To Strip or not to Strip? Is it worth stripping copper cables?? Electrician

yo nick adam he's here uh today's video is gonna be on the cable stripping machine so i've tried to we just had a tiny adam couldn't deal with the mess i'd made so cheers right adam would organize everything uh sort of yeah it's awful i don't think we're gonna go as far as labeling stuff but it's getting tidier and it's getting neat we've still got more stuff to do video per video will get better and better but we are doing the the machine so this is the um cable stripping machine i brought we've had a tesco with it to figure out how it works so the purpose of today's video so everyone can sort of learn something i wanted to put across this video where you locker go is it worth investing something like this because i've always wondered if it's worth it i've never ever ever stripped my cable this is all the cable we've got so we've got normal pvc got loads of swa we've got some lead stuff which i won't strip that's just gonna have to go the way it is but is it worth spending your time investing in your stripping cable is it worth the cost so today i will hopefully answer that for you um so we've got our scales i've tried to get as much information together as possible to make it informative so you guys can go is it worth spending 350 pound on this machine or stripping it by hand or getting other types of strippers i brought this machine i bought everything here this is all mine from cables from people's houses that we've collected over the past six months odd and all that so uh i'll get to it today sponsor the video is ideal and ideally sent me some stuff across for you guys so send me across the works backpack very nice very deep i'll just show you in there there's loads of pockets we'll run through this properly at the end we've got open toe and then we've got three bags as well to keep bits and bobs in um i'll run through all the stuff at the end for the giveaway for that where it will be run through all the specs in the bags for you and i'll put a link below to all the ideal stuff so thank you very much ideal right the machine itself got off amazon around about 300 quid i've written some stuff down so what the plan is i've got a tool behind me with some scales we're going to weigh that we're going to weigh what i've got out here so we've got a mixture of one mil 1.5 2.5 singles one mil uh 25 mil tail 60 mil tails 10 mil twin on earth maybe this bit of 16 mil 20 lift i don't know so we'll weigh that comparison i'll time myself then on how long it takes to strip all of this with adam's help and then figure out the cost difference so per kilo for pvc cable from the tap yard one pound 40 per kilo around this area for bright copper so if you don't want bright copper as bright copper is when you strip it and it looks bright bright copper by itself no connections no plugs no nothing that is 4 pound 50 per kilo so if i can turn this into bright copper what i will do is weigh this before weigh this afterwards of the bright copper and the pvc we've stripped off of it to figure out the weight difference of how much we've removed from it the time then but obviously with this i'm filming this during the day and working hours it's fine by me but for you guys most of the time when you strip stuff is in after hours weekends in the evenings with your kids with your mrs fellas whatever so i wouldn't really take into account time wise for cost wise for you guys because unless you're going to take a day off work which you might do if you've got a massive tub like i've got here and you want to strip it all and see if it's worth your while taking a day off work to strip it is the come back from that going to be worthwhile so hopefully we'll answer that on this i'm going to do the pvc first do that measurement and then we'll come on to the swa afterwards because obviously the steel in it we can also weigh that in so i'll wait before i wait after the pvc out sheathing and in achieving and also the armored itself and then the copper and we'll combine the price to see if that's worthwhile as well right so the scale so far for the gorilla top we're looking at around about 500 grams so i'll pop this in here and see what it changes to all right so that is saying that's still uh smack on eight so in there will be seven and a half kilos worth of pvc cable insulation and copper so now's the fun thing we'll get this out we'll set the machine up itself for where it's meant to be i'll run you through a few things we've had to go yesterday didn't we trying to do it a bit see how it works it's a few adjustments you need to make between cables it's amazing at tails it's amazing armored it's amazing at flex and single core cables twin earth is a bit hit and miss with without changing the adjustments but i'll show you through that so tech spec wise we've got a gorilla tub there we're going to put the copper into no sorry the pvc adam's just weighing the little gorilla tub that we're going to put the copper into it's going to be about 250 grams ish the machine itself normal 13 amp plug top um big emergency switch on off different size cable so that's a cable flattener that's for meant to be for one mil and 1.5 mil 2.5 well anything for twin but really i've only found out that 2.5 hits through it and then gradually up and up and up it gets higher and higher and higher it's a little flat up on this side you can see through the the uh the blades are pinched down so with that it's a bit of a fine adjustment these on top thread down pushes the blades up and down as and when you are stripping so uh what i found as well from doing stuff yesterday is the stuff that i've put in here i've sort of taken the kinks out so beforehand if i'm