scrap steel $ has me nervous.

Here is a positive I see........there is a couple guys that must be cleaning out old fams and ranches in my area. I see their pickups heading to town with old combines and assorted other ag junk. Lots of places are getting cleaned up due to the prices! Dont worry, most of these places have no cars on them.

 

this is nothing new, i know this old timer, and his family has been in the recycling business for damn near a century! he said this is the same thing that happened when we hit the great depression. scrap drives were on and the money was real good, you can blame this on the economy.

 

So, anybody want a 64 Impala?

 

um... maybe?

 

I am getting $250 per ton and they provide the containter pickup and delivery at no extra cost. My shop turns in around 4 tons per month of steel scrap.

I turned in $400 yesterday in Aluminum.

 

I feel people are becoming Aware more and more each week to this issue. Discovery Channel should do at least a 2hr special on this topic, and the 'de-industrialization' of America. When you wholesale our past, what is tomorrow going to bring? We are slowly being 'squeezed' into submission. That is not 'chicken little' thinking.

 

It seems a little strange that big brother has been trying to get rid of the old cars for years, now we [some are smiling] when they are taken to be crushed. Like turn in your guns and we will ask no questions and give $50 for all you bring in!!!

 

I put the blame more on our school districts for removing tech programs from the curriculum, the average age for a factory worker is somewhere over 50 years old. As a nation, we are short of skilled labor in our workforce. Not enough people are training to be machinists and the like.

I don't believe scrapping to be hurting our economy, merely an indicator, it's an export at a time when we really need more exports.

 

The One Good Thing To This I See Is That I'm Friends With Owner Of The Local Scrap Yard And He Saves The Old Stuff That Comes In And Lets Me Pick Through It For The Parts Or Buy The Whole Car...just Have To Make Friends With The Right People...but It Still Sucks To See The Old Stuff Get Crushed

 

Wow I Stumbled On That Paragraph With All Words Starting In Capital Letters.... :grin:

 

Hey, yeah the car I was going to come see the day after you told me about it and was "gone" when I finally got an answer on the phone after calling for three hours when I said I was going to call about it. Which is fine and all, next time, assuming there's a next time, I'm not even going to waste the time to make a hole in my day to go see and buy a car when I could be doing something else. Of course that also applies when I'm selling something and you ask about it, but whatever.


It just proves the point that at $200+ a ton people just don't give a shit what they have, they just want the money for it. I've scrapped a few, but they're total pieces of shit, stuff that was too rusted to save. And even then I stripped a ton of good parts off the cars, the one that I finished off Friday is a bare shell on a rotty frame, I even took the e-brake pedal setup out of it and how often does anyone want one of those for a '58 Buick?

 

Copper is like $3.50 a pound. The auction I went to a few weeks ago they bid up to $200 for a pile of copper tubing, new stuff, the guy planned to take it for scrap. It wouldn't have even filled the trunk of a car and he knew he'd get over $500 for it.

A guy was digging old electric motors out of a hill near his house and brought some in the day I scrapped my parts Suburban. He got $100 for 5 of them, I didn't see how big they were, but I have to figure even the price for dirty/mixed copper is pretty damn good. I've been cutting cords off stuff and saving wire and so on so that when I get enough together to bring in a load of just copper and batteries I'll do that too.

 

Ha we cleaned out the shop 2 weeks ago,
I sent my friend with a truckload of scrap to the local recycler.

750 lbs and the guy gave us 23.90!

Of course he takes it to an LA recycler and gets the bigger money but barely beer money for the work!

TP

 

I live just around the corner from the local scrap yard. Wednesday, working on the Stude, I watched as a pickup hauling a '48 Chevy 4 door, turn to head to the crusher. I had $100 in my pocket, couldn't compete with scrap metal price.

 

280gt for cast iron and 250 for tin( regular scrap steel) been doing the stay at home dad thing for awhile now and at around 2 -3 tons a month from my fathers shop it really helped out but now that the rices are up guys are stealing everything they can and my own brother whohas my old collision manager job there and has money!! started cutting me out of the scrap and selling to the guys that come by begging for it...
Our scrap yard here will let me pull a few things just pulls the weight off mine .. fair trade, got a clean late 20's firewall last week....

