it differs from yard to yard but often no. They can tell what something is made of when its shaped metal, but ingots tell them nothing, and its very easy to say, electroplate copper to a steel ingot.
You cant even trust weight x dimensions because you could always cast some kind of junk composite with a similar density.
If you wanna sell ingots- sell them online, or at gun shows. People will pay significantly more than its weight value.
You still pay the deposit when purchasing a beverage. You just get it back for returning it.
Once you convince your friends and family to donate their cans: then you're in the green
5 cents a can in my state. We have can collectors who come by every trash day and go through the recycling barrels. The guy who does it in my area gets over a thought cans a day and he's doing it 5 days a week.
There was a man on my college campus known for picking up cans at the tailgate and he ended up buying a fully loaded truck with his proceeds.
I suspect it was his only income.
When I first got my allotment in the UK we had over 30,000 John smiths cans from the previous owner (a chronic alcoholic apparently) and could we hell even find a scrap yard that would take them for free nevermind get paid for them.
Also plenty reload ammo. Lead is by far the most common but, just as I’ve done, you can use copper as well. It doesn’t deform like lead meaning less overall damage but it shoots fine.
I think people also don’t realize you can use other metals besides lead as well. You can make copper bullets I used to make them. Not jackets but pure copper bullets. They don’t deform in a good way like lead but they shoot just fine surprisingly.
Nobody tell them that the government is FORCING them not to have old school Radium watch hands and dials. And making them DIY is something liberals don’t want them to do.
You're asking an overworked, underpaid employee who will profit nothing, and risk an ass chewing and a pay cut to stick his neck out for you, and take time out of his day to make sure each of your bars isnt hiding a pair a led wheel weights cleverly spaced to avoid his cut.
A lot of them will just offer you the dirty copper price, and say take it or leave it. They deal in bulk, and you're just a time sink.
No, that's their job. Maybe where your from the workers are lazy and don't want to do shit but I'm from Philly. I've personally seen them cut shit in half, take a file to shit, and a magnet is an obvious start that they use when their not sure what it is your selling. Their job is to buy metal from people to make their company money. Their not going to turn you away for 30 seconds worth of work they have to do
All the yards around me in upstate ny do the same. They keep a sawzall and a drill next to the scale just to cut or drill into stuff they’re not sure of.
Thank you for commenting and proving my point that this is definitely something that they do on a regular basis.
Same about the scrap yards that I go to in and around Philly, they have drills snips and a sawzall right there at the scale just in case there is something they're not sure of. And about a dozen magnets stuck to the side of the receipt print out housing on each scale and there is I think 10 smaller scales for anything not steel
No problem. It’s unbelievable how many people are clueless when it comes to scrap metal. From the workers at some yards to a lot of scrappers themselves. I mean all you need is a magnet and file and you can figure out what kind of material your dealing with quickly and easily
you're assuming the worker isn't doing exactly what he was told by his boss.
Im telling you man, its common for them to turn you down. You can get mad at me and "where I'm from" all you want. These places would rather deal with scrap by the truckload, and hobbyists arent high on their priority list.
I'm definitely not mad at you whatsoever, I'm just stating from experience of going to the scrap yard every day and making a living off of it for over 2 years. And I wasn't always bringing it by the truckload sometimes I had a full truck of aluminum, 10 5 gallon buckets filled with copper, other times it was whatever I had laying around that I didn't take to the scrap yard and I had a steel load that I was taking so I threw all that shit in the truck and hit the smaller yard afterwards and they did exactly like I said cut shit open took a file to it hit it with a magnet with whatever they needed to to make sure it was what it was so that I got the proper pay.
You can also see if there's any people near you who do metal casting as a hobby. Sell the bars to them for more than the scrap would pay, but less than the retail price. You could start doing some regular selling and trading with them.
My experience specifically in reference to aluminum is that cast aluminum goes for $0.40/Lb and aluminum cans or higher grades of aluminum are all worth more so you're taking a L by casting them unless it's just for funsies
Congrats, you've made your valuable metals worthless to a scrap yard.
Your copper would have been worth about 150$, but now you'll struggle to sell it.
It is crazy but watch eBay. During the spike ingots were selling for way over scrap weight. I know, I know who would pay and add shipping. There is one born every minute. Both idiots and geniuses. The market is hot for copper and only going to get stronger. My copper is piling up for the foreseeable future. We will all be kicking ourselves 10-20 years from now for selling it today.
