Scrap metal prices

[mike_van]

I took a load to the junkyard today, got .48 lb for aluminum, 1.70 for copper, and poor old steel, the most used metal in the world, was .05.  I was hoping to get gas money out of the 20 mile round trip, and I did pretty good, coming home with 262.00    

[submarinesailor]

Mike,

The price for your copper sounds a little low.  Was it what they call class 2?  I throught that class 1 was going for about $3.50 plus per pound.

Bruce

[mike_van]

Not sure Bruce - It was mostly an old tank, really green, soldered up - Not clean & bright by any means.

[submarinesailor]

If it had soldered and other "stuff" on it, it's class 2.

[gary]

Number one copper was 3.50 a lb. Now in large gaunities 1 ton or more I get $2.50 a pound.The price of steel will be going up the beginnig of sept. The price for your aluminum was a little low unless they were cans. You should not sell scrap at the end of the month the prices are normally down at that time.

[mike_van]

Thanks for the tip Gary - You learn something every time here - The aluminum used to be a camper - I was [still am] looking for some Dexter wheels, used on these in the 70's, I found 2 last Sat., only the deal was I had to take the camper too - There's 170 Lbs of aluminum on a 12' Coast Inn model,  a really nice 3500 lb trailer frame under it, and 50 lbs. of mouse turds in between !!  :D   It probably will be cans next week - Hope they wash it  first -  :D

[PawNature]

I took off 168lb of #2 Copper last friday and fetched me $357 and some odd cent. (2.12 lb) I probably got another 1000 lb just dont' have time to get it ready.

[getoverit]

with steel bringing $.05/pound, I wonder why it is so DanG expensive when you want to BUY it?

[logwalker]

Hey getoverit,

That reminds me of the story of buying the oats for two prices. One before the horse gets 'em and one after he is through with them.  LW

[getoverit]

:D :D :D  Point well taken !!!

[leweee]

A handy site to check

http://www.metalprices.com/FreeSite/metals/cu_scrap/cu_scrap.asp

[easymoney]

with the price of scrap metal so high and few jobs for the drug addicts theft is a problem. i have heard of a t least 2 cases of loggers leaving thier skidders and trailers in the woods overnight and finding the batteries, radiators and wireing stripped by thieves. in one incidence they climbed a communications tower and stripped about $15,000.00 worth of copper line in a night. i have sold over $3,000 in scrap metal this summer from where my house and shop burned this spring. still have some to go.

[metalspinner]

A story on the local news yesterday was of a guy that electricuted himself stealing copper wire from a utility substation.  That was the second time that has happened.

I would think the scrap yards should be a point  of interest for the police.

[leweee]

I would think the scrap yards should be a point  of interest for the police.

the easy money is on the highway.....IRS is interested in who cashes in scrap...so they make sure you pay income tax....scrap is hard to track source of origin. :

[MemphisLogger]

Copper's got so high that the crackheads came down the industrial drag my shop is on and cut all the grounds off the utility poles flush to the ground and about 10' up--I figure it was one doper standin' on another's back  :D

The utility came out and replaced it all with bare shiny new copper--solid #4--and it was gone again within a week. The latest batch has been up for a couple weeks now but I bet it dissapears soon too.  :   

[LeeB]

I know what you mean about selling at the end of the month. My wife had called the scrap yard and told them about all my junk I needed to get rid of so we can move. they said sure, briing it by we'll buy all you got. I finally got around to them at the ned of the month and they didn't want it then. I just gave it to them because I really needed to be rid of it. It was way cheaper than taking it to the dump and I didn't really want to see it just go to waste. LeeB

[mike_van]

I got paid in cash - green $$$$ - the IRS can dig a while to find that money.  Does anyone know what lead is bringing? Someone asked me today.  Metalspinner - That dudes family will no doubt sue the utility co. for not having a better fence - or not having the WARNING signs in 6 languages - probably win too, how sad is that?

[metalspinner]

They may have stolen the fence the week before! :D :D :D

[gary]

Around here they have had a few deaths from stealing copper wire. Now they want the scrap yards to get id and take your picture.  I always get paid buy check. I am going to check on the price of lead I just got about 15 tons of it. But it is the end of the month and I will sell this direct to a foundry so my price will be way different than yours. I would say it is probably around .10 a pound

[mike_van]

Gary - where do you get 15 tons of lead? Radiation shields? They don't "glow" do they?  :D                                                                                                                  I remember reading somewhere people were stealing road signs & guard rails for scrap due to the price of steel. At .05 a lb, thats a lot of work. Risk of going to the slammer too. How dumb some people are.  ???

[gary]

These are counter weights off of furnace doors. sometimes i get elavalator counter weights.

[Larry]

Where ya been UL?  Glad to see posting.

I have maybe 4 or 5 dead motors in my scrap pile.  One must be the first 5 HP single phase ever made, and weighs I would guess 500 pounds.  What's the best way to sell them?

[scsmith42]

I guess that it's time to share my "copper theft" story...

In 1990 I supervised the construction of a cellular tower site in the "Watts" neighborhood in downtown LA.  Yup, the same neighborhood that got burned after the Rodney King trial.  It was a real garden spot, to say the least...

The tower site was in a back alley in a particularly bad section of town.  The first time I visited the site the hair litterally stood up on the back of my neck (had never had that experience before or since).  Looking around, I started to notice hundreds and hundreds of used lighters on the ground, and looking closer I noticed a similar number of used syringes - with needles still attached.

