Jason, Your family business is awesome. so diverse , I don't imagine there is much that can't be crushed, sorted and recycled! I would really lie to see the precious metal recovery from the computer, and other mother boards. I can see why your products sell, your making the world a cleaner place! Thanks, Rik Spector
Get a floor drying blower and have non ferrous fall perpendicular thru the air stream. That should blow clear most of the plastic/paper and leave a cleaner copper product.
Hi Jason, Your new 34 x 24 hammer mill is a beast! Great video! Thumbs up! Everything you fed into that machine was improved for extra value pulling out the steel! The only item I strongly disagree with is the computer towers. I've been recycling computers for over 11 years. Pulverizing the towers just to remove the steel is a complete waist of time. Towers are very easy to take apart. The only component that would benefit from being shredded is the power supply. It's much easier to process the boards when they're in one piece! After the boards are depopulated - then they can be pulverized to liberate any copper & precious metals that are left. Stay safe, Jim
You can unscrew the side panels and remove the front plastic face but after that most cases use rivets or are welded so you still have a big block that takes space. I would have imagined they're using something to flatten them and then maybe run them through one of those shredders that have teeth running in different directions (lots of videos with those eating tires and bikes and small things) to make smaller pieces out of them. I like this machine but I don't understand why they didn't make some small improvements like maybe some side panels or guides so that there's no steel hanging on the side, or maybe some walls so that copper wouldn't fall outside the barrel.
Yup second this. Have an electric screwdriver and go nuts. The power supply units are a total mixed bag of aluminum copper steel tin and god only knows what else.
Hey Jason, That is a very interesting video ! Every question I could think of was answered. 99% of your videos I see are quality viewing. When you team up with Dan they are fun and sometimes funny. Thank you for producing great videos. Work Safe, Be Well Enjoy Life
Wouldn’t you want the conveyor belt to go a little bit slower to have the magnet get most of the metal and the picker to properly pick out the big pieces?
I was thinking along the same lines. Run the conveyor a bit slower when shredding the computer towers give the magnetic belt a chance to grab the steel without the plastic.
I love your videos. The one question that i have is at the end of the line, as it falls, could you have a blower set up to blow away the paper from the side into another dumpster beside the metal one?
with particle sizes varying so much it would be hard to tweak it to blow away bigger pieces of paper but not the copper "dust" which amounts to noticeable weights in these scales of operation, I'd think
I feel like videos just like this should be shown in schools so yhat people understand that items can be recycled. So many people think that products need to be 100% taken apart and sorted by hand which then makes it unprofitable and not worth recycle. Our society today absolutely sucks at recycling.
What got you started doing this? I think it is wonderful what you do for a living. God bless you and your family. *Maybe you already have a video explaining your journey. I will look for it
curious if it is beneficial to do step down runs and rerun the same material into smaller/finer products...say from 4" to 1" to maybe 1/8 inch or smaller-does it clean it up any better or remain cost efficient?
Your machines and the product that they result in are really cool! Of course I love the gold prospecting the best! Only second to the shiny stuff on your shaker table! I definitely have to tease you about your videos because when you're home every video it's raining. I mean like always! 😂 Here in semi-arid Colorado It's definitely different and even interesting to see a different climate.
On those electric motor parts (stator, commutator, rotor, armature core & armature windings) A lot of that would be easier to clean by hand. That way the copper is much cleaner, also they make a machine that for a stator and armature windings, that cuts and pulls the copper/aluminum wire out, without shredding it and make less of a mess.. I do understand the need for the system you produce for those with massive amounts to process, yes indeed use a system like yours, it would be faster, but not as profitable as a $ per pound selling value.. I used to be a scrapper and did it for about 30 years and I made very good money, cause I completely cleaned and sorted everything to gain the most $ per pound, I also smelted coper, aluminum & brass, because you get more per pound for ingots and/or bars of pure material.. To me it looks like your system would be better used for processing mined raw ore, of which I have watched you do many times.. Sorry if I sound critical.. I enjoy watching your channel and have been subscribed for a long time, I have seen every video & short and I do share many on my facebook & twitter.. Thank you for sharing.. I am sorry so long of a comment
There are videos of stator cutters and windings pullers online and yes, they are much neater but there are a lot of other advantages. They are also much quieter and at least as fast. The setup takes up a lot of space compared to stator processors which often have a footprint less than a square metre. The mill pulls huge amps (100amps under load is pulling about 60 kilowatts on this setup, equivalent to $30 per hour at 50¢ per KwH). The hammers won't last long against stator steel, requiring frequent replacement. A stator cutter only needs lubrication and cutter blade sharpening when needed. If I had a business processing tons of stators every day, I'd definitely go with a stator cutter and windings puller. On the other hand, if such volumes were a rare event (and I had the space) I would go with a hammer mill for its versatility. (I actually own a small hammer mill but it wouldn't handle electric motors. Plastic and cardboard shredding are more suitable jobs for my machine. I have to try aluminium casting one day.)
@@andymanaus1077 That is what I was referring too.. When you are processing pallets full, it is very affective.. When you do a small amount, I was a scrapper/Junker for years Just a angle grinder with a cut off disk is just as affective when it is like maybe a dozen or two a week.. The machinery Jason builds, sells & uses is more suited to raw ore and use for mining.. and not very effective or efficient for lots of the things he uses it for..
