Stripping Copper Wire - Is It Worth It?

so i got that bear bright copper this garbage bag was uh empty when i started good morning welcome to scrapping pallet man channel what i plan on doing today all works out is to do some wire uh stripping the wire from its insulation so i have a bunch of number one wire which is a solid core um type wire and i got a decent barrel of it and i'm gonna use my wire stripper here i can't remember the brand name of it 27 pounds um almost 28 pounds oops you know so subtract 5 pounds so i have 22 pounds that's 22 dollars it's worth right now about so let's see now i know that bare bright copper is what this will be turned into once i take the insulation off is worth two dollars and forty cents of my scrap yard all right so you got two pieces that were wrapped up and all this all this wire came out of someone's trash or a dumpster or something so this is a truly getting recycled where it otherwise would have been buried in our local landfill now i can either use my hand crank or i can put a drill on it but i'm just going to use the hand crank for right now until i get bored of that so this adjusts the height of this blade you can kind of see that there's a blade right there you see when i crank it i move that crank it uh moves this whole wheel down here right here and there's that blade all right let's see if we can get this started or not oh yeah and then it starts to strip it it's pretty gonna knock the camera over hopefully it doesn't yeah and it's still lined up oh it's gonna it's good camera and scrap strikes back again hopefully just knock it over and break it all right so what i do at this point is just take the sheathing off the insulation now i don't do this very often because it's been raining four days straight i just decided i need to do some inside work all right now i got this and uh i guess i'm just gonna fold it up like this that's what i see other people do i don't i don't like i said i don't do this very often a lot of times i just sell the uh wire as a dollar now this is worth two dollars and forty cents and the sheathing is worth nothing all right let's go ahead and take a look at it from this view so you see where the blade is oh just kidding all right so you can adjust the height of the blade and you can lock it down to where it won't rattle or something and then and you can already tell it's cutting right through you can see the copper coming through so yeah looks good that's what i want so i can either use my drill or i can just continue doing this but now i'm not gonna knock the camera over yeah it's not gonna take that long now this entire bucket probably take an hour or two with a drill i don't know probably less probably takes just as much time to take the uh plastic sheathing off is the camera lined up i can't quite tell hey you give me a hard time now what happened there it is probably don't need to wear gloves really everything's giving me a hard time i can hear that sounds like electricity's still in it right here okay i've seen people fill buckets just like a regular five-gallon bucket where it's almost too heavy to lift because copper weighs more than steel weighs more than iron should i just keep going and then pick up afterwards hey scrap fly see if i can get it thing flick them all right next what's the next one it's gonna be a big tangled mess isn't it all right i just did a blue one now red and white got some patriot colors going on here i want are some linesman's pliers to just kind of mash and straighten up as i go regular pliers will work i guess all right the other end's a little wonky i guess this doesn't really matter my little magnets are dancing these were sent to me by an awesome viewer thanks okay oh that's kind of this is a bigger gauge and so i can tell it's a little more difficult to crank hopefully that doesn't uh dull the blade i don't do this that often anyway all right now this is stranded so this is going to go in a different bucket i think i can still sell it for a dollar a pound but i can't get bare bright prices for stranded wire i don't know why it's still just as much copper as anything else but hey i have to climb in the tree that i have i guess no not automatically towards the camera all right that's a little weak so i'm gonna go down a little farther there we go now i can see there's an actual cut i can see copper poking through the insulation i didn't straighten this part of the wire now okay now this is the value add that i was saying like any company especially like a district distribution company where they buy products and sell products a lot of times they want to do a value add value-added services like packaging things let's say they buy you know a thousand switches well if they're a district distribution company um whoever they're selling to an end user doesn't want a thousand switches they want five switches for their application or their prototype so um to value add they will uh they'll make packaging you know for a whole bunch of to turn that thousand switches into a bunch of packages of five so that's what i'm doing right now is value adding this dumpster wire into bare bright copper so i got about a pound or two of wire and guess what this little guy right there is a pincher that's right it pinched me so i need to tighten it up i mean it got me got my adrenaline pumping actually maybe we want to start kicking stuff all right you know what i'm going to do i'm going to take this handle off and we're going to start using my drill so i straightened up the ends so fit through here now let's see how it does that's a little too aggressive they go full speed sorry full speed that just stripped itself i mean like even separated itself all right let's semi straight maybe not we'll see [Music] oop didn't quite get all the way through did it let's try that again that's good it's gonna go a lot quicker this way that's for sure and i started doing a little twist in the center here so they weren't tangling with each other all right next all right see if i can separate these two without it being too