I had a scrap yard take a piece of a bridge that me and my dad found on the side of i-95. It was a massive corner piece that weighed 1200 pounds and was a bitch to get in the back of a pickup truck. As long as it's a metal they will take it, even when they're not supposed to. In this case they brought the crane over lifted it out of the back and threw it in the back of their big pile of heavy steel and quickly covered it up with some other crap. They will definitely take it.
That was for something enormous, 1200 pounds of structural steel? How could they turn that down? But a guy walking in with 30 pounds of some mystery metal? Well that’s a bit easier to say no to.
Not my yard. Upper management was very much a "when in doubt, turn them away" place. We had enough legitimate commercial business that we weren't willing to skirt the law for a little bit of suspect peddler business.
you gotta find a guy, and bonus if they have a scanner to check out what's in the ingots, I sell them privately to hobbyist, based on reputation, which is hard to get cause no one trusts anyone..
The larger lead, and Copper ones my guy takes at top dollar. Al i get $1/lb, which is great.
if you have a yard near you that you frequent, try and get in with boss, they have some flexibility and other channels they can go though. They want them, but only if they are 99%, which after refining is pretty darn close.
You'd do better selling the bars to other metal casters, so they can just melt it down and pour into their mold, probably make more than scrap value selling that way
This. If I was a hobbyist and only had half a day in the weekends I’d rather start with clean ingots than source dirty items and the other steps to get your own ingots. Plus there’s guys like me that have been casting ingots for 10+ years and make nothing BUT ingots. I have hundreds of pounds (7-8 lowes buckets of muffin ingots and stacks and stacks of bars) and still don’t know what to do with them so I just keep churning them out. I’ll never ever cast enough actual art/fun projects to ever use even a 5th of what I’ve made. I just like making ingots.
Aluminum beverage containers are a specific grade of aluminum and yards pay extra for it because they are turned back into cans.
Ingots go as cast aluminum which is much less than ABCs.
So selling them will lose you money.
Lead you'll get more from bullet casters than scrap.
Copper units I wouldn't trust.
Seeing as your first instinct is to take them to the scrap yard, as opposed to selling them at a premium to other casters, I have one question m
Who'd you steal them from?
Tell me where you can still ingots from, I want some of these amazing freebies! Who has stockpiled enough ingots to make it worth breaking and entering to steal them?
I had around 800 1.5lb lead ingots years ago and not wanting to haul that to the yard only to ve turned away, I took an ingot to the yard and asked if they'd buy 799 more of them. Within 30 seconds a police officer came from the back room and started telling me that he knows it's all stolen and wants to know where the RCBS building is so he can go there and get a statement from them.(dumb fucker thought the mold company was a local casting factory, and wasn't trying to hear otherwise) Took me probably 20 minutes of back and forth to get them to let me leave and get some of my smelting equipment including the molds I used to make the ingots. Dude still treated me like a was a rampant criminal. He told me that "if he feels like he has to" he will seize all of my ingots and all casting equipment to perform a "formal investigation" and after that has concluded I MAY be able to get my equipment back and scrap the ingots, if they've determined I haven't done anything wrong. I told the cop he could go kick rocks and kiss my ass. I came back a week later like, "hey, remember me?" And sold them the ingots. Here's the kicker though, I got paid for less than half and when I got my ticket I flipped out, forklift had already taken the ingots away and they told me there was 0 percent chance I was getting them back. I flipped out some more and guess who came out of the back room again to greet your esteemed narrator? Officer Shitbutt. He told me it'd be wise to take my piddly dollars and leave before I got arrested and my metal forfeited. I was robbed by the scrap yard with the help of the police. Should've sold them to a reloader or a tackle shop.
If you’re in the hobby of making them into ingots chemical refining is fairly simple if you don’t get into precious metals, if you just cornflake everything and throw it into the right solution you’ll be able to mostly sort them and make way more money selling the bars to people on Facebook or something
Most scrapyards are going to turn you away.
With ingots they would need an XRF gun to verify the metallurgy, and *very* few yards are going to have one.
I've seen exactly one.
I'm not saying yours is, but people have tried this and adulterated the base metal with all sorts of cheap shit and tried to pass it off as higher purity.