"The Motor Eating Monster From Outer Space". Imagine the value of that stuff when it was new. And the vast majority of the stuff you smashed up was less than 15 yrs old. There must have been many millions of dollars worth of stuff reduced to a couple thousand dollars in scrap.
Crazy cool Jason.. I scraped a 35lb potted transformer last week. Those things are crazy tuff and probably too heavy for your hammer mill. But that would be interesting for you to try some smaller ones. Should be No Issues I would think. The one I did was encased in 1/8 Metal and needed to be sawed for me to get er dun. Terrific work and business there Jason, your doing a great service to the very necessary recycling industry. Peace Prospector Tripp
There exist hammer mills that are designed to take whole vehicles. There are a few good vids out there, one is by whistlindiesel. The operator talked about how crane weights were placed in a car trunk and the machine had to be stopped to remove them. Giant chunks of solid steel, and the machine was only stopped because they were to big to pass through the grates.
@@aredditor4272 Whoever put the crane weights in the car either didn't know what they were doing or were too lazy to care. Crane weights are worth double the scrap value of a car by weight. If they'd taken them out of the trunk and sold them to the scrapyard separately, they would have made a lot more money. I get 24¢ per kilo for scrap cars and 47¢ per kilo for FHIS (Ferrous heavy insize scrap). Any crane weight under one metre long is considered FHIS and their weight adds up FAST.
Potted transformers. Uggh. Yup they make those really hard to dismantle. If they work you could offer them whole on second hand industrial equipment sites and get decent money for them. ❤
Man, that hammermill is a beast!! Now, what about the gold-plated parts/pins in cellphones, on printheads, motherboards, processors, and RAM sticks - do you extract that gold via leaching or do customers take care of that themselves and hire you first to break down and sort everything into manageable pieces? Also, it sounds like your customers can still make a profit with copper for example, even when taking your processing/labor fee into account?
As a computer enthusiast , I do NOT enjoy the spot at 24:25 showing the smashed boards. The poor computer! A few minutes labour un-screwing might have removed the insides of the PC, rather than smashing the whole thing. Looking for cost effectiveness of manual labour VS smashing machine.
Jason the only thing wrong is the pieces of plastic contaminating the copper. If you had a vacuum or blower to remove that product it would mean the difference of #1 from #2 copper where I live
I wonder what power-factor that 100hp electric motor has at idle. (Depending on how the AC current lines up to the voltage, it's actually possible to draw significant current without drawing *any* power.)
A problem that I've seen recently is copper coloured lacquer on aluminium wire and similarly copper coated aluminium wire. I can't imagine some mashed aluminium will do much good to a copper melt.
Sometimes it's an extremely thin layer of electroplated copper. You can easily tell by sliding a grinder disk or a file over the windings before throwing them into a processor. However, it's always painful when scrapping a motor to discover that the windings are aluminium. There's a lot of manual labour just to get the motor cores out of the motors and you can't always tell they're Al until you've done the work. Al is worth a quarter of CU by weight but CU is also twice as dense so, by unit, Al is only worth about a quarter of CU. Pro tip: almost all welders have Al windings.
1st question to mind is cost ratio I know I asked on your other similar video the pounding the hammers have to take from those so the question is how much is a new set of hammers to profit (assuming one has to pay for the material) ok I wrote before watching so if you answer it in video um nvm haha
i wish there was a clear material strong enough so you can make the sides of the housing transparent. that would be super cool the only thing i can think of is a solid block of lab made saphire but that is super brittle
I used to run a scrap plastic grinder (PVC pipe) with similar motor specs to your mill. 100 to 110 amps on 'drop the piece in' was max safe load. Anything more than a half second spike over 140 would stall the motor or (usually) burn the drive belts off. Sounds like you were pushing your machine about as hard as was prudent.
Excellent gear! Everyone needs a machine that can pulverize a printer! A PC! The most frustrating devices ever contrived ... serves them right. Thanks for the superb videos and, your equipment is built for the user, obviously well designed.
Wow that was very interesting I never knew it was done like that😮 it is good to see the process😊 and I am glad that it is not going into a landfill😊 thank you for the video it was very informative 😊 thank you for all the hard work you do in making these videos😊 I will see you on the next one thank you😊😮🎉😂❤🤯😛😍😜💞💓💕😮
Just throwing this out there you should do a live stream ones of these days where you send a GoPro threw the hammer mill 😂it would be interesting to see how long it will broadcast for as it gets eaten by the mill 😂🎉 💥
Judging from what i know from a friend who does buisiness in this direction......PC towers have a lot of gold and value in their PCBs. And are super fast to disassemble. You can do like a whole company worth of them in a day by hand. And you get high value PCBs that big professional scrap refiners will pay top money for. Not much of a point in shredding those so early, my friend certainly wouldnt tolerate it. Like you shatter a lot of the ceramic caps, probably. Well they have silver and some palladium. You will break and maybe loose gold plated parts because they have a nickel undercoat and are slightly magnetic etc. And yes, if you send 10 tons of PCB to a company like Aurubis, major European copper refiner, 7000 employees...., and not some muppets on youtube, they extract all the metals together because they have the process capabilities........The motor idea is really promising though.