 

Sorry, that car was leaving that day no matter who took it. It just happened that a scrapper paid me my asking price, but you did say you would probably take it if it had this part and that part which are the parts I sold and you would take it if you could flat tow it it but there is no way that was going to happen with the suspension falling out of it, I really though that you probably wouldn't buy it. However, if we ever deal again please leave me a message the first time you call because I am not always inside to answer the phone,I'm sorry if you planned your day around the deal but I really needed it gone.

 

Here in Missouri, you can't scrap a car without a title, so that might help us out a little.
Ratty55

 

The few yards that are around here won't pay anything for scrap...I guess because they have to haul it to L.A. for processing. What bothers me the most about this whole issue is that the scrap is being sent out of country for processing and returned to us as goods. Why can't the US process the steel and make the goods here?

 

Because then you would have to hire American workers. Bottom line cutting is going to make this place a 3rd world country in the next 50 years. Just think...Sudan sending us bags of rice and Tibet having benefit rock concerts for the USA.

 

Funny you say that. The other weekend a freind and I were out metal detecting for old beer cans and found an old dump. The only thing I thought was worth bringing home with me that day was a long strip of aluminum and a big electric motor I found.

 

My thoughts exactly!
I tell people this and they think I'm just being a pessimist!

My brother-in-law is making good money cleaning up all the scrap from farms around this area. He gave an old guy $900 for all the scrap from around his farm. He had made $5,000 in a week and only had half of what was there hauled out!
I've told him to let me know about any old cars/signs/gas stuff if he finds it.
I told him that 95% of the stuff he'll haul out will be junk, but it's the other 5% I'm worried about!

 

Ha Ha...I find it's harder for people to get ahold of MY scrap metal and haul it to the yard if I keep it insured, plated and DRIVE it!!! I'm a conservasionist at heart, I guess??!!

 

This is the perfect time to recycle all that rusty old metal and then use the money on space-age fiberglass! I'd wait for a few more months though because the price is going to get higher before it goes down.

 

I guess you probably have it about right with the 5% thing.

hamb lake huh? are you in MSRA?

 

Actually, it's Ham Lake, but it was to hard not to list it as HAMB Lake!
It on the northern side of the Twin Cities.

Yeah, I'm in the MSRA...have been 22 years. My Dad has been in it since when the 74 Street Rod nats were here. Seen lots of changes in it over the years...

 

At this time I'm giving 10.00 a hundred pound, but the price is up and down every month. I keep all the old treasures stashed away when I do get them, but flatten everything else once every 4 months or so. Alum. and Converter buyers hit me every two weeks, so that pays out pretty good, and sell the copper about once every three months depending on the quanity. Salvage cars went to hell for awhile, but the scrap is going crazy.....

 

Steel is getting close to $300 a ton where I'm at. Copper theft has gone up so much because of the prices that most yards take a copy of your I.D. to cash in. Alot of retirement homes and car lots need security because catilytic convertors are being cut off the the cars.

 

Not to belabor this, but A: you didn't make it clear it had to be gone that day, and B: I did leave not just one but several messages. The PM you sent me made it seem like you wanted to make sure someone besides a scrapper got the car, that it might have some value. Given some of the pieces of crap I've dragged away with suspensions held together with bailing wire, I figured I'd get it out of there one way or another.

But we went through this same shit last fall when you had a truck for sale in the local paper, my buddy wanted me to go look at since I'm 10 minutes away and he's 2 hours away. I called, left messages, managed to get a hold of you only once and you were just leaving. After about 2 weeks of this I finally concluded you just didn't want to sell the truck - then what appeared to be the same vehicle turned up in the classified here with the price multiplied about 7 times.

Now with this Olds, when I asked if it was going to scrap you said you didn't know. Well, did you or didn't you? It can't be both. You said you'd be there all day both with this car and with the truck, but no one ever answers the phone, that could go either way.


My conclusion: Dealing with you is a waste of my time. Not so much because I care about the car, for all I know it was a piece of crap anyways, but because I don't like being jerked around and lied to. So there won't be a next time - be it me buying from you or me selling to you. You can jerk around someone else. And that should be the end of that.

 

guy down the street's wife called him last night about her 4 runner making a loud noise! he said someone sawzalled the cat off it in the parking lot?!
what the hell !
kinda getting paranoid about my stuff!!

 

the other day somebody was asking if he should pay 150.00 for a 50 chevy 4dr fleetline kind of rough. the yard could crush it for more. just like gas and food old cars are now worth more. just a fact of life.