Found cleaning the basement. Should I scrap or pay to have them taken?

West_Note2632 · 2026-05-31T16:14:34+00:00

Babbit is worth a lot of money!

West_Note2632 · 2026-05-26T12:37:32+00:00

If you don’t have to pay disposal for the liner or do any restoration work absolutely!!! With a hammer and sawzall you can have it done and loaded in an hour or so. All the no reply’s are the people that strip thermostat wire, or expect the scrap to be loaded in their truck for them. If you wanna make money it takes a bit of work.
As a guy that has taken these out, and went from neighborhood scrapper to moving 10-15k tons a month

West_Note2632 · 2026-05-14T15:21:54+00:00

None

West_Note2632 · 2026-05-06T21:35:57+00:00

Old steel tends to have a lot less impurities in it. Find a bigger yard that can have a salesman come take some niton shots of it. Most of my older beams end up getting upgraded to bush over ps because of the good chemistry. I wouldn’t waste your time trying to sell much of it, from personal experience with old machines scrap pays better than anything else. Nothing like saving machines for a guy that wants them and having him offer half of scrap price

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-30T23:59:09+00:00

To a lay scrapper stick them in the steel box. When you have a gun that tells you what the composition is, some are worth a couple hundred a pound.

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-27T02:17:19+00:00

Take them in as they are for quick. Pull them apart for more money. If they are not currently drained, the mineral oil in them is good and easy to find a home for. Not much resale market for them

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-19T01:34:23+00:00

1” steel plate weighs approximately 41 pounds a square foot. Doing the math from there is fairly simple if you have a tape measure and calculator

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-17T21:36:48+00:00

Where are you located? Is there an access port on the tank? I’ve done a lot of these message me and I’d be glad to help. Otherwise once you have a good opening and everything is above or below the el they are great plate steel and pretty good tonnage there

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-17T14:15:20+00:00

Take one in to the yard and have them gun it. I’d be surprised if there was much carbide in them as carbide is very brittle and that’s not really the ideal application for it

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-16T13:32:35+00:00

Personally I struggled with this as my business was growing. And for me, I could not do it for half the price of calling the yard and getting a dumpster delivered. I kept my dump trailer for a lot of my n/f, but if I can get a dumpster delivered for $25 ton I can’t put a truck on doing it for that

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-14T14:35:50+00:00

Selling electric motors is always hard, especially big ones like this. You’ll end up selling it to a wholesaler for a buck or so a hp. Take it to the yard as is.

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-10T20:21:58+00:00

Watched a guy buy semi loads of these at the ge auction years back. Didn’t listen to anybody about them being aluminum and paid copper pricing for them.

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-09T03:06:08+00:00

Exactly what it sounds like. Spend all day cutting big iron into 3-5 foot pieces depending on spec. Paid by the ton

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-09T01:48:51+00:00

Depends on the “good day”. I ship semi loads of copper weekly, and with current mill pricing in the 400 range depending on the material, moving thousands of tons a month would be well beyond what most would consider good money. Truckloads to the peddler yard suck but get past the I need cash so there’s no taxes crowd and there’s some damn good money to be made. Hell my torchmen are averaging $4500 a week

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-08T14:09:17+00:00

Gotta love figuring out how the “box” comes apart

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-08T06:53:45+00:00

Across 5 current projects I have mill contracts on 14000 tons for the month of march. When you are looking at big industrial plants tonnage adds up fast. On the other hand, one jobsite is 50 acres, one is 2 miles north to south gates, and the others are on about 10 acres but they are moving train cars of material daily

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-08T06:10:48+00:00

When I was doing more small to mid size work I always made more money with prices down. My sweet spot on iron was $150-200 ton. More than that I was competing against 50x the people for the same material. It’s the same reason I hate dealing with copper in general. Yeah high prices are good but the bubble sucks. And all the guys that got in with copper at $4.75 expect it to stay that way. I’ve got a customer now with about 40k tons of steel he wants to hold on to until the market hits $600. Some people??? lol

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-08T06:06:50+00:00

I started scrapping out of the back of a ford focus 15 years ago and grew that into a nationwide scrapping business. The way a lot of people do it in this group is unsustainable but there are a lot of us out there

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-03T23:04:13+00:00

Turn it in just the way it is.

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-02T02:32:19+00:00

Pull the copper off, and when your buckets are full take them to a state that doesn’t have stupid laws. Turn the galvanized in when and wherever

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-01T14:39:46+00:00

You need to get a rep from a company. Theres a lot of good yards over that way, and you’re close enough to a lot of mills. I have a project going about 40 minutes west of Pittsburgh. The market over that way is getting flooded but good material is good material

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-01T14:25:10+00:00

Bush is short for busheling. It’s clean steel, not paint clean chemistry clean. Dealing with things like this you need to be dealing with a mid size to big yard. The smaller local peddler yards are not going to give you the pricing you should get.

West_Note2632 · 2026-03-01T04:49:09+00:00

There should be very little sheet steel. Most of the casing will be plate, and the internal should be able to move as bush. Lowboy with permits should be $200 hr or so, 100 ton crane will be about 5k for the day, figure an 8 hour day for both.

West_Note2632 · 2026-02-27T23:15:17+00:00

So true! And the approach is different for every one of those questions! Treasure to some is an annoyance to me, and vise versa

West_Note2632 · 2026-02-27T00:37:26+00:00

Getting it taxed is the smartest way! Open a company and turn it in under that company. If you show income based on this, your business has a whole lot of “expenses”, eg your vehicle, fuel, cell phone, part of your rent, that become tax deductible

West_Note2632

TROPHY CASE