As far as gold content, "lots" is relative. You certainly can dismantle and sort through things in many different ways, but from start to finish, there's too much work involved for anyone to get wealthy off of it. Many people have mechanically and chemically processed ewaste and uploaded vids of the process. There's a reason most of the complete processing of scrap is done in Pakistan, India, Africa, Bangladesh, etc.
@@aredditor4272 My Friend would laugh at you and show you his new car.....this religious belief is the sole, self perpetuating reason that so much ewaste still goes into black channels. Gotta be careful here. Some stuff like printers, peripherals and loudspeakers is not economically doable by hand. But ATX towers, server blades and other modular industrial electronics can be done by hand. You can do about 10t a year no sweat, no electricity consumption, no dust and noise and hazmat issues, no expensive equipment. Aurubis pays enough for that much premium PCBs that you can comfortably live off that for years......well i could. He needs about one dumpster a year but he has some real strange spending habits......
there was much more in the olden golden days. So if you get your hands on a pile of OLD computers they have much bulkier gold contacts. Modern manufacturers try to use as little as possible so there isn't that much
Yeah local scrap yards around here will give you stator money but they won't give you dirty number two copper wire I've never had a processed like that and take it in but I don't know it seems like when you put a magnet to the stator wire even though it is cooper they won't take it like that. They will give you electric motor but that's the only way I can get paid on it. I don't know I tried to do precious metals for them at the scrap yard because I was bringing in gold and stuff like that and people would just follow you home try to rob you around here I was trying to sell small buttons of gold that I had processed they actually sent me to a school they wanted me to work for them. It almost seemed to me that you know they had problems with everybody but what really happened was they had a huge can crusher that was three phase power and every time they turned it on you would lose power to the receptacle and I had gold cooking down on the beaker and it would explode because it would just turn off and then would turn on and then we just get too hot too fast and then when I did diagnosis they tried to make me look like a fool. They brought the guy that was teaching the class in and everything else I said you know she keeps throwing away the flux I was trying to get second pulls I figured out what was going on the bus bar on the power was just burned up I was losing power to my beaker they were trying to refine the gold in the night time I said stand right there hold on I went and turned on the can crusher and she said don't turn it on it cost a lot of money to run that thing I said I know it's turning all the power off to the whole building😂😂 😂😂😂😂😂
Allways whatch your vids . Very interesting. Would it be possible to put a magnetic trap conveyor on the larg hammer mill with a 2.5inch screen. This would be constantly removing the large steel piece's .
The largest pieces can be removed by sight and most scrapyards have a ~5% contamination allowance. No one is going to care much about little piddly bits of steel in a giant pile of copper. Your real problem is aluminum- which will go right through magnets and will have to be separated by hand or it WILL lower the value by a large amount
@@anotherboredperson large pieces of steel such as hardened shafts break machines. And absorb a lot of power which could be otherwise utilised in chooping up the copper to a finer grade .
@@mikebond6328 I had to deal with the scrap yard or I would buy their transformers for $0.30 a pound and then sell them back the copper and steal. So they paid $0.25 a pound and made money selling me the transformers so I used to go there picking through the Gaylord and there was a couple of weeks where I would make a couple thousand dollars cutting open transformers a few hours each night after work. I made a jig where I would drop them in and a big 14-in demo saw that would cut the welds out in a second and then I drop them right on the concrete and that would usually be enough to split them open.
I built something very similar except it used a rather powerful AC electromagnet that kicked the copper away and attracted the steel after the milling. It sorted into 3 bins steel, copper, and the outermost bin had aluminum that came along for the ride. Also imo Alumium wound motors absolutely suck. 🤓
Very cool, I don't know what would pass in my local yard and they seem to change depending on the person and quantity. I'm sure they have some built in costs that they ultimately put in their pockets just to pad the bottom line. What's a guy gonna do? take it back home? Doubtful, your kinda at the mercy of the scrapper.
Not a lot, but you can get ~$200 per ton. Which is way better than paying the landfill fees to throw it away! Clean steel in uniform pieces is probably worth more.
That is most definitely #2, if very little corrosion might get #1,,,,, depending,,,, also, wene I even take in large amounts of good copper, they ussualy give me a few cents more per pound,,,,, I'm an electrician and get lots of #1,,,, and an extra10/15 cents a pound on 500/1000 pounds adds up so if ever doing large volume ,,make sure to ask what the price is
at first i was like why are you piling up all the ferrous material on the floor like that you should be using a container... then i saw it zoomed out...
Don't know if you happen to have one but there is a really nice lazer cleaning device that makes cleaning much much easier with no chemicals, i sure would love to get one for cleaning automotive parts and what you have there with that lazer cleaning tool you could make all of that there shiney new looking
Yeah, those laser cleaners for steel descaling... they cost upwards of $200,000 each. That's why you don't see many. Also, they're dangerous. They can permanently blind in an instant and require a controlled workspace for safety. (I'd like one too. They are amazing machines.)
