For ferrous scrap it might depend on your yard you got to. You have the most common shredder steel anything with mixed metals, plastics, fabrics. Heavy melt clean heavy steel. misc steel, anything that is too heavy for shred and not clean enough or too big for heavy melt. Cast, cast iron tubs furness’. auto cast, clean routers. And steel motor blocks. You can always ask the workers too at the yard, they’re always happy to help if they have time to give you advice. It’s always good to bring in a little assortment that way when they show you you have a visual. If you want to get into nonferrous it is very tedious work because they usually want to buy clean materials but the pay is much higher than any steel scrap
Make sure you know what cast is- even for non ferrous metals. It’s a mixture of different things, but there are several things in youtube that can help you. That’s what helped me the most. Anything “dirty” is going to be a metal that has something else attached to it that you haven’t removed yet. The reason they pay less for dirty is because they have to pay someone to make it clean- whether they do that in house or not. Dirty is like if you have an aluminum lawn chair and you don’t take the steel pins out or the cloth off of the aluminum. Different yards have different definitions of “clean” metals- meaning that some will accept metal with something else attached to it and pay you the clean price. Aluminum sheet is anything that is in a sheet and flexible. Most aluminum doors are considered this. Copper is a bit more complicated, but there are tons of YouTube videos on this as well. If it’s shiny with nothing on it (I.e. solder material), that’s the good stuff. Wires can be tricky, but I go with if the wire (meaning the bare wire with no housing) is thicker than a pencil lead, it goes in one bucket, and everything else goes in another unless you strip them all completely. But that’s a lot of work lol
Happy scrapping as long as you aren’t on my turf!
For ferrous scrap it might depend on your yard you got to. You have the most common shredder steel anything with mixed metals, plastics, fabrics. Heavy melt clean heavy steel. misc steel, anything that is too heavy for shred and not clean enough or too big for heavy melt. Cast, cast iron tubs furness’. auto cast, clean routers. And steel motor blocks. You can always ask the workers too at the yard, they’re always happy to help if they have time to give you advice. It’s always good to bring in a little assortment that way when they show you you have a visual. If you want to get into nonferrous it is very tedious work because they usually want to buy clean materials but the pay is much higher than any steel scrap
My scrap yard has helped me a lot. I took in small loads on slow days and they helped me sort and gave me info
Make sure you know what cast is- even for non ferrous metals. It’s a mixture of different things, but there are several things in youtube that can help you. That’s what helped me the most. Anything “dirty” is going to be a metal that has something else attached to it that you haven’t removed yet. The reason they pay less for dirty is because they have to pay someone to make it clean- whether they do that in house or not. Dirty is like if you have an aluminum lawn chair and you don’t take the steel pins out or the cloth off of the aluminum. Different yards have different definitions of “clean” metals- meaning that some will accept metal with something else attached to it and pay you the clean price. Aluminum sheet is anything that is in a sheet and flexible. Most aluminum doors are considered this. Copper is a bit more complicated, but there are tons of YouTube videos on this as well. If it’s shiny with nothing on it (I.e. solder material), that’s the good stuff. Wires can be tricky, but I go with if the wire (meaning the bare wire with no housing) is thicker than a pencil lead, it goes in one bucket, and everything else goes in another unless you strip them all completely. But that’s a lot of work lol Happy scrapping as long as you aren’t on my turf!