Okay here's the deal... my friend and I (we're both in high school, and really smart guys too) want to start doing something productive... so we thought of a bunch of stuff and scrap metal sounds good... so..

1. Can we get some advice on:
-where to find copper wiring
-[bad idea]
-laws and stuff
-how much scrapmetal sells for nowadays in the USA

And ANY other additional info. would be GREATLY appreciated

The price of copper right now is pretty low. Has to do with the dollar rally bs that also brought the price of other metals and oil down. Wait until it rebounds.

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http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...8-ebbf62807704

Don't die 'K?

if you two were really smart.. you guys would figure it out rather than trust other teenagers probably in high school..

Scrapmetal is worth about one third of what it was 3 months ago.

Its definatly not worth stealing it any more.

Even with what I have, its not even worth the travel/time to take it to the scrapmetalers.

Even they say that!

They say 'Just hold onto it for a while, the price will go up again'

sounds like a decent job man.. is this efficient though? i mean... how many hours does it take to get the car, do the job, get rid of the car?

Start a mobile phone recycling business. Some businesses may have bins to place old mobile phones in. Ask if you can take the mobile phones from the bins. Chances are you can.

If you are smart then you should be able to work out how to get precious metals out of phones. hint: aqua regia dissovles gold. Precipitate the gold out and you have gold dust. If you want to you can buy a crucible and make gold bullions. IIRC there are 150 grams of gold per tonne of mobile phones. Thats around $3000.

Not to mention there are other things you can recover from mobiles. If some of the phones still work you can sell them.

Old cars don't have catalytic converters anyway

that gold bit interests me... a ton of phones = $3000 bucks worth of gold... interesting if it is true... ill check it out

old computers have much more gold in them than mobile phones. Pre-2000 computers have about half a gram each, if you count all the chips, connector pins and whatnot.

The only problem that I see with the mobile phone deal is, do you know how many phones it would take to make a ton? You would have to compare that also to the work/reward ratio.

Everyone may find this hard to believe, but many of the used computer stores will purchase just about ANY laptop that you have.

I took an older Thinkpad in to one to ask about repair, and the guy offered to purchase it from me. He said that laptops are the rage right now. and that people will buy just about anything.

I did not want to sell it. Besides he probably wanted to give me 30 dolllars and sell it for 150.

It is a 500 MHz Pentium for comparison.

He said that he is hardly selling any desktops.

This is right. It would take a good 5,000-10,000 phones to make a ton, and then you'd have to pay for the chemicals, all the work you put into it, all the time it takes, etc. If you have that many phones, you could sell them for like $0.50 each, or sell them online in bulk, and make the same money much more easily.

Also, if you do the mobile phone thing, the lithium in the batteries can be sold(or even the complete battery to meth cooks) for a fair bit of money.

Do your research first. See which catalytic converters have the highest value and target them.

I wish my friends weren't so lame and would actually do some crazy awesome thing like steeling copper or aluminum.

Obama hyperinflation ftw. For serious though: wait until the wall street blood bath is over and the supply of desperation selling dries up. Also: the grounding rod is low risk, low fucking other people over, and high return per investment.

QFT. this summer i probably revenued $2000+ from the scrapyard. copper is way way way down at the moment. if you are going around stealing the shit, just hold on to it until it gets up a few dollars and it will be worth your time.

if you are going to steal from houses you may as well take the hot water heaters while you are at it. those are worth about $30-50 a piece depending on prices at the yard

trust me wait for copper to go back up, i once saw a guy at the yard with the bed of his truck filled up with the most expensive copper and he walked away with $9000 cash. that was about 5-6 months ago.

This is turning into bad ideas....

Follow the other topic here:
http://www.totse.com/community/showthread.php?t=2175355

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If you want to get metal from construction sites then ask for scraps. Chances are they will give it to you for free.

heh maybe there, in the US they take it to the scrap yards themselves.

should have robbed his bitch ass