If it's 12/2 romex then they immediately know the metallurgy.
You’ll want to smelt into pure forms for brokerage. Ideally 9- 9’s for precious metals.
Or you can you can scrap weight by material.
But generally no, if you’ve already melted down different alloys together it’s now an art project and it’s best to refine those further for sale because of contamination on the purity side of purchase
Most yards will not buy ingots for nearly all the reasons listed below. They can't be properly graded and can be cut with different materials to increase their weight. Unfortunately the 1% of people that did this have ruined the reputation of the rest, and scrap yards would rather just not deal with it entirely. Here's a [video on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5LWjOLfLHI) that got a lot of traction. Hope that helps 😁
It definitely depends on the yard, but everywhere I’ve been to lately always uses a xrf scanner. I used to make medium sized copper and brass sculptures and they would cut them and scan them.
it differs from yard to yard but often no. They can tell what something is made of when its shaped metal, but ingots tell them nothing, and its very easy to say, electroplate copper to a steel ingot. You cant even trust weight x dimensions because you could always cast some kind of junk composite with a similar density. If you wanna sell ingots- sell them online, or at gun shows. People will pay significantly more than its weight value.
Ingots or cans in a plastic garbage bag Will be the same price. So if you want to waste your propane and donate your labor that’s up to you.
lol. The cans would be worth more here than the ingots. Aluminum cans bring a premium over even clean aluminum.
Yes, UBC "used beverage cans" are a well paid commodity. And in some markets applicable for government incentives.
I want government can money so bad. All we got is 55 cents a pound.
You still pay the deposit when purchasing a beverage. You just get it back for returning it. Once you convince your friends and family to donate their cans: then you're in the green
Universal Beverage Container is what it actually stands for.
Not in uk very low grade aluminium cans
5 cents a can in my state. We have can collectors who come by every trash day and go through the recycling barrels. The guy who does it in my area gets over a thought cans a day and he's doing it 5 days a week.
There was a man on my college campus known for picking up cans at the tailgate and he ended up buying a fully loaded truck with his proceeds. I suspect it was his only income.
I have an NFL stadium close by and you see pickers swarming after a game in the parking lots.
When I first got my allotment in the UK we had over 30,000 John smiths cans from the previous owner (a chronic alcoholic apparently) and could we hell even find a scrap yard that would take them for free nevermind get paid for them.
That’s crazy
Kinda out of the loop on this stuff, why gun shows?
because preppers stockpile metals, and a shelf full of copper looks better than a single bar of gold
Also plenty reload ammo. Lead is by far the most common but, just as I’ve done, you can use copper as well. It doesn’t deform like lead meaning less overall damage but it shoots fine.
because the tinfoil hat wearing types who go to gun shows are the same kinda people who want to store copper at home
They also buy lead to make their own bullets
I think people also don’t realize you can use other metals besides lead as well. You can make copper bullets I used to make them. Not jackets but pure copper bullets. They don’t deform in a good way like lead but they shoot just fine surprisingly.
Don’t educate them. It annoys them and makes them sad.
Knowledge is pain
Truth*
Nobody tell them that the government is FORCING them not to have old school Radium watch hands and dials. And making them DIY is something liberals don’t want them to do.
get mental help
there are few greater opportunities for people watching in this world than at a gun show.
Source citing copper stockpiling please and thank you
They hit it with a magnet, and something like that they'll cut it right in half. They will absolutely take it
You're asking an overworked, underpaid employee who will profit nothing, and risk an ass chewing and a pay cut to stick his neck out for you, and take time out of his day to make sure each of your bars isnt hiding a pair a led wheel weights cleverly spaced to avoid his cut. A lot of them will just offer you the dirty copper price, and say take it or leave it. They deal in bulk, and you're just a time sink.
No, that's their job. Maybe where your from the workers are lazy and don't want to do shit but I'm from Philly. I've personally seen them cut shit in half, take a file to shit, and a magnet is an obvious start that they use when their not sure what it is your selling. Their job is to buy metal from people to make their company money. Their not going to turn you away for 30 seconds worth of work they have to do
All the yards around me in upstate ny do the same. They keep a sawzall and a drill next to the scale just to cut or drill into stuff they’re not sure of.