@@andymanaus1077 Not to mention fumes and particulate management becomes a big deal. This machine already stirs up enough dust that they should probably design some dust control though.
it would be nice if i had a place i could take used aluminum foil. it seems a waste to trash it. so, i keep it. i would love to turn it into ingots myself but am not equipped to do that by any means. but, i want to do so even in small batches, to consolidate and clean up the aluminum foil as much as possible, so that it could be scrapped properly, and not end up in land-fill purgatory... (i have a 20 gallon plastic tote full by now lol, i want to process it someday)
I scrap a LOT of stuff, to the point where my friends call me "Brasso" because I reclaim used metal. Anyway, my local yard pays a penny per pound on aluminum foil, foil pans, etc., because it's nearly always contaminated with food waste and that adds more weight than the foil does. So, I will often take the foil, compact it, and stuff it into the soda/beer cans to bump up the weight on that category without cheating the scrap yard by diluting the feedstock with dirt like so many morons do. It takes time and effort, though, so not practical on a large scale. Aluminum foil can also be easily compacted into heavier, more valuable chunks by hand with a hammer, but it takes a lot of time, makes noise, and is messy.
@@dionh70 thanks for the reply. i was wondering if it could be heated up to carbonize food scraps remaining, even if it isnt melting the metal itself. could it be done over a simple wood fire in an appropriately heat resistant crucible or pan? could be some experiments out there to make the clean up as cheap as possible. perhaps if it could be melted in a way that helps remove contaminants like an electric furnace and crucibles, then pouring ingest in small batches, or by the pound? i just feel like it needs to be done somehow, but would like to do so as cheaply as possible. i don't mind noise and mess, i have a workshop for that haha...
@@EddieSchirmer I went to a local fire safety company and bought a couple of old fire extinguishers that failed pressure testing, cut the tops off with my angle grinder, set one in my little firepit in the yard, and fed scrap foil into them as the fire burned. I was burning scrap pallets that I pick up for free from nearby industrial buildings, because they set them out on the curb if they're too bashed up to re-use. The foil melted down fairly easily, because steel melts a couple hundred degrees higher than aluminum. I did have one extinguisher bottle fail, with a hot spot developing to melt a hole in the side of the bottle, allowing the molten aluminum to pour into the coals, but that was easy enough to recover the next day when everything was cool. They charged me $5/ea for the old extinguisher bottles after I reassured them I wasn't going to try to pressurize them again.
@@EddieSchirmer I saw a vid a few days ago where the guy made a small melting furnace with a microwave and some kaowool wrapped around a crucible made of silicon carbide. he calls himself 'Shake the Future' on youtube. Crucible has to be made of SiC as that's a material that absorbs microwaves but has a higher melting point than the metal. Batch size is pretty small, the crucible looks like it's maybe 2 inches in diameter.
Now when they had the shredder open I could get like anywhere from 600 to 1100 depending on the size and weight they would pay everything Ferris non-ferrous precious metals it didn't matter. There's a scrap yard real close to here but there was just knocking off like a dollar per pound on the copper and stuff I'm like you know that's a decent load I would rather get the full amount of money you're not coming out of like 60 bucks. And a couple of the guys were actually weigh in their stuff before they would take it in and they said that you know I think the scales off a little bit so we just collectively said to not go down there. Couple of the guys that called him out on it you know he just said take it somewhere else 😂😂😂
Pretty cool. Sadly you are missing out on the gold content of the PC boards. Many of the the chips inside have gold wire inside them as well as gold plating on the boards. I would remove all PCBs with components on them first. There are other methods that are used to recover that gold. That sorting process would be ideal for AI with robotic picking arms.
Jason,
Your family business is awesome. so diverse , I don't imagine there is much that can't be crushed, sorted and recycled!
I would really lie to see the precious metal recovery from the computer, and other mother boards.
I can see why your products sell, your making the world a cleaner place!
Thanks,
Rik Spector
Get a floor drying blower and have non ferrous fall perpendicular thru the air stream. That should blow clear most of the plastic/paper and leave a cleaner copper product.
Yup that would be a good after process. Combine with an AC electromagnet to kick the aluminum out as well.
Hi Jason, Your new 34 x 24 hammer mill is a beast! Great video! Thumbs up! Everything you fed into that machine was improved for extra value pulling out the steel! The only item I strongly disagree with is the computer towers. I've been recycling computers for over 11 years. Pulverizing the towers just to remove the steel is a complete waist of time. Towers are very easy to take apart. The only component that would benefit from being shredded is the power supply. It's much easier to process the boards when they're in one piece! After the boards are depopulated - then they can be pulverized to liberate any copper & precious metals that are left. Stay safe, Jim
You can unscrew the side panels and remove the front plastic face but after that most cases use rivets or are welded so you still have a big block that takes space. I would have imagined they're using something to flatten them and then maybe run them through one of those shredders that have teeth running in different directions (lots of videos with those eating tires and bikes and small things) to make smaller pieces out of them.
I like this machine but I don't understand why they didn't make some small improvements like maybe some side panels or guides so that there's no steel hanging on the side, or maybe some walls so that copper wouldn't fall outside the barrel.
Yup second this. Have an electric screwdriver and go nuts. The power supply units are a total mixed bag of aluminum copper steel tin and god only knows what else.
Awesome demonstration of y'all's hammer mill's . Great video .
dang that steel is perfect for smelting
One mans garbage is another mans treasure Jason! 😊
I think the most important thing is the separation of the metals. Powerful forces at work there.
Very good content !
Tell em bro
i could run this on repeat. if their was a live feed id watch it alot ... so satisfying!!
If fluff is a problem, you could always add an eddy current to the end of the conveyor to fling the non ferrous.
Hey Jason,
That is a very interesting video !
Every question I could think of was answered.
99% of your videos I see are quality viewing.
