I Bought 2775 lbs of AC Compressor Motors to Scrap for Copper!

hello pandas another scrap Enthusiast on today's video I wanted to try something different really different so I went out and bought almost 3,000 lbs of AC compressor Motors because I want to know how much can I make buying compressors to process them for scrap copper are we going to make a whole bunch of money or is this going to be a huge waste of time materials and gas there's only one way to find out however I may have gotten a little over excited see you're probably aware a vehicle has a total weight capacity and although I do have a truck to use my truck is a Ford Ranger or similar and 2,000 lb is too much 3,000 lb is an accident waiting to happen so the first thing I needed was a little extra help from a friend and that help came in the form of a trailer which was generously donated by a friend who didn't need it anymore this was still basically at the upper limits of the capacity of both these pieces of equipment but after an emotionally taxing ride home we arrived safely now that I find myself staring down this absolute unit of a heap I'm wondering again if I may have bitten off more than I can chew it's been a while though since we had a good old scheme on this channel this may be one of the best or one of the worst but I'll tell you this it's definitely the greasiest at this point we better just get started I want to see if this torch can actually do the job cuz last time I didn't have any [Music] Oxygen honestly parts of that make it seem easier but mostly that just seemed like took a whole lot longer and now I've got a scalding hot pot of boiling oil all right let's get real for a second um as fun as that is uh my first priority is not which one is the most awesome because if it was that would be an obvious choice but which one is faster so I've got two very similar I couldn't find identical um compressors here and I want to time myself to see which of these methods either the torch or a 4 and 1/2 in aluminum oxide uh abrasive cutting disc which one is faster for me obviously a experienced um machinist welder whatever would be faster with the torch probably um and and a settling torch would be faster but with the two tools that I have in front of me which one is going to save me time let's find out 7 minutes on the torch that one took 8 and 1/2 minutes but it wasn't really a fair fight because I was like not even 3 minutes in before I started fighting with this little thing that was in my way that one is nasty I'm going to try one more okay okay so it's faster by like a minute um this way definitely ends up with a lot more fiddling about and uh I'm not calculating the time spent swapping out the blades which apparently I can only get through like two of these with one blade and the second one is a struggle so um I think it's actually kind of even but this way I don't have uh it's not all scorching hot and a burnt up mess inside so you know there's that well regardless of the method we decide to go with there's a lot of these to get through and I'm going to get started and after a few hours we ended up with a pretty decent little pile and we got to pull the motors out of these things and uh there's there's a couple things attaching them we got to so there's a bit attached to the casing and freeze that up we're starting a there and then there's a couple bolts that are holding these things together that's all we wanted right there of the sweet coppery filling going make a pile of those too leaving us with a pretty decent pile of copper wound motor now this is where last week's video came from and I'm glad I explored a few different options as to which cutting wheels to use uh cuz I do like these Diamond blade ones but it was not all smooth sailing an old adversary reared its ugly head in the form of aluminum wound Motors I was hoping we wouldn't see them I'm not surprised but I am disappointed if there's too many of these these could really affect our ability to turn around our investment they're basically worthless not to mention they represent a huge waste of time so we're losing money twice over but we've gone this far already and there's no way to know until looking inside so we Soldier on these small ones are not so bad and before long we had a pretty decent collection of number two copper windings going but I wanted to check if there was any hidden treasure on these casings see the inside had a lot of these little copper tubes the outer ones non-magnetic those are clearly copper and we're going to want to keep those these inside ones though though they may not look it they're just regular steel copper coated to prevent corrosion or something maybe I don't know but it doesn't matter we're not going to get copper price for them so they got to go now a couple of them had some CPP wound up on the inside of casing I'm glad we didn't miss that because that has some value yoink these are going back from once they came now we'll move on to these little cylindrical ones it doesn't matter what order you do them in but I'm just enjoying coming up with the system and testing out this uh this diamond blade well it really didn't work out it's trying to take out way too much material and it's really slow so it's back to the abrasive cutting wheels at least for this [Music] part there's a couple different ways to take these things apart personally I like doing them like the uh the tetris Zed blocks uh I'll link my AC compressor video video in the description and at the end just in case anyone really wants to get into um how to take these apart and which ones are worth more and and that sort of detail that's not what this video is about spent quite a few hours on these and I'm not going to pretend it was fun the whole time found myself cutting away long into the night to the joy of my neighbors No Doubt but eventually I allowed myself some sleep so I could get up the next morning to this beautiful pile of copper round Motors and we've made significant progress pretty much just leaving the big ones now this was interesting I hadn't seen one of these before uh I'll show you what I mean it does have some nice pieces of copper and brass on the outside but when cracking the thing open Str I'm pretty sure those are brass but despite my best efforts I couldn't find an efficient way to separate the brass from the steel I didn't want to lose any more time on these things so they were getting the boot we're going back to these this is the same as the previous one but larger and after a bit more work all we had left were the three largest ones the ones that I couldn't lift onto the table I mean like like I could obviously I just didn't feel like it they're not even heavy the first of the three was just a larger version of the ones that we've done before I had to take it apart upside down which is strange but same thing okay it's a little different inside it doesn't matter these other two