ever taking cables i cut at people's houses i just bunch it up chuck it in like this but if this is going to be viable to use from now on when cables are brought out i'm going to put them in loops make sure we take the kinks out anything with nails or cable ties or plugs or connector blocks on the end need to be removed because it would just jam and destroy the uh the stripper so spend a bit of time with this we'll start with some of the smaller cables on top i think we've got some singles and some one mil we'll put all on the pile and we'll start the timer okay i'm going to start stopwatch now obviously it's not going to be completely 100 accurate because we're going to be stopping the star and filming but i will leave that there got this out got that out we're obviously very aware not put your fingers and feed them into it's very healthy safety obviously it's common sense so if i turn it on easily with that so let's start with the simple one of adam you just turn that off and then literally that's just is that scored through one or two both let's score through the two so if you want to do it for the one you could just higher the the blade up a bit that's stripped through that so yes on both sides yeah yeah it's kind of a score yeah well if not just rip that off and run it through again so to run it through again all i'm going to do is just adjust turn this once lower the blade down a little bit and then i'll stick that back through to adam adam's keeping all the bbc in the buckets yeah all right so a little close up so that's how i've just tightened up a little bit more run it through simple as that pull it all off yeah so we'll stick it on the side we'll do all the singles and then i'll stop every time we run into a different type of cable like say we'll do the singles then we'll go to one mil one five two five and then start doing some meat tails and some earthing as well right also as well we've just had a bit of a problem where someone's stuck some copper in their hands so if you put it through and it's not the right uh distance it will go through but also cut the copper and obviously the copper is the spire all the way through so what it ends up doing is a blade just cut straight through it and becomes extremely sharp so be careful they say wear gloves but gloves aren't going to stop er and you can't you can't do it needles aren't going to stop a needle point going through but we're just being a bit more careful as we're passing it through they say we have had a bit of practice with this so it's just about fine adjustment when you adjust it for one cable you got to make sure you adjust it back for twin and earth so i've fed through a lot of the singles and the earth like this um i'm gonna do some thicker stuff in a minute but we're gonna try with the uh twin in a second so that's one mil twin so what i've end up doing is with emergency stop button make sure you turn it off as well so you can see through if you lift the flap the other side you can visibly see the thickness and the depth of where the blade's going to go on the cable so you can sort of adjust it to suit obviously put the back back down that is there for safety so you don't get your fingers caught in turn the socket back on and away she was fed first twin so that has worked that time because sometimes what happens when it feeds through itself instead of going flat if it hits the blade at a certain angle it actually twists to its side the blade does run down it ends up running down the side and not exactly the way you want it to but i just think that's that is what it is with this machine i don't think i'm gonna get much better than that uh we did find so there you go that took you what 10 seconds yeah so we can feed the singles back through but why i will say is from everything that's been perfect to strip except for one with the one five have been a bit of an issue but i do have found it's how easy us lot is to strip the actually the from the outside by hand you know to put your foot on it pull the earth out might be quicker doing it that way and then just feed the singles through just through just the thought right so i've just changed the center second so this is 1.5 mil and it's sat absolutely perfectly and cut exactly where it needs to so it is hitting miss i'm not going to say it's the best machine in the world you say i brought it no one gave it me to say it hasn't what i want about it but when it strips it like that beautiful so i would say if you find the right setting for the right size cable stick on that cable get that all through and then move to your next size up 10 mil this is was 10 mil twin um i'd already stripped it out originally i presume this was out someone's fuse board back in the day so uh foot rule of thumb the cable fits in the hole it's going to go through that one most of the time right so just so you can see how it splits as i want to be rushing the video and not showing you guys how it comes out so you get it the right thickness and the right distance apart that is how it should cut the insulation and then in theory it should let's peel out right so if you get a bit of twin that's got kinks in it yeah come forward dude i have the obviously scaffold in here but you can get any tube so if you want to try and get kinks imagine like that's now twisted like that if you get it over a bar and you roll it that will help you so much more when feeding cables through machines or even stripping them in general so to try and get rid of this to keep it a bit more uniform but easy to strip put some weight on it not loads and just run it around a bit [Music] and that straighten the cables up all right so so far we're on 40 48 minutes on the clock which is here uh we've done all the