When you team up with Dan they are fun and sometimes funny.
Thank you for producing great videos.
Work Safe, Be Well
Enjoy Life
This is a great video. Your hammer mills are amazing
Stunning, amazing what comes out of natures rocks..
Excellent video and well done on your mill. Very nice work on it.
watch a lot of your gold videos. So this is your day job!
Wouldn’t you want the conveyor belt to go a little bit slower to have the magnet get most of the metal and the picker to properly pick out the big pieces?
I was thinking along the same lines. Run the conveyor a bit slower when shredding the computer towers give the magnetic belt a chance to grab the steel without the plastic.
I absolutely love watching this, so satisfying watching the process. You do a great job 👍👍👍
I love your videos. The one question that i have is at the end of the line, as it falls, could you have a blower set up to blow away the paper from the side into another dumpster beside the metal one?
with particle sizes varying so much it would be hard to tweak it to blow away bigger pieces of paper but not the copper "dust" which amounts to noticeable weights in these scales of operation, I'd think
I feel like videos just like this should be shown in schools so yhat people understand that items can be recycled. So many people think that products need to be 100% taken apart and sorted by hand which then makes it unprofitable and not worth recycle. Our society today absolutely sucks at recycling.
I like your business more than my business.
What got you started doing this? I think it is wonderful what you do for a living. God bless you and your family.
*Maybe you already have a video explaining your journey. I will look for it
that is a beast love watching you make money
curious if it is beneficial to do step down runs and rerun the same material into smaller/finer products...say from 4" to 1" to maybe 1/8 inch or smaller-does it clean it up any better or remain cost efficient?
That is awesome! Thank you for showing us how this works!
Those are some beautiful welds.. 😉
Thanks so much for sharing this part of the operation, so interesting!
Your machines and the product that they result in are really cool! Of course I love the gold prospecting the best! Only second to the shiny stuff on your shaker table!
I definitely have to tease you about your videos because when you're home every video it's raining. I mean like always! 😂 Here in semi-arid Colorado It's definitely different and even interesting to see a different climate.
On those electric motor parts (stator, commutator, rotor, armature core & armature windings) A lot of that would be easier to clean by hand. That way the copper is much cleaner, also they make a machine that for a stator and armature windings, that cuts and pulls the copper/aluminum wire out, without shredding it and make less of a mess.. I do understand the need for the system you produce for those with massive amounts to process, yes indeed use a system like yours, it would be faster, but not as profitable as a $ per pound selling value.. I used to be a scrapper and did it for about 30 years and I made very good money, cause I completely cleaned and sorted everything to gain the most $ per pound, I also smelted coper, aluminum & brass, because you get more per pound for ingots and/or bars of pure material..
To me it looks like your system would be better used for processing mined raw ore, of which I have watched you do many times..
Sorry if I sound critical.. I enjoy watching your channel and have been subscribed for a long time, I have seen every video & short and I do share many on my facebook & twitter..
Thank you for sharing.. I am sorry so long of a comment
There are videos of stator cutters and windings pullers online and yes, they are much neater but there are a lot of other advantages. They are also much quieter and at least as fast. The setup takes up a lot of space compared to stator processors which often have a footprint less than a square metre. The mill pulls huge amps (100amps under load is pulling about 60 kilowatts on this setup, equivalent to $30 per hour at 50¢ per KwH). The hammers won't last long against stator steel, requiring frequent replacement. A stator cutter only needs lubrication and cutter blade sharpening when needed.
If I had a business processing tons of stators every day, I'd definitely go with a stator cutter and windings puller. On the other hand, if such volumes were a rare event (and I had the space) I would go with a hammer mill for its versatility.
(I actually own a small hammer mill but it wouldn't handle electric motors. Plastic and cardboard shredding are more suitable jobs for my machine. I have to try aluminium casting one day.)
@@andymanaus1077 That is what I was referring too.. When you are processing pallets full, it is very affective.. When you do a small amount, I was a scrapper/Junker for years Just a angle grinder with a cut off disk is just as affective when it is like maybe a dozen or two a week.. The machinery Jason builds, sells & uses is more suited to raw ore and use for mining.. and not very effective or efficient for lots of the things he uses it for..
Do you have PANIC emergency off switch nearby?
"The Motor Eating Monster From Outer Space". Imagine the value of that stuff when it was new. And the vast majority of the stuff you smashed up was less than 15 yrs old. There must have been many millions of dollars worth of stuff reduced to a couple thousand dollars in scrap.
Thank you Jason this is definitely a great video excellent information and great content six stars brother
Crazy cool Jason.. I scraped a 35lb potted transformer last week. Those things are crazy tuff and probably too heavy for your hammer mill.
But that would be interesting for you to try some smaller ones. Should be No Issues I would think.
The one I did was encased in 1/8 Metal and needed to be sawed for me to get er dun.
Terrific work and business there Jason, your doing a great service to the very necessary recycling industry.
Peace Prospector Tripp
Wow, Thanks for the tip pal. Very interesting ⚒👍🤠
There exist hammer mills that are designed to take whole vehicles.
There are a few good vids out there, one is by whistlindiesel. The operator talked about how crane weights were placed in a car trunk and the machine had to be stopped to remove them. Giant chunks of solid steel, and the machine was only stopped because they were to big to pass through the grates.
