possibly two propane tanks. Why buy explosive material? Where is the prepared plate pile? I see an unprepared pile of what appears to be tires mixed in with heavy melt? Why buy material that will catch on fire and you have to dispose of? Why isn't the yard bare this month with the prices up I shipped a 1,000 gt already this month and still have two days and two weeks left to it? Do you have a rail siding or are you shipping strictly by truck? Where is your material handler at those piles could be allot neater and better sorted if you had bigger equipment. Those piles of cars could be 45 high if you stacked them right. Do you have a car crusher or logger/baler? Just some questions and opinions I have don't take it personally.

lol pistone.. I figured I would get some questions from you and yes those are 2 (actually 4) piles.. The plate is behind that big heavy melt and farther down is cast.. We allow tires if mounted on cars.. Truck tires we sometimes come to an agreement about. We haven't had a tire fire.. And the government picks up tires free here. We are still small so we only have the small deere with a magnet and grapple. And we only have trucking no rail siding. and still no crusher/logger yet, we hire out but I would love to own one. We are still too small to have the big boy toys but we are trying to grow. And the small heavy melt pile is smaller because I sent some loads out of it since I took the pictures.. I was sorting most plate out until recently.. our machine is small and doesn't have a long reach so I have to move it 3 times to get it to the other pile.. price vs time. And the 45 high.. We are pushing the bylaws stacking them that high for where I am. they are mostly 5 high through the center. We have grown considerably in the 2 years that we have been buying scrap.. And I have been buying non ferrous for almost a year as well.. without a warehouse. lol. Start somewhere.

Originally Posted by starbits

Have you seen the TV show Hoarders?

Starbits

Lol yes.. they don't have the timeslots to make a show here.

Pistone do you own a yard or just work for one? I know from your posts you cut heavy melt all the time. Post some pictures of the yard/yards. I like seeing other peoples setups/layouts.

very nice yard looks like i could be kept busy for a few months.

You probably could.. We don't have a lot of employees so to make extra from our cars and shred pile instead of tying up an employee we had a guy that was selling stuff to us (scrapper like most on here) go around our yard and pick stuff, clean it and sell it back to us for a lesser price.It works out better than paying a guy to do it because it is by the pound not by the hour so he can frig around all he wants but he doesn't get paid for it. So instead of getting shred price we over tripled on a lot of stuff. especially the coppers and aluminum. You would be amazed how much people chuck away in a place like this. Its nice to help people out and make money doing it lol.

that sounds like a sweet gig to have for him and a nice come up for you. Canadians keep telling me i need to visit up there im thinking they might be right.

I don't own a yard nor would I want to at this stage in my life. I am 30 when I am 40 its going to be a completely different story. So to answer your question nope we don't own a yard we just contract for scrap yards to do all there burning of torch material. Pretty much just hired guns to blow out the unprepared torch piles. I am still kinda confused as to why you don't sort the material when it comes in and moving a pile three times pretty much makes you break even once you consider labor, diesel, Workers comp, maintenance, taxes, etc. I might have missed something but where is the cast pile and where is your burning field at? I saw what looked like a stove cast pile maybe but you can break up stove cast by ball dropping it into 6x6 inch pieces for max money on your return but I wouldn't be doing any ball dropping with the machine you have. A 20 foot boom and flying cast mean you can easily punch the window out of the machine and hurt the operator.

I would love to post pictures of the yards I worked in but unfortunately I wouldn't do that due to the fact I don't want to mess up my money tree and there's privacy issues in doing that to. I also don't want to the competition to know anything about what we are doing or how we are doing it. Plus I see so much scrap that people would find amazing on here if i took pictures of it but I just don't have the time in my day to do. I am a burner not a photographer. I can only share so much. I can tell you our setup though we have a 3000 gallon liquid oxygen bulk tank with a 1000 gallon propane tank and 350 feet of underground piping with three burning stations and six oxygen lines and four propane lines at each station. We have 450 feet of burning field with four guys pretty much continuously burning all day long. I was told yesterday that I was going to have to hire 2 more guys because we are going to start breaking whole locomotives that weight 375,000 a piece and there could be 47 or more of them coming in. We are going to start in the next two weeks and I will take pictures of that for you but I have to be select about my angles and where I am positioned when I take the pictures. I think it should take me a day to break one into sizable pieces so the material handlers can move them off the tracks. I am also going to have to buy a material handler in the next six months but its going to have to be an 80,000 lb machine or bigger I can't move enough material with something as small what you have. Trust me the scrap industry is a learning experience and it takes years and years to perfect it with tons of hands on time in order to perfect it. I also might have to force my hand with the oxygen company and force them to upgrade my brand new tank to a new 6000 gallon tank which is the biggest they make since I am gonna be handling 2000 gt of material a month for who knows how long. Scrap is like pringles once you pop the top you can't stop at least that's how I think the phrase goes. I just woke up so I am still a little out of it so I hope I didn't leave out any words I don't feel like proof reading. If you have any questions though feel free to ask them I love to talk about scrap.

That setup sounds impressive pistone.. But as a small company in a small place I am far from it.. Everyone here uses excavators.. If you go 45 mins away there are some material handlers but once again they have bigger operations. Our "burning field" is where ever we make a pile to cut that is out of the way. We only use 160-180 liquid oxygens and they are stored in that yellow container in the pictures. Right now Everything is moved by truck, And we don't buy anything as a prepped price. We only buy heavy as oversized and pay just a little more than shred. We don't do enough volume to make it big so those big material handlers are out of the question. Right now our yard is a mess because there has been scrap piled for a while on the side of the heavy hms that is oversized and we didn't have a proper machine to move it around.. and no magnet. But now we are whiddling the pile away slowly cutting it. And once it is all done it will be easier to keep it sorted. Until then Its cheaper to leave it mixed. And the cast is mostly auto rotors and drums.. with some boilers and other stuff mixed in. In the future I am going to sort that too.

hey i been here great guy to sell to even when u show up late and missing a tire on your trailer.

On a Sunday at that lol. Thanks man hopefully you will miss your local yard again some day. I also gave him more per ton for 3 reasons.. 1 he broke his trailer on the way in.. 2 he is from 45 mins away.. and 3 met him on this forum, seems like the only other nova scotian scrapper online.

yes it was a scary trip on the way in lol . ill be back up that way trying to buy a 1 ton dually right now.

Ok my next question I guess is do you keep the clean auto cast separate from the boilers, cast pipe, bathtubs, etc? Clean auto cast such as drums and rotors are there own separate grade aside from stove cast which would be your boilers, cast pipe, bathtubs, boilers, etc. Do you also have a heavy breakable cast pile such as unprepared machinery?

On the cutting side of things what torches are you using and how many of the 160 liter liquids are you using a week. If you are going through four or more and you are currently stationary you might want to just pour a concrete pad put up some fencing and some flammable liquid signs, etc. and go bulk. The smallest tank they make is a micro-bulk and it holds around 23,000 cubic feet of oxygen you don't need a pad for it either but if you are using more then that in a week I would suggest a 500 gallon bulk tank which holds around 56,000 cubic feet of product when topped off and with a good vacuum in the tank you will have zero bleed off of your product in the tank which unlike those sh%tty 160 liquids are constantly popping off and bleeding oxygen out the safety valve. If you are using quantity then there is no reason not to go bulk with both your propane and oxygen. Everyone loves making more money there cut material and this is pretty much the only way to cut your costs down to a few dollars per ton excluding labor.