twin and earth we found out a system with the two five was feed it through this one not the flat one and it worked a lot better oh here we go it's my ceiling dripping brilliant um next we're going to the meat tails so like i said remove most of this but there is some cable tie still on this one so we'll remove that and start feeding through [Music] so with the armors it pretty much strips it straight to the core you get on the right hole excuse me try this in might be a bit easier probably because it's cold in here the cables are stiff as a lot harder to well this copper as well [Music] right so that's the pile done that's a part of the scrap that's the part of that i'm just going to stop my stopwatch on 53 minutes and 22 seconds so obviously taking into account that there is me and adam doing it or somebody say adam and i doing it hey i've been doing stuff so you know you could double that time equally i've been doing it quicker than i'm doing it you put the cameras off person oh dear dear oh dear so what i'll do i'll leave this to the side we'll write down 53 minutes um i'm gonna get that massive piece of armored which is over here this should be three quarter 16 mil adam yes it is so we'll put that on the scales weigh that then we'll put this through and then at the end uh that mate all right so i'm going to weigh that let me take it away no no that's it that's coming to 90 kg yeah right so i'll write that down okay so really now while i'm stripping that the price of armor cable per kilo is one pound 60 to my local guy and steel is 40p per kilo so that itself when we say nine kilo i don't have to get cochlear i can't i can't do this on the whim so that armor itself should short make me if i take that to the tack yard apparently 12 pound 60 apparently it is a thick cable that's one of the summer houses that we did when it that was just an off cut some people may keep it but if i ever use a 16 ml cable it's gonna have to be longer than that so it's just gonna be lying around i'd rather just for the sake of the video get it done uh what do you think we should do cut it into three sections with an angle grinder that's gonna be a bit more manageable in it right sort of stop watch now let's get this a go and put the angle grinder for us we'll chop this down i won't time-lapse this bit i'll just run through in a second of feeding it through then i'll realize when reeling the yeah yeah guys we've got our cuts we've got one two three four five bits meeting a bit long right they should should because they are cold and thick you're passing through that one problem we're gonna go biggest because the reason i say that i think these blades are set for which is like a single core cable obviously this is a three core cable uh we'll try through the big one see if it's cut well enough if not because we only need to go through the first layer of installation unreal the steel itself and then pass it through again [Applause] right so there's our armours we're going to sleeve them off i'm just going to change the battery with my gopro it's about to get flat and what we'll do we'll cut the steel separately into a bag we'll weigh that separately as well pvc into the big tub and then the copper into the smaller top right they're all done now so now we've got our three core on our pvc layer across the top i might be wrong saying it's pvc but it's got a layer of black insulation on top okay steel right so we're gonna do insulation steel's gonna get one copper in the other so we'll start feeding these one through one by one to make sure we get the right hole again excuse me choke them up right i'm trying to do this on camera for you it's even gone through the installation on the one of the cores so normally it should be a bit easier because it's freezing cold and it's minus three yeah [Music] we all know much of a pain this is just strip anyway it works right there's our pile of uh 16 mil thumb let's make sure we get the right hole again excuse me never gets old doesn't how's that matter yeah perfect yeah not sprinted it just straight out sound right i'll uh i won't bore you with time lapses we'll get these done get these chopped and voila adam stop eating memory labs they're mine uh 25 minutes 25 minutes to do the armored so that's what we got there's a steel there's the installation there's our insulation for our normal pvc cables twin and earth flex single core cables but um this was a yeah 16 25 mil tails all sorts of stuff so we've got our times for them the next thing to do is literally do a comparison of what we would have earned compared to what we haven't and then i can tell you afterwards a little plan little plan that we've adam came up with that it's going to be in future videos that would incorporate all of this it's just so cool but you have to wait to the end of the video right so copy from the pvc cables the very first one so looking at that that is 4.5 kilo so 4.25 yep okay all right then the pvc for this these i did actually buy a digital scale but it's not to do with the post yet so we've got the right so that'll be 3.25 minus the tub all right so i've just tipped the copper from the pvc cable into the trough that's some of the stuff that we were stripping yesterday to have a practice obviously this has got no handles so this is all the cables from the armored copper all right so the copper there is uh smack on four so that's 4kg all right so the steel on it comes to three two five so we take the tub off it's three three kg from the steel right pvc for the armored itself let's try and get this on all right it's coming up let's keep it still right minus the top is 2.25 ish so let's have a look what that adds up to right so after a bit of a graft and weigh in and measuring