@@aredditor4272 The mineral resources won't last forever.
These technologies will help us a little.
Many thanks for the answer
@@aredditor4272 Whoever put the crane weights in the car either didn't know what they were doing or were too lazy to care. Crane weights are worth double the scrap value of a car by weight. If they'd taken them out of the trunk and sold them to the scrapyard separately, they would have made a lot more money. I get 24¢ per kilo for scrap cars and 47¢ per kilo for FHIS (Ferrous heavy insize scrap). Any crane weight under one metre long is considered FHIS and their weight adds up FAST.
Potted transformers. Uggh. Yup they make those really hard to dismantle. If they work you could offer them whole on second hand industrial equipment sites and get decent money for them. ❤
Man, that hammermill is a beast!!
Now, what about the gold-plated parts/pins in cellphones, on printheads, motherboards, processors, and RAM sticks - do you extract that gold via leaching or do customers take care of that themselves and hire you first to break down and sort everything into manageable pieces?
Also, it sounds like your customers can still make a profit with copper for example, even when taking your processing/labor fee into account?
So with the motors and transformers I seen some aluminum wound items how do separate the aluminum from the copper
Great content!
what RPM on the hammers? the power of the hammers is crazy.
As a computer enthusiast , I do NOT enjoy the spot at 24:25 showing the smashed boards. The poor computer! A few minutes labour un-screwing might have removed the insides of the PC, rather than smashing the whole thing. Looking for cost effectiveness of manual labour VS smashing machine.
That’s too cool!
Fantastic video mate 👍
How much copper coated aluminum wire are you seeing come through with those old motors?
If you were to smelt tge copper shred what would have in tge of process
If you ran it through water much of the paper and light elements would float and you can screen them off the top.
Wasn't this already put up before?
That is so awesome. !
more videos like this Jason :)
Would love to know what your recovery numbers are
Hi can l ask , could one of your rock crusher units be adapted to a
PTO, drive for a tractor ?
Great video! Why do you use a slotted screen rather than a 'traditional' screen with round holes?
Jason the only thing wrong is the pieces of plastic contaminating the copper. If you had a vacuum or blower to remove that product it would mean the difference of #1 from #2 copper where I live
I wonder what power-factor that 100hp electric motor has at idle. (Depending on how the AC current lines up to the voltage, it's actually possible to draw significant current without drawing *any* power.)
Now I know! very cool!
Do you have plans to smelt all the copper to find out how much it's all worth?
A problem that I've seen recently is copper coloured lacquer on aluminium wire and similarly copper coated aluminium wire. I can't imagine some mashed aluminium will do much good to a copper melt.
Sometimes it's an extremely thin layer of electroplated copper. You can easily tell by sliding a grinder disk or a file over the windings before throwing them into a processor. However, it's always painful when scrapping a motor to discover that the windings are aluminium. There's a lot of manual labour just to get the motor cores out of the motors and you can't always tell they're Al until you've done the work.
Al is worth a quarter of CU by weight but CU is also twice as dense so, by unit, Al is only worth about a quarter of CU. Pro tip: almost all welders have Al windings.
What kind of screen do you use if you run it with ore and boulders
Starters and alt can be rebuilt.
Love the videos. What's up with the video quality though?
Very interesting video
1st question to mind is cost ratio I know I asked on your other similar video the pounding the hammers have to take from those so the question is how much is a new set of hammers to profit (assuming one has to pay for the material) ok I wrote before watching so if you answer it in video um nvm haha
i wish there was a clear material strong enough so you can make the sides of the housing transparent. that would be super cool
the only thing i can think of is a solid block of lab made saphire but that is super brittle
Greetings from the other side of this gem we've FUBAR
Do like most of your posts (not a fan of small places)
Can i ask what happens with da magnets
Wow very interesting
I used to run a scrap plastic grinder (PVC pipe) with similar motor specs to your mill. 100 to 110 amps on 'drop the piece in' was max safe load. Anything more than a half second spike over 140 would stall the motor or (usually) burn the drive belts off. Sounds like you were pushing your machine about as hard as was prudent.
Yet I can’t help but worry we do not do this enough in the uk
Excellent gear! Everyone needs a machine that can pulverize a printer! A PC! The most frustrating devices ever contrived ... serves them right. Thanks for the superb videos and, your equipment is built for the user, obviously well designed.
Wow that was very interesting I never knew it was done like that😮 it is good to see the process😊 and I am glad that it is not going into a landfill😊 thank you for the video it was very informative 😊 thank you for all the hard work you do in making these videos😊 I will see you on the next one thank you😊😮🎉😂❤🤯😛😍😜💞💓💕😮
I remember we used to put all this in furnese burn off all crap and pule copper by hand in 1-2 min after cooling in water
It is financially viable to take the PC components out of the cases first?
Just throwing this out there you should do a live stream ones of these days where you send a GoPro threw the hammer mill 😂it would be interesting to see how long it will broadcast for as it gets eaten by the mill 😂🎉 💥
We need to focus on recycling more . I really like your video about it .