much of a pain i'm asking for trouble aren't i all right cool it worked um that end needs to be straightened up a little bit we'll have the same issue can you hear the car detailer guy next to her all right [Music] all right let's see how that did grew all over the place didn't it okay if i had another system that could just literally take this off not just do the cutting that'd be nice hey what's going on here i've seen some people cut these wires into smaller pieces to make them more manageable maybe that's the key or the key could be just get to work paul strip the wire stop trying to devise some new mouse trap same old ones work just fine really oh yeah this one didn't actually strip hey what's going on how are you sir not bad all right you looking for a question for you do you know how power up pause lot goes over here um yeah it's like right to the um the asphalt and the rest of it is i think it's owned by the um you probably know i think it's owned by the apartment complex that was nice meeting him he was uh he is uh the father oh this is um stranded wire he's the dad of someone that's running for local office and he was wondering how far the property went out um because the the my landlord is allowing him to put some political signs up so yeah you can always tell this solid core stuff versus that stranded because when you bend it it stays you know it's uh and the stranded stuff won't yeah that was so neat talking with him you can't tell but i was gone for about 15 minutes chit-chatting yep good guy we're talking about just the difference and and i don't get too political with folks that's just not my thing but as you know i'm more of a pragmatist that um get the job done versus any type of ideology all right see if we can get this [Music] stripped all right should we see how much this stuff weighs so this is probably i don't know 15 20 minutes of act probably 20 minutes of actual messing with this stuff i'm gonna say two pounds three pounds maybe two pounds seven ounces so this is worth five dollars this stranded stranded wire and you can tell when i bend it it just bounces right back yes that's going to go into that bucket let's go and strip this one you think when i go too fast it can come out of this well right here i think these short pieces are easier to deal with yep i think they are all right so this has what five solid core wires inside of a sheathing of copper and then another insulation over that and then there's some insulation in between all that this came from the uh union pacific dumpster i'm not quite sure what i'm going to do with it i could turn in for probably 80 cents a pound something like that and i've already had it go through once just to see if i could do it and it's it's working it's just uh this bump right here is so awkward that it has a hard time getting through maybe we should try to straighten it up yeah i think that's straighter oh yeah it catches right there [Applause] it's about as about as big as you can get through here really dude oh my god this might not work i don't know my drill worth very much all right i think it's gonna be more hassle than it's worth that's what i meant to say got this chisel from the dumpsters you can tell this is the line that i just cut through but yeah it's just not fitting through the stripper very much just hoping it would cut through easier i have to import this whole mission right here what yeah no way all right let's try it one more towards time blade there she is hey get through there we go yeah it's catching on here it's just too big can't get around that too big it's getting sold as is okay so i got this extra long piece so we'll see how this works out i do so i did just a little bit to get that blade at the right height again because i was trying to trying to strip this big beast it's just too big for this machine so all right see if i can do this hey is that working yes good all right so go full power all right that's what i'm talking about now here's where the real trick is see if i can peel this off well it's totally working yay oh might be a piece that's okay it's working oh nope that little piece didn't make it so let's we'll just pull kind of huh yep that works that was probably the biggest piece of wire that i've stripped so far i wonder how much this weighs just this one piece five ounces yeah not that much oh that looks good self-destruct that might be too tight actually just make sure it's all straight the last piece of wire i did had this piece on the end that was kind of it was all jagged so when i was holding it it um went right across my hand luckily i got gloves on it would have cut me all right wish me luck i'm good oh that worked really really well okay yeah that worked really well hey that front piece didn't strip very well wow it coiled it huh i don't think that the wire was actually coiled i think it coiled hmm strange i don't know why it called you see that a little it wasn't like that when i uh had it [Music] unraveled all right clipping right along i got a lot to go yeah this stuff kind of makes my attention deficit kick in all right how much does this weigh so that's at zero four ounces we're going for a world of record now see if we can strip this in five seconds [Music] oh yeah see it coils it yeah i think i have the the blade down too tight where it's coiling it hmm that little ripple there is going to cause a problem and i think i need to have not quite as much tension on that blade all right let's back up the tension just a little bit cutting doesn't look like it nope i don't see any copper in that so i'm gonna back it up all right so now it's cutting hey get back in that well there we go all right i think that'll work so wonderful that's what i'm talking about sorry i'm trying to get a good view for you without getting knocked over let's try this again does this work a little bit better all right yeah that does work a little better kind of streamlined my system here my garbage can and my coffee bucket let's see if we can do two wires in in succession one and two i think this is gonna