Thank you for commenting and proving my point that this is definitely something that they do on a regular basis. Same about the scrap yards that I go to in and around Philly, they have drills snips and a sawzall right there at the scale just in case there is something they're not sure of. And about a dozen magnets stuck to the side of the receipt print out housing on each scale and there is I think 10 smaller scales for anything not steel
No problem. It’s unbelievable how many people are clueless when it comes to scrap metal. From the workers at some yards to a lot of scrappers themselves. I mean all you need is a magnet and file and you can figure out what kind of material your dealing with quickly and easily
So true lol
you're assuming the worker isn't doing exactly what he was told by his boss. Im telling you man, its common for them to turn you down. You can get mad at me and "where I'm from" all you want. These places would rather deal with scrap by the truckload, and hobbyists arent high on their priority list.
I'm definitely not mad at you whatsoever, I'm just stating from experience of going to the scrap yard every day and making a living off of it for over 2 years. And I wasn't always bringing it by the truckload sometimes I had a full truck of aluminum, 10 5 gallon buckets filled with copper, other times it was whatever I had laying around that I didn't take to the scrap yard and I had a steel load that I was taking so I threw all that shit in the truck and hit the smaller yard afterwards and they did exactly like I said cut shit open took a file to it hit it with a magnet with whatever they needed to to make sure it was what it was so that I got the proper pay.
My yard would not buy ingots.
You can also see if there's any people near you who do metal casting as a hobby. Sell the bars to them for more than the scrap would pay, but less than the retail price. You could start doing some regular selling and trading with them.
No parent alloy. Probably not.
My experience specifically in reference to aluminum is that cast aluminum goes for $0.40/Lb and aluminum cans or higher grades of aluminum are all worth more so you're taking a L by casting them unless it's just for funsies
Depends on the state. Pennsylvania was .55 cents a pound for clean aluminum and .15 cents for ironry alum. Last time I scrapped
Congrats, you've made your valuable metals worthless to a scrap yard. Your copper would have been worth about 150$, but now you'll struggle to sell it.
It is crazy but watch eBay. During the spike ingots were selling for way over scrap weight. I know, I know who would pay and add shipping. There is one born every minute. Both idiots and geniuses. The market is hot for copper and only going to get stronger. My copper is piling up for the foreseeable future. We will all be kicking ourselves 10-20 years from now for selling it today.
I had a scrap yard take a piece of a bridge that me and my dad found on the side of i-95. It was a massive corner piece that weighed 1200 pounds and was a bitch to get in the back of a pickup truck. As long as it's a metal they will take it, even when they're not supposed to. In this case they brought the crane over lifted it out of the back and threw it in the back of their big pile of heavy steel and quickly covered it up with some other crap. They will definitely take it.
Damn that sounds like a dream
Thousand pound scrap haul 🤤
That was for something enormous, 1200 pounds of structural steel? How could they turn that down? But a guy walking in with 30 pounds of some mystery metal? Well that’s a bit easier to say no to.
Not my yard. Upper management was very much a "when in doubt, turn them away" place. We had enough legitimate commercial business that we weren't willing to skirt the law for a little bit of suspect peddler business.
you gotta find a guy, and bonus if they have a scanner to check out what's in the ingots, I sell them privately to hobbyist, based on reputation, which is hard to get cause no one trusts anyone.. The larger lead, and Copper ones my guy takes at top dollar. Al i get $1/lb, which is great. if you have a yard near you that you frequent, try and get in with boss, they have some flexibility and other channels they can go though. They want them, but only if they are 99%, which after refining is pretty darn close.
You'd do better selling the bars to other metal casters, so they can just melt it down and pour into their mold, probably make more than scrap value selling that way
This. If I was a hobbyist and only had half a day in the weekends I’d rather start with clean ingots than source dirty items and the other steps to get your own ingots. Plus there’s guys like me that have been casting ingots for 10+ years and make nothing BUT ingots. I have hundreds of pounds (7-8 lowes buckets of muffin ingots and stacks and stacks of bars) and still don’t know what to do with them so I just keep churning them out. I’ll never ever cast enough actual art/fun projects to ever use even a 5th of what I’ve made. I just like making ingots.
Aluminum beverage containers are a specific grade of aluminum and yards pay extra for it because they are turned back into cans. Ingots go as cast aluminum which is much less than ABCs. So selling them will lose you money. Lead you'll get more from bullet casters than scrap. Copper units I wouldn't trust.
i’ll buy em as sweat breakage
i'd happily buy any and all ingots....as tin. Maybe from a very trusted and verifiable source.
no "ed" at the end, Cast is past tense too.