Godzillia is what id call that machine
You should install one more mag belt to catch the missed iron and steel
Judging from what i know from a friend who does buisiness in this direction......PC towers have a lot of gold and value in their PCBs. And are super fast to disassemble. You can do like a whole company worth of them in a day by hand. And you get high value PCBs that big professional scrap refiners will pay top money for. Not much of a point in shredding those so early, my friend certainly wouldnt tolerate it. Like you shatter a lot of the ceramic caps, probably. Well they have silver and some palladium. You will break and maybe loose gold plated parts because they have a nickel undercoat and are slightly magnetic etc. And yes, if you send 10 tons of PCB to a company like Aurubis, major European copper refiner, 7000 employees...., and not some muppets on youtube, they extract all the metals together because they have the process capabilities........The motor idea is really promising though.
As far as gold content, "lots" is relative.
You certainly can dismantle and sort through things in many different ways, but from start to finish, there's too much work involved for anyone to get wealthy off of it.
Many people have mechanically and chemically processed ewaste and uploaded vids of the process.
There's a reason most of the complete processing of scrap is done in Pakistan, India, Africa, Bangladesh, etc.
Printers are also more promising. Because those are not economical to do by hand, too cramped, too few boards.
@@aredditor4272 My Friend would laugh at you and show you his new car.....this religious belief is the sole, self perpetuating reason that so much ewaste still goes into black channels. Gotta be careful here. Some stuff like printers, peripherals and loudspeakers is not economically doable by hand. But ATX towers, server blades and other modular industrial electronics can be done by hand. You can do about 10t a year no sweat, no electricity consumption, no dust and noise and hazmat issues, no expensive equipment. Aurubis pays enough for that much premium PCBs that you can comfortably live off that for years......well i could. He needs about one dumpster a year but he has some real strange spending habits......
Do you have any idea the AU ounce per ton values in the computer towers you're talking about ?
Thank you !
there was much more in the olden golden days. So if you get your hands on a pile of OLD computers they have much bulkier gold contacts. Modern manufacturers try to use as little as possible so there isn't that much
Nice
Yeah local scrap yards around here will give you stator money but they won't give you dirty number two copper wire I've never had a processed like that and take it in but I don't know it seems like when you put a magnet to the stator wire even though it is cooper they won't take it like that. They will give you electric motor but that's the only way I can get paid on it. I don't know I tried to do precious metals for them at the scrap yard because I was bringing in gold and stuff like that and people would just follow you home try to rob you around here I was trying to sell small buttons of gold that I had processed they actually sent me to a school they wanted me to work for them. It almost seemed to me that you know they had problems with everybody but what really happened was they had a huge can crusher that was three phase power and every time they turned it on you would lose power to the receptacle and I had gold cooking down on the beaker and it would explode because it would just turn off and then would turn on and then we just get too hot too fast and then when I did diagnosis they tried to make me look like a fool. They brought the guy that was teaching the class in and everything else I said you know she keeps throwing away the flux I was trying to get second pulls I figured out what was going on the bus bar on the power was just burned up I was losing power to my beaker they were trying to refine the gold in the night time I said stand right there hold on I went and turned on the can crusher and she said don't turn it on it cost a lot of money to run that thing I said I know it's turning all the power off to the whole building😂😂 😂😂😂😂😂
Allways whatch your vids . Very interesting. Would it be possible to put a magnetic trap conveyor on the larg hammer mill with a 2.5inch screen. This would be constantly removing the large steel piece's .
The largest pieces can be removed by sight and most scrapyards have a ~5% contamination allowance.
No one is going to care much about little piddly bits of steel in a giant pile of copper.
Your real problem is aluminum- which will go right through magnets and will have to be separated by hand or it WILL lower the value by a large amount
@@anotherboredperson large pieces of steel such as hardened shafts break machines. And absorb a lot of power which could be otherwise utilised in chooping up the copper to a finer grade .
You should get that lazer cleaning device and add it to ur hammer mill to clean up all the metals to nice n shiney
I need a cheap mill to mill wheat and corn. I used a grinder with a blade still I wish I could have bigger for 500 bucks or less.
A lot of the newer transformers actually use copper coated aluminum wire in there windinings instead of solid copper. Only way to tell is to cut them.
With experience you can tell by sight and feel(weight).
@@mikebond6328 I had to deal with the scrap yard or I would buy their transformers for $0.30 a pound and then sell them back the copper and steal. So they paid $0.25 a pound and made money selling me the transformers so I used to go there picking through the Gaylord and there was a couple of weeks where I would make a couple thousand dollars cutting open transformers a few hours each night after work. I made a jig where I would drop them in and a big 14-in demo saw that would cut the welds out in a second and then I drop them right on the concrete and that would usually be enough to split them open.
If you had a fan next to the copper bin you could blow the small plastics and tape out of the clean copper
How many employees do you have now?
I built something very similar except it used a rather powerful AC electromagnet that kicked the copper away and attracted the steel after the milling. It sorted into 3 bins steel, copper, and the outermost bin had aluminum that came along for the ride. Also imo Alumium wound motors absolutely suck. 🤓
Very cool, I don't know what would pass in my local yard and they seem to change depending on the person and quantity.
I'm sure they have some built in costs that they ultimately put in their pockets just to pad the bottom line.
What's a guy gonna do? take it back home?
Doubtful, your kinda at the mercy of the scrapper.
My local yard accepts 30% contamination on #2
Glad to see the employee wearing protective gear. I thought it would help his back if he didn’t have to bend over so much 😊
Urban mining!!
Is that scrap steel worth anything?