work [Music] this one's working toaster's working wire strip is working you're not working paul all right let's see if we can get this wire stripped with the electrical device still on the wire nope that didn't work getting sick of this yet hey here we go stuff is dangerous it's electrifying this time i'm gonna try to do three lengths of wire we'll see how that turns out one second one all right now let's go into the third one oh my god kind of lined up excellent definitely get a system going to try go away keep myself from getting bored it's a fight trying to compete somehow that long fold it up give it a twist last one just a little ending straight let's get that real quick [Applause] that worked all right how long did that take done i got some wire that i got from the railroad dumpster and there's three different kinds there's some solid stranded which is this there's some very stranded like fine hair then there's some stranded where it looks like there's eight or nine strands so i'm gonna do that one first i'm not sure this is probably way too small let's try that all right i did not cut myself man that grabbed my finger though that grabbed my finger big time yep all right so now i know that this thing can be dangerous you guys see that i'm glad i was recording okay so there is a safety guard that goes here we still have it yep it's right here yeah let's try the safety guard mr paul so this thing goes right here yeah so let's try that let's not be dumb about this man that grabbed my finger all right so i put the the safety guard on here man that was so close to a major life-changing um problem wow thank you god i just want to praise you right now for uh for not having my finger get stripped man it's some scary stuff all right where was i oh yeah safety first not safety second like i sometimes say all right so i'm gonna go through this section right here is it gonna work oh no i might have to raise that up all right let's go and raise this up to about where it's supposed to be so now this this one is a solid core well at least it looks like it so we'll see yeah my fingertips bruised and it went right to the left i want to see i'm curious to see what the video looks like all right that did not dig in enough that should have dug in enough still not come on there we go there we go all right so you can see right there now that's not much thicker than regular house romex wire [Music] but you can tell it's a lot higher voltage or wouldn't have this much insulation on it so this is high voltage lots of uh potential energy there now this one's pure stranded so i'm going to uh we're going to strip this one but just going to go into a number one copper uh [Applause] okay that dug in pretty good you can see that dug in but it it's not separated there we go yeah that's that same braided number one if i have learned anything today it is safety first not second paul hey what's going on here didn't work okay now this piece is about 15 feet long safety first that got me a little um a little freaked out getting my finger pulled up into that it all came in it was on that section yeah a little sobering it's probably the best word it's alarming and makes me reflective of how i'm conducting myself yeah and i started thinking like was it because i i wanted to be competitive and get two strands there's two a piece of wire and then three pieces of wire and then i'm getting careless not okay absolutely not okay knock the camera over all right i can tell when it's i have the uh the knife down a little bit too hard is when it starts shredding the uh the insulation a little bit too much so i'm going to make a copper flower will you be my valentine my copper valentine so not only is this guide good to not get hurt but it also guides the wire next okay now this piece is probably 20 feet long [Music] okay that went smooth i can find the correct end and end so hey i think i'm pretty much done for the day so i got that bear bright copper this garbage bag was uh empty when i started now all of this stuff is stranded so it's not i thought it was a number one but it's not it's this stranded stuff you can see yep so my number's a little bit skewed because i stripped a few uh of the large stranded stuff and i put it into my number one wire bucket but i think i can weigh the stranded stuff here and then weigh my bare bright and that'll minus a pound or two that'll give me a good estimate of uh any return on investment uh if there is any at all all right so five pounds two ounces let me go throw that bare bright in okay so 14 pounds minus the uh five pounds which would be nine pounds and um let me do some math real quick okay so now it's back to five pounds ish now i'm gonna put that strand wire in here because this stuff is still a dollar [Music] fourteen pounds three ounces minus five is nine pounds so nine bucks so i just did the math so before it was with the bear bright 14 pounds minus five pounds for the bucket which was nine pounds at 240 cents 21.60 and this is about nine pounds so it's nine bucks so add nine dollars this so it's 30 bucks so i gained ten dollars by doing what i did yeah ten bucks five bucks an hour so i'm not sure if i would i don't maybe it's an acquired taste stripping wire i'd probably get better at it and um but uh yeah it wasn't that fun for me but a lot of people really enjoy it so just want to thank god for allowing me not to get injured uh today that was really careless of me but god you look after even when we're not doing stuff that's smart thank you for that god in the name of jesus you are good amen you

Channel: Scrap & Pallet Man

Views: 164,022

Rating: 4.860333 out of 5

Keywords: Make Money, Garbage Picking, Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, Trash Day, Garbage day, Found in the Trash, Treasure Hunting, Treasure Picking, Scrap Metal, Scrapping, Junk Man, Junker, Junk Collector, Dumpster Diving Hauls, Dumpster Finds, Found in Dumpster, trash man, Recycle Metal, Trash to Cash

Id: uEnOFpH2qBM

Length: 50min 4sec (3004 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020