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(161 votes) Published: Mar 15, 2007 7:52 p.m. In 16 Favorites Lists Viewed 1734 times
This concept is very simple and basic but it can get you a significant amount of cash on one weekend. You may get your hands a little dirty but its worth it for how little amount of time you spend searching for parts.
The idea is that you can make money from recycling copper cored radiators. The price of copper is getting close to 3 dollars per pound and so the value of it is getting significant enough that metal scrap yards are willing to pay you for every pound of copper material that you give to them.
How to obtain used radiators. Go to an automotive shop and ask them if they have a scrap metal pile where they keep their old car parts (rotors, mufflers, radiators ect.). You then want to ask them if you can search for old radiators and just use an excuse or just tell them the truth. say...
-Oh i need to use one for a school project
-oh im doing a research project
-oh i need radiators to make cash
Chances are they will tell you to have a blast just not to hurt yourself and cause a liability. Most automotive shops dont bother recycling the copper and they consider their junk metal to be open to the public. They would be happy to let you look through their junk so they can save some space.
Tools needed:
Gloves (for sissies)
Goggles (optional but really not necessary)
Razor blade
Hands
Once you are inside of their junk metal pile, you want to start lifting things up. The radiators will be big flat squares which are either painted black or they are aluminum and unpainted. They vary from 1.5-2.5 inches in thickness and they have either aluminum or black painted cooling fins. They have headers on the side which are similar to a fluid reservoir with a pipe junction at the top and one out the side at the bottom. The razor blade is used to scrape off any black paint to determine exactly how much of the radiator is made from copper. Generally i get about 5 lbs of copper from each one and i can get 10 copper radiators from each automotive shop i go to. I generally spend one to one and a half hours at each shop. I make about 150 dollars from each shop. Ive made $30 off one used radiator when i brought all the scrap radiators to the metal recycling yard/junk yard for cars.
Some recycling yards will give you a little less than the core value of the copper because they need to refine it. Rather than being paid $2.82 per pound for my last run, i got paid 2.50 but i still made $600 over 2 days of work.
I understand that this egg is not for everyone, but even if it comes of no good use to you specifically, rate fairly.
Mar 15, 2007 8:19 pm - If you plan to carry the stack of radiators in the back of your car, i reccomend that you smash the radiators against the ground a few times to get any rust particles out from the cooling fins. You will also want to put newspaper down in the back and put the radiators into a trash bag. Coolant smells like jizz (literally) and it has sugars and wierd chemicals in it.
Mar 15, 2007 8:35 pm - i managed to get 19 copper radiators from meineke last week. that alone got me $264.21. You seriously need to try it. Jesus will love you even more.
Mar 15, 2007 8:37 pm - I run scrap about once every 2 months at my job.. We usually load all the metal together, but this time, we’re separating it. Yesterday, I dropped off about 3500 pounds of iron... Only got $228.00... Iron’s only worth it if you have a lot of space to store it, and time, for the prices to go up. You’re right, copper’s worth MUCH more per pound. I’d suggest any metal other than iron or steel.
Good egg, btw.
5
Mar 15, 2007 8:38 pm - i already knew this, and i tried before, but the 2 wrecking yards near me both recycle there parts, however, i did take a run around my town on "big garbage day" (the day you can throw away as much shit as you want without being charged extra) and i found 6 old aluminum BBQs and 3 old aluminum push lawn mowers, and stripped all the bolts and shit off them, and made like 80 bucks. 5* not a bad egg at all, good job
Mar 15, 2007 8:41 pm - Idk they weigh anywhere from 95-135 depending on what the header material is. Sometimes they still have a small amount of coolant in them which you want to tip up and drain out.
Mar 15, 2007 8:43 pm - the thing thats great is that they braze all of the seals with lead. So sometimes a little bit of lead from the brazing on the cap and headers will get into the tubing or it will be included and you can make like a few extra bucks for every couple radiators you drop off.
Mar 15, 2007 8:49 pm - oh yeah. I got a big one from a BOCgases air vacuum and got $35 worth of copper out of it. There was other metals in it which only totalled up to about $5. Sometimes they use wierd alloys in their brush material and you can get zinc and all sorts of other metals youve never heard of. If you unscrewed all of the brushes from every one of them and sold them than you might have a significant amount of magnetic material to be recycled but some places might not even want it. Copper is a plus.
Mar 15, 2007 8:54 pm - I agree... Copper’s the way to go. Tomorrow, I’m gonna set up a separate bin in the back of my work for copper/aluminum, and one for elec. motors... Thanks for the ideas....