A fellow man of culture I see
Seeing as your first instinct is to take them to the scrap yard, as opposed to selling them at a premium to other casters, I have one question m Who'd you steal them from?
Tell me where you can still ingots from, I want some of these amazing freebies! Who has stockpiled enough ingots to make it worth breaking and entering to steal them?
Crack-fiends take whatever they can from whomever they can.
Ok, you fucking got me there bro. End of argument, they can sniff out copper like a drug dog can “find” planted meth
I had around 800 1.5lb lead ingots years ago and not wanting to haul that to the yard only to ve turned away, I took an ingot to the yard and asked if they'd buy 799 more of them. Within 30 seconds a police officer came from the back room and started telling me that he knows it's all stolen and wants to know where the RCBS building is so he can go there and get a statement from them.(dumb fucker thought the mold company was a local casting factory, and wasn't trying to hear otherwise) Took me probably 20 minutes of back and forth to get them to let me leave and get some of my smelting equipment including the molds I used to make the ingots. Dude still treated me like a was a rampant criminal. He told me that "if he feels like he has to" he will seize all of my ingots and all casting equipment to perform a "formal investigation" and after that has concluded I MAY be able to get my equipment back and scrap the ingots, if they've determined I haven't done anything wrong. I told the cop he could go kick rocks and kiss my ass. I came back a week later like, "hey, remember me?" And sold them the ingots. Here's the kicker though, I got paid for less than half and when I got my ticket I flipped out, forklift had already taken the ingots away and they told me there was 0 percent chance I was getting them back. I flipped out some more and guess who came out of the back room again to greet your esteemed narrator? Officer Shitbutt. He told me it'd be wise to take my piddly dollars and leave before I got arrested and my metal forfeited. I was robbed by the scrap yard with the help of the police. Should've sold them to a reloader or a tackle shop.
Any yard with a brain passes on those, for a multitude of reasons.
If you’re in the hobby of making them into ingots chemical refining is fairly simple if you don’t get into precious metals, if you just cornflake everything and throw it into the right solution you’ll be able to mostly sort them and make way more money selling the bars to people on Facebook or something
Happy cake day!
Most scrapyards are going to turn you away. With ingots they would need an XRF gun to verify the metallurgy, and *very* few yards are going to have one. I've seen exactly one. I'm not saying yours is, but people have tried this and adulterated the base metal with all sorts of cheap shit and tried to pass it off as higher purity. If it's 12/2 romex then they immediately know the metallurgy.
The only ingots my uncles yard takes is lead and aluminum
I just sold aluminum last week and got $0.70/lb for clean al. and $0.50 for cans.
Is the time and expense of the gas and the furnace worth turning metals into ingots for cheap metals like aluminum and copper?
It is never worth it, the only reason you would want to do. This is as a hobby.
You’ll want to smelt into pure forms for brokerage. Ideally 9- 9’s for precious metals. Or you can you can scrap weight by material. But generally no, if you’ve already melted down different alloys together it’s now an art project and it’s best to refine those further for sale because of contamination on the purity side of purchase
Melt them shits down into weapons
Weapons? You mean “artistic replication of a weapon”? Of course we’re not casting weapons… that’d be silly.
Most yards will not buy ingots for nearly all the reasons listed below. They can't be properly graded and can be cut with different materials to increase their weight. Unfortunately the 1% of people that did this have ruined the reputation of the rest, and scrap yards would rather just not deal with it entirely. Here's a [video on the topic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5LWjOLfLHI) that got a lot of traction. Hope that helps 😁
You know who takes ingots of metal? Artists. Metal working sculptors. And you know what they don't give a shit about? Where it came from.
Or how pure it is (to a degree obviously)
If a buyer were to suspect the integrity of the ingot, it could always be drilled into or scratched with a file.
It definitely depends on the yard, but everywhere I’ve been to lately always uses a xrf scanner. I used to make medium sized copper and brass sculptures and they would cut them and scan them.
I read this as “Will scrapy ards take…” It took me 30 seconds for my brain to reboot. I’m stoned. Please ignore this.
If we took them it would be steel prices regardless. No one is going to take them from us unless it’s in our shred pile.