Scrap Metal Identification Guide - How To Make Money Scrapping

hello pandas and welcome back to the make money scrapping metal starter kit mini series this right here is episode two so there will be plenty of links in the description if you need a little hand finding the rest of them now this episode is just a quick and easy guide to how i identify different scrap metals to know where they go as well as a basic pricing guide but be warned that is not really that useful because the pricing will change depending on what the prices are doing at the time it's only going to be accurate for today and it's only going to be accurate in canadian and it's only going to be accurate for me right here you get the idea but if you wanted a hand knowing which bin to put the scrap in this one's for you [Music] now i've got a few examples over here on the bench now the only things you're really truly going to need are a magnet and the angle grinder if you don't have one of these well it's gonna be more difficult and remember that ppe is never optional so what i have here are a few different pieces and we're gonna figure out where they go the first thing this big one this magnet is gonna tell you if it's made out of steel this is all steel look at that now i already recognized that this was aluminum because of the cover right also the shape the design the weight the sound you just kind of get used to these things and that's probably one of the most important things is just experience and knowledge i can't give you that well i can give you the knowledge but the experience is going to come from you so that we have aluminum now which aluminum bin that plastic out of there now if you look here this shape this is extruded aluminum because it was clearly created by being pushed out of something like plato right so that's going to go in our extruded bin [Music] two nice pieces of extrude now because this piece is really really thick and by thick i mean greater than an eighth of an inch so like a headphone jack see if that's clearly thick that makes this number one or prepared steel so i'm actually going to get a better price for this so when i bring them in i'm going to put them in two different piles now those ones are easy but it's not always easy look at this piece here it's pretty heavy right and the color isn't the same as aluminum but the magnet isn't sticking that's because it's probably stainless steel if it was aluminum it would be a lot lighter but if we want to be sure [Music] see it's sparked a little so that's not aluminum aluminum will not spark so it sparks a bit but it's non-magnetic this is stainless steel and that's good that's a good price now what about something like this it would be nice if this was all brass but it doesn't weigh very much and if you look down here they're like casting marks or sprue marks and also there's like sort of a weird texture on it that is not going to be brass brass could be made into this shape but it's just not a common device and this is where the knowledge and experience comes in this isn't usually made out of brass but just to be sure [Music] there is no yellow at all on that and that's because it's actually going to be zinc or more likely a zinc aluminum alloy pure zinc is not common i suppose we didn't do the magnet test but those naturally those are steel now these pieces the brass and the copper are pretty obvious i would think we can separate those fairly easily these other chunkier pieces though we can hope but there's only one way to know [Music] there you see so that one has a bit of copper showing and that's necessary so they can plate the nickel on top of it but this one that bright beautiful yellow yeah so this piece is brass and this piece is probably also zinc or well alloy now how do we know that this is all zinc and not aluminum well the only real test that we could do that would be definitive would be zep root killer i think it's super basic and when you apply that it will react to the presence of the zinc other than that the best test you could do would be a a density test or a water displacement density test which would be just to test how much water it displaces and then weigh it and compare the two to find its density that can be a little difficult to set up but really the best way to know besides getting used to its application is just by the weight the physical density once you've handled enough of these pieces you'll just know because this is far too heavy to be aluminum i was hoping this was brass but it's not so the density means it's zinc we'd better remove this otherwise we're not going to get clean brass now here's an interesting one this piece is too heavy to be aluminum it's not magnetic okay so it sparks it's stainless steel that's really too bad i was hoping it was pewter but it's a good thing we did spark test otherwise well i would have felt really silly waiting for it to melt in a uh in my pewter pot [Music] so what else have we got here how about this one is it gold well let's think about its application right is that likely to be solid gold no now of course reading that it says 100 stainless steel we can determine and the magnet and the spark test confirm that oh but some parts are not look at that that is really really magnetic it must be the pins all throughout here now that doesn't actually mean it's not stainless steel i still believe it probably is but the problem here is that the scrap yard is not going to do a complete analysis on every piece you bring in they're just going to check to see if a magnet sticks and if it does they're not going to want to buy it as stainless steel but this is likely this is probably 316 stainless but i'm not going to get 316 price unless i can prove it so unfortunately it's going into the scrap bin the other reason it's here is gold plating how do you know it's gold plated well it's gold color see gold plating is actually super difficult to fake and not as expensive as you might think yes it's expensive to set up but the amount of material consumed is not a whole lot you can't brass plate things because brass is an alloy and you can't just dissolve that into an electrolyte and plate it onto something you'd be either plating zinc or copper you could try and stain it but this is likely gold-plated we're not going to get any extra value sad to put in the steel bin but that's where it's going what about silver hmm you've probably seen these before little silver button on a contact well there's only one real way to test that this should turn bright beat red there it goes see so that's silver just buy some of it it's cheap it doesn't last forever unfortunately now here's another one can you guess what that is it's titanium we don't have a test for it i just know it's titanium because it's a titanium arrow we can try the spark test and see if we learn anything no sparks goes through really easy but it does not bend easily right these are the only tests we can do if it bent easier it'd be aluminum but i i know better because of the application i wish there was a better test this will be an interesting one to find a buyer for how about these [Music] that was fun there i'm just having fun now it went a cool purple it still is it's aluminum how about this um we can read it [Music] now i'm seeing more and more yellow as i turn it so i was expecting this to be either copper or brass because silver plated stuff is usually plated onto a copper or brass plate so i guess i have a brass plate a slightly scratched up brass plate and the only others i can think of of the moment would be on a motor you might want to scratch the windings before taking the time to separate them because they could be aluminum and you'll be able to tell the copper color pretty easily if you scratch it and then lead you might think it's steel but if you can't tell by the weight you can always just bash it with a hammer or something and if it makes a really easy indent that's too soft that's not steel that's lead oh and you could find magnesium you probably won't and please keep in mind there are different grades and categories for all of these and you'll make a lot more money if you sort them appropriately if you want to go through any of them in detail i have a whole playlist with a video for each so i'll link that in the description too otherwise be sure to check out tomorrow's video where we'll go through tips to sorting and storing all different kinds of scrap metal until then leave it better than you found it keep doing the thing [Music] you

Channel: thubprint

Views: 51,531

Keywords: scrap metal, identification, guide, how to, make money, scrapping, steel, aluminum, aluminium, zinc, brass, copper, quick, easy, recycling, thubprint, thumbprint

Id: n_cnmEkxOgc

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021