Seems that the cell site was located right in the heart of the drug district.

I hollered for the rest of the crew to "freeze", and back out of the site.  We hired a crew to bring in a Bobcat and a dumpster and haul off the top 6 inches of the site.  I sure didn't want one of my crew members to trip, fall and end up with hepatitis, or something worse.

Anyway, on to the copper story...  one afternoon, as we were finishing up the site, the electrician was running the grounding wire to connect the ground ring inside the shelter with the ground ring outside.  He had a spool of #2 bare copper on a reel stand inside the shelter, and he started feeding the copper wire through a hole in the shelter wall.  All of a sudden, the wire started reeling itself out real fast.  Seems that one of the local homeys had grabbed the wire as it came out of the wall and just took off running down the alley with it! 

I sure was glad when we finished up that site. 

[Woodwalker]

Utilities have problems with copper thieves on a regular basis. It's worse with copper going for around $3.00 #. We are losing not only pole grounds, but copper neutrals off rural lines, truck stock off the trucks in the yards and the sides of the store room buildings cut through to get to the copper stored inside. The theft of the copper is bad enough. Problems created by a lack of earth grounds or open neutrals cause major headaches and safety issues for the utility.
It may sound callous but (in my opinion), some crack head stealing copper out of a substation and finding out that opening neutrals on an alternating current system kills.... Justifiable self-homicide.

[PineNut]

If the effort some of these crooks put into stealing something was put into legitimate work, they would make much more money. Some people have the mentality that they just have to steal to get something.

[gary]

The electric motors that size are a lot of work to clean. I sell mine the way they are. 

[thecfarm]

We are having the same problems with copper thiefs here too.Some are going into sub stations and stealing the ground wire.Not a good thing.Looks like someone got a bunch of 3-4 inch wire some wheres.They threw the casings away down at the cornor at the end of my road.Kinda like the place to throw old tires,fridges,pallets,inside of a mobile home, and the like.

[sawhead]

A sawmill just south of us took a long weekend over the memorial day holiday, came back to work on tuesday morning and had no wire . Someone had used the forklift to pull the wire from the conduit, this mill is situiated out of the way so they just had run of the place. My opinion was it had to be someone that worked there because they had to know the schedule, how to operate the forklift and which wires would not be "hot". It cost the owner which is a friend of my employers almost 20000 dollars to replace the wire not including the damage to the conduit and other objects.

[Furby]

Not a copper story, but my brother lost a pair of cars out of his driveway several weeks back.
They were junkers, but one was fixable.
They just grew legs and walked off. :

[sawguy21]

Furb those guys were desperate :D :D Recently, some high tension lines collapsed when thieves made off with the guy wires. Police have no idea why there were no bodies.  : Here, copper plumbing is being stolen from construction sites almost as fast as its being installed

[Don_Papenburg]

Copper plumbing should be hooked to the power feed at night and grounded during work hours.

[PawNature]

I was reading last night about copper tubing being stolen from unoccupied rental property. Cut loose live gas line.

[highpockets]

I hear that down in New Orleans they are stealing the copper out of new houses and really doing a number on the Katrina ones.

My question is what has happened to make copper go so high?  I haven't kept up with it that well but I got my eyes open the other day when I called for 500 foot of No 10 Thhn wire.  I hear that a large copper mine was down or some reason.

[mike_van]

In yesterdays local paper, there was an article about the thieves, etc. It said "unprecidented foreign demand" was driving the metal market.  Must be unprecidented local demand driving the price of oil, huh? 

[gary]

China is buying alot of copper. That is where I sell all my thin copper wire. Did you know that the best paying wire is communication wire(telephone wire). It has almost pure copper in it.I spent $15.000 on a used analisiser that tells me what is in the metal. The % of tin ,nickel or other metals in any piece of metal. But if your not in the scrap bussiness full time and large scale you don't need it.

[ducknutt]

my dad builds homes.....had to build a subdivision once near a 'bad' part of town....we ran the copper plumbing under the slab, and they would break off the access we left sticking up thru the concrete to connect to........nothing like a little chisle work to remove the concrete so we could get a coupling on there... :-\

[gary]

this is some scrap I just bought.750,000 pounds of clutches came in 40 tractor trailer loads.I paid less than a penny a pound for them. But I had to ship them from detroit to cleveland. This is hi carbon steel it will pay a little more than $300.00 a ton.

[Mooseherder]

Another Copper theft to the tune of 30,OOO GRAND occured at the Windmill installation site at  Mars Hill, Maine  this past week end.  They took several hundred feet of the cables that were gonna run some current through.

[ely]

larry, i strip all the windings out of every motor if they are copper, in the end the money justifies the time spent on it. if its aluminum windings it is not worth the time. i just try and hide it in the prepared steel. 2.98 a pound for copper a couple weeks ago thats number one copper i sell very little #2.
it is best to get to know someone that works in the scrap yard and learn the trade. you will be paid alot different if you learn the different types of metal like electrical brass, red brass, yellow brass. everything matters in metal and if they say it doesn't then i would sell other places personally.

we did a job here in okla and rolled up several rolls of 1590 mcm acsr conductor and had someone bring in a trailer and front end loader and make off with about 12,000 pounds worth of it. bad thing was i told the boss" that wire will be gone come monday" i was wrong they took it tues night.