Not a lot, but you can get ~$200 per ton. Which is way better than paying the landfill fees to throw it away!
Clean steel in uniform pieces is probably worth more.
That is most definitely #2, if very little corrosion might get #1,,,,, depending,,,, also, wene I even take in large amounts of good copper, they ussualy give me a few cents more per pound,,,,, I'm an electrician and get lots of #1,,,, and an extra10/15 cents a pound on 500/1000 pounds adds up so if ever doing large volume ,,make sure to ask what the price is
Better to get the #2 separated from the steel by yourself. Otherwise the recycler will "armature" you on the weight. Much worse than being "shafted"😂
please use ear protection
youtube bit rate 12:50 really doesnt appreciate that copper wire
at first i was like why are you piling up all the ferrous material on the floor like that you should be using a container... then i saw it zoomed out...
Happened to me as well. The ground around is litterally a FeO2 coated gravel yard I think.
Don't know if you happen to have one but there is a really nice lazer cleaning device that makes cleaning much much easier with no chemicals, i sure would love to get one for cleaning automotive parts and what you have there with that lazer cleaning tool you could make all of that there shiney new looking
Yeah, those laser cleaners for steel descaling... they cost upwards of $200,000 each. That's why you don't see many. Also, they're dangerous. They can permanently blind in an instant and require a controlled workspace for safety.
(I'd like one too. They are amazing machines.)
@@andymanaus1077 Not to mention fumes and particulate management becomes a big deal. This machine already stirs up enough dust that they should probably design some dust control though.
I bet that machine makes aright racket.
it would be nice if i had a place i could take used aluminum foil. it seems a waste to trash it. so, i keep it. i would love to turn it into ingots myself but am not equipped to do that by any means. but, i want to do so even in small batches, to consolidate and clean up the aluminum foil as much as possible, so that it could be scrapped properly, and not end up in land-fill purgatory... (i have a 20 gallon plastic tote full by now lol, i want to process it someday)
I scrap a LOT of stuff, to the point where my friends call me "Brasso" because I reclaim used metal. Anyway, my local yard pays a penny per pound on aluminum foil, foil pans, etc., because it's nearly always contaminated with food waste and that adds more weight than the foil does. So, I will often take the foil, compact it, and stuff it into the soda/beer cans to bump up the weight on that category without cheating the scrap yard by diluting the feedstock with dirt like so many morons do. It takes time and effort, though, so not practical on a large scale.
Aluminum foil can also be easily compacted into heavier, more valuable chunks by hand with a hammer, but it takes a lot of time, makes noise, and is messy.
@@dionh70 thanks for the reply. i was wondering if it could be heated up to carbonize food scraps remaining, even if it isnt melting the metal itself. could it be done over a simple wood fire in an appropriately heat resistant crucible or pan? could be some experiments out there to make the clean up as cheap as possible. perhaps if it could be melted in a way that helps remove contaminants like an electric furnace and crucibles, then pouring ingest in small batches, or by the pound? i just feel like it needs to be done somehow, but would like to do so as cheaply as possible. i don't mind noise and mess, i have a workshop for that haha...
@@EddieSchirmer I went to a local fire safety company and bought a couple of old fire extinguishers that failed pressure testing, cut the tops off with my angle grinder, set one in my little firepit in the yard, and fed scrap foil into them as the fire burned. I was burning scrap pallets that I pick up for free from nearby industrial buildings, because they set them out on the curb if they're too bashed up to re-use.
The foil melted down fairly easily, because steel melts a couple hundred degrees higher than aluminum. I did have one extinguisher bottle fail, with a hot spot developing to melt a hole in the side of the bottle, allowing the molten aluminum to pour into the coals, but that was easy enough to recover the next day when everything was cool. They charged me $5/ea for the old extinguisher bottles after I reassured them I wasn't going to try to pressurize them again.
@@dionh70 Awesome, great ideas thanks!
@@EddieSchirmer I saw a vid a few days ago where the guy made a small melting furnace with a microwave and some kaowool wrapped around a crucible made of silicon carbide. he calls himself 'Shake the Future' on youtube. Crucible has to be made of SiC as that's a material that absorbs microwaves but has a higher melting point than the metal. Batch size is pretty small, the crucible looks like it's maybe 2 inches in diameter.
i wonder how much vintage electronics get shredded like that :(
Like the "DVD" player which looked more like a picture disc player.
Now when they had the shredder open I could get like anywhere from 600 to 1100 depending on the size and weight they would pay everything Ferris non-ferrous precious metals it didn't matter. There's a scrap yard real close to here but there was just knocking off like a dollar per pound on the copper and stuff I'm like you know that's a decent load I would rather get the full amount of money you're not coming out of like 60 bucks. And a couple of the guys were actually weigh in their stuff before they would take it in and they said that you know I think the scales off a little bit so we just collectively said to not go down there. Couple of the guys that called him out on it you know he just said take it somewhere else 😂😂😂
I Think a Shredder would be more energy efficient.
Industrial scale "Will it Blend?"
Pretty cool. Sadly you are missing out on the gold content of the PC boards. Many of the the chips inside have gold wire inside them as well as gold plating on the boards. I would remove all PCBs with components on them first. There are other methods that are used to recover that gold. That sorting process would be ideal for AI with robotic picking arms.
1:50 Th Thats What She Said. 😂
Wish i could afford one of these :(