Mar 15, 2007 8:55 pm - my friend works at GE and he said that they were building a huge electric generator which goes onto those windmills and on some cruise ships. Well anyways they discovered a giant crack in it and they were forced to scrap it. the amount of copper that was revived from it was in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Mar 15, 2007 9:05 pm - Great egg, good idea. I was just wondering, if you acquire the radiator, do you have to do anything to it before you take it to the recycling place, or can you just stack a bunch up and go? Also, how do they determine how much of each element is in the radiator parts?
Mar 15, 2007 9:10 pm - Motors are only worth scrapping for scrap if they don’t run. It might sound obvious, but I know idiots who scrap working motors for the copper when they could just sell the motor for more.
Mar 15, 2007 9:14 pm - ^Pyoobes^ Bigger motors would make sense, but the little bullshit motors, like for box fans, and washers and dryers... be worth more for copper... right?
Mar 16, 2007 2:50 am - in Hong-Kong a group of people stole over 3km of copper wire from the train tracks, and in some countries who use copper coins as low face-value coins actually lost money. why the hell is copper so expensive?
Chances are they will tell you to have a blast just not to hurt yourself and cause a liability. Most automotive shops dont bother recycling the copper and they consider their junk metal to be open to the public. They would be happy to let you look through their junk so they can save some space.
Actually, auto shops keep them, as tossing them out is an EPA violation. Further, shops keep them BECAUSE of the copper scrap in them, which they will usually let people have for a fee. Some shops even refurbish them there.
Now talk about the platinum in the catylitic converter. That’s where the real money comes in, and the funny thing is? They expect $$ for that too.
Mar 16, 2007 6:12 am - yeah i turned in a few catalysts from my work but they only gave me $15 a pop because they cant determine how much of the platinum has been deteriorated or burned off by the exhaust. And btw i never said that automotive shops throw them away, they call up metal collection companies and tell them to come and have a blast with their metal. And ive seen the collection guys setting the copper radiators aside. The shops do not get any money for their radiators, they do not keep them, and they couldnt give 2 shits what you did with them once you have taken them. There are collection companies that make profit off of their junk.
Mar 16, 2007 6:19 am - when recycling, companies want softer metals that still have value. If the metal is soft than they dont have to spend as much money to heat them up and re-melt them down. In a car catalyst, the platinum is often mixed with other ceramics that act as heat tiles. Separating out the platinum from the ceramic would cost you more than the face value of the platinum. If you got a fairly new catalytic convertor than you could get up to $80 for it because they can determine that not much of the catalyst has been decayed. Criminals steal them off of big trucks, toyota tundras, tacomas and 4 runners all the time because of how easy it is to remove them. Radiators are easier to find because of their size. Catalytic convertors in the junk pile are often attached to the rest of the exhaust system so you would need so spend some time with a grinding wheel removing them all.
Mar 16, 2007 6:42 am - one last thing to add. Its impractical for a shop to refurbish a radiator because they would need to spend at least 3 hours in total to use a torch and melt lead from the headers off the side of the cooling fin stack. They would then need to decompress the stack, figure out which fin layer (sometimes over 100 of them) is the one thats leaking. Replace it, use a press to recompress the rest of the stacks, braze on new headers, sandblast off the old paint, melt lead and re-coat the header seal, re-paint the radiator with a black phosphate paint and test it. A new radiator made by machine costs $100-$200. Paying an employee $40 an hour for 3+ hours is extremely unprofitable.
Mar 16, 2007 5:40 pm - cool i knew that copper is worth alot and in montreal (Canada) alot of ppl go to the churches and rip off the old copper roofing to sell @ the scrap yard. is there ne parcticular way to take the cooling fins off?
Mar 16, 2007 6:10 pm - Mar 16, 2007 7:04 pm -
well the junkyards will usually separate out the cooling fins from the rest. The tanks on the side are attached by lead brazing. So you would need a blowtorch to melt the lead to pull the tanks off the side and you would have just the cooling fins with the header depending on the style. Sometimes the tanks are made from copper even though its really unnecessary.
Mar 17, 2007 6:40 pm - i found out today that the dump actually measures copper if you bring it in. Its like 1000 feet from my house. I just drove up there (like 20 seconds) and opened my trunk, they took them, scaled them and subtracted 15% of the value for other metals included and i got an instant $45 from two big dump truck radiators.
Mar 28, 2007 7:22 pm - Good idea...the reason why copper is so valuable is because it remains itself longer than aluminum would or any other metal...which decompose more readily or synthesize with oxygen.
Apr 02, 2007 9:24 pm - so do you take the whole radiator to the junk yard? or take off the copper and the aluminum ones are they copper underneath or solid aluminum and could you take the copper to any recycling place or only a junk yard?
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