though they were something special um and I really didn't want to do that so much much oil just spilled out onto the floor and well anyway I had to get creative um when figuring out how to cut these things open because they were attached in a few different places I did eventually get this thing off though and got the cap off and well it didn't want to give up that is cast aluminum though So eventually through some cutting and some bashing I managed to pull this thing out uh at this point I was not asking but we got it we got both of them and it was well worth it those are the largest of the entire collection so far what a beautiful collection but before that we are not going to be able to haul everything in one go and yeah the trailer is kind of annoying figured we'd bring the steel in which yeah no that's uh that's a pretty big pile of Steel but we made it safe and sound to the scrapyard with a most proper squat on display I wouldn't too much about what th's saying here it was windy I it didn't really work out all I'm saying is I asked to confirm and they said yes prepared steel we'll give you prepared steel for all of it which was fantastic news that was a fair bit of weight and I do have a few pieces I'm throwing in the the tin shred because they're clearly not prepared steel and you know we ain't trying to take advantage buddy all right 1775 lb in steel delivered that's 220 bucks so slightly more than half of our initial cash investment and that was the hard part now we get to do the fun part now I decided to start with the biggest ones first you know eat the Frog so to speak and as much as I love this D Diamond coated blade it doesn't quite have enough of a plunge to do the largest ones so there were super and saw steep in to in the Gap we didn't have to use it too many times and of course these ones have a lot of tension so cutting them in half was uh the best way to release well okay there's still a big pain in the butt but that's just the way it goes and these smaller ones were for a lot easier and bit by bit we worked our way through I tried to alternate between uh cutting and uh hammering because uh I didn't want to overwork either of the tools and these smaller ones oh just a [Music] dream you're relatively speaking obviously it might look like a big pain in the but and I'm not saying it's not but this is way easier a very low effort weing this stuff for this long it's a lot of friction anyway there's uh some that are a lot easier than others and I'm not sure if I can realistically uh clean the biggest ones out at least not in time cuz I'm trying to get this done but most of these seem to be fairly straightforward I've only found two that are really giving me trouble so just going to go as fast as I can and uh we got a couple hours till the place closes so I thought I was going to be in frame here that's my bad let's move on well there we are roughly 20 hours of Labor later uh We've turned three nearly 3,000 lb of AC compressors into six buckets full of clean copper windings uh and the total number of aluminum ones we only had seven or eight out of I don't know how many uh I haven't actually counted how many we did I will count them when I load them up into the truck tomorrow uh it also costs us 58 um abrasive discs to cut open all of them and it would have been way more if we didn't have the uh the diamond Edge um that to cut through all of the windings themselves that saved a ton of time that was way better than I realized totally worth it but we would have have gone through way too many uh grinding discs um if we hadn't had that to do the soft stuff now how much was it all worth we got to load everything up and find out tomorrow this is easily the messiest scrap project yet we've got um there's some piles on the floor that I haven't picked every single copper winding out of I'm not going to up yet like I will I won't just throw them out and then there's a lot of copper dust so we're just going to throw that in the bin and uh oh and there's also a small bin of um number two copper pipes we're going to bring those in as well but the grease the oil the dust we'll see if it's worth it oh I am excited for this one all of that work I really hope it paid off this was fun it was fun and uh there we are safe and sound not not that I was worried about this one the weight wasn't that bad after loading up running into scrapyard and unloading everything we made at home with 1,000 Bock that's a nice little stack of cash but let's simplify the math here real quick it was about 1775 lb of Steel and uh the total copper windings we brought in 188 lb I haven't done the percentages that's not what I'm focused on here I'm just looking at the results of this experiment how long it took and how much we made so I wrote down the figures here uh and I also forgot to bring in the bin of uh copper tubes that we cut off that's roughly 10 lb so somewhere like 35 to 40 bucks remember this is all Canadian but um our costs bring our between our costs at like the the gas and the sleeve cutting discs and the amount we spent in the first place and the the bit fuel uh oxygen the propane used there um total profit was about 550 bucks now I estimated the hours that we spent at 20 hours processing but if we also include the travel time because I made three trips to the scrapyard and there's gas involved there well at 20 hours that means we made 2750 an hour which is you know well it's what we made but realistically we spent 25 hours doing all of this stuff and that comes out to $22 an hour you know it's exciting that we turned a couple hundred bucks into 1,000 bucks that was great it worked but it also came along with significant amounts of wear on tools that we already had my uh uh hammer drill was smoking there a couple times I only paid 100 bucks for it used but I'll probably have to replace it in the near future so that comes off the top in addition this little project produced a lot of garbage some big greasy pieces of cardboard I got a big plastic tub I've got a pallet and a couple bins full of just plastic and junk that I have to throw out so that's ours as well all this to say this experiment was fun and I'm glad we did it and I hope you enjoyed it was it worth it well that's not really for me to say money per hour not too bad probably won't do it again let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more like this I had fun and I've got a few more planned check out this video if you want to go more in depth as to which AC compressors are really worth doing and this one if you want to see how I figured out which angle grinder wheels are really worth the time leave it better than you found it keep doing the thing sh

Channel: thubprint

Views: 393,056

Keywords: Scrap Metal, Recycling, Compressors, Sealed Units, Motors, copper, scrapped, scrapping, thubprint, thumbprint, thub

Id: 9mp7CVQ-orw

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 21 2023