and then working out those are numbers um i really enjoyed it adam's enjoying himself like it's something different and obviously explained at the end what i'm going to do with the copper but to put it into context so let's say we both stripped this it was an hour stripping so there's two of us so that's two hours uh two hours worth of driven time so the pvc itself provided weighed in 7.5 kg uh i'll put all the numbers up here as i'm saying so 7.5 kg normal pvc household cable uh at the the local scrap yard i would have got uh 10 pound 50. stripped bright copper which what we've got uh that equals out to 19 pound 12 so you've got a profit of around about eight eight pound ish um so going off that then the armor cable itself uh if i'd have weighed the armor cable in it by itself at nine kg i'd have had fourteen pound fifty sorry fourteen pound forty stripped away the steel separately and the copper separately uh you would have made 18 pounds so realistically you're making three pound 60 on that for what was time-wise 25 minutes so not the best so we worked out some calculations so this was around 350 quid so if you work off the cable itself so we worked out per hour you could probably strip about you make yourself four pound 50 profit per hour on strip and cable if you did it at the same rate we did it obviously i'm counting this as one person number two so per hour four pound fifty so to pay for this machine outright you need to do it you need to spend 77 hours worth of stripping continuously to pay for this and that works out 3.25 days which is a lot really um is it worth it this is why i've never really gone out strip cable because i can't see and if there's a massive profit margin in it 100 but by the looks of this four pound 50 now which is a minimum wage great for someone to do as a part-time job if you want someone to come in and strip the cable for you but then at the same time you make no profit on the cable you're better off just banging up like i've been doing for years i'm just taking it straight to the dump i know a lot of people burn it which isn't good for the environment and you get less money because it's not quite copper i really wouldn't recommend that whatsoever but yeah recommendation on the machine fantastic great it does exactly what i wanted to do it was expensive and i'm gonna have to put a lot of hours into make this pay for itself but once it has paid for itself everything on top of that is profit i don't think it'd be taking days off work to strip cable evenings weekends you know um so yeah i think it's been helpful like you can see the difference is it worst chicken coffee copper yes if you're gonna do something else with it which i'm gonna do and i'll talk about in a minute but we'll run through the bags for our deal now right the first audio bags of rucksack so as you can see from inside all the pockets all the single dancing stuff on the outside and it's also got a clip-on clip-off holster which i thought was pretty cool um normal pockets in the front we've got a hard shell up in the front open up inside absolutely loads of room for drill bits pockets screwdrivers all that sort of stuff and then in the back there's even more space space for laptop notepad drill holster in there tape measure holster and a deep pocket through the drills and whatnot nice padding on the back second one is the open toe we've all seen these before it comes with a bigger strap sections that it can be removed for screwdrivers drills all that sort of stuff loads of pockets around the outside screwdriver tape measure clip and stuff for your tape these are a godsend we don't know why everyone doesn't have these on and last but not least a few little pouches the screwdrivers drill bits uh we use them for tape didn't we and loads of bits and bobs that you want to carry around with you that ends up floating around the van this you can contain it all so to do with this i'll put a picture on my instagram when this video is live to enter it uh just tag someone like the video and like the video of course like the post and also go and follow ideal on instagram well last bit of video what i'm gonna do with attack cable so this is all the time i've gathered so far which is a good amount and i could weigh it in but what we're gonna do instead adam gave me the idea is i'll turn this way to the light and the idea was why don't you make copper ingots why don't you make copper bars so i've actually bought myself a furnace and some gas and some gloves and some molds and everything like that and what i'm going to be doing is doing a video on turning on this copper here and the steel at some point to make my own or smelt my own copper and make a copper bars that will hopefully be engraved with my logo and hopefully i can then sell them as much to you guys as and when i hit different milestones on youtube as in 30k 40k i'm obviously gonna have to have a practice first and it'll be a lot floating around so keep your eye out let me know if you're interested in that sort of stuff because it's gonna make a cool video let me know if you want me to do on my main channel or my other channel because it's not really electrical related but it's playing with carlos so anyway like the video thanks very much for watching bye bye

Channel: N Bundy Electrical

Views: 135,451

Rating: 4.8132076 out of 5

Keywords: electrician, works unit, industrial unit, sparky, phase one, stud wall, racking, van, tour, ford transit, n bundy, electrical, uk, industrial lights, metal tray, apprentice, commercial wiring, tray work, industrial wiring, cable stripping, copper wire, swa, strip wire, stripping machine

Id: wnQ62sxcwFQ

Length: 26min 0sec (1560 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 12 2021