This is Jason Gaber with MT. Baker Mining and Metals
I've run quite a bit of scrap metal through our hammer mills in the last week, and put some videos on youtube.
And that's all well and good, its fun to watch them and see all the stuff come out the bottom.
The real question is can you make money doing it, is it worth doing it.
So were going to take this unit, this is a 16" x12"
hammer mill, you can see down there
inside there is the hammers
The bar grate spacing on this is 2 inches
As soon as something gets hammered to 2 inches it falls out the bottom.
and into the box and what I'm going to do
as a trial run here is go get some dirty brass, contaminated brass
run it in this machine, right into the box and hand sort it.
into its separate components
and take it in as clean brass, clean copper, clean stainless
and whatever else we hand sort out
to see if you can actually make money by cleaning brass up
Just as an example, here are some old kitchen faucets
some old plumbing fixtures
lots of plumbing, valves
this is an old regulator off a welder or an oxy acetylene torch
there is an old light for a porch
Here is the discharge from the hammer mill
and I'm just going to hand sort this
There is a piece of clean copper.
There is two pieces of clean yellow brass
there is a piece of clean red brass
There is some more clean copper
Here is a bucket of clean yellow brass and its everything from
little tiny fittings on valves to
old, this is probably an old kitchen faucet.
it's that chrome platted brass.
here is some more of it, this whole bucket is clean brass, yellow brass.
This is clean red brass
Red brass you usually find in your larger valves
it's worth just a little bit more than yellow brass
This is pot metal
a little bit of stainless steel
Here is all your steel and your garbage, plastic
This is all clean copper.
We have finished running our brass.
and there was quite a bit of fines, this is all the stuff
that we didn't hand sort, it's all the fine stuff we just put it all in a bucket.
and I'm going to play around and try to figure out how to get all hte brass out of here
still some brass
copper wire
A bunch of plastic and garbage and stuff.
There is still some value in here but we just got tired of hand sorting it
there is about 20lbs left here
so there will be 20lbs missing
from the total of 160lbs that a I bought when I take it back
another thing I will mention here real quick
We ran all 160lbs through the hammer mill and there were
30lbs that I had to re-run
through the hammer mill again and it went fairly fast because it had already gone through once
but it did not knock all the steel contamination off the first time
and after the 30lbs there was about 6lbs of brass I had to hand clean
with a screw driver and a hammer and stuff
It was a little time consuming at the end but it gives you an idea of what we did.
I screened it, this is the screen I used
This is the stuff that was larger than half inch
here is another cut over here, this is between 1/2" and a 1/8"
You can see some brass and some copper wire all mixed up with little pieces of plastic
That's what an 1/8" screen looks like and here is the
the fine material that went through an 1/8" screen
lots of little brass shavings and things
and there is about 20lbs of material here
here you can see of three of them here
and I am not sure the best way to clean this and I'm hoping
I'm going to keep this and not turn it in
but I'm hoping all my value is left here is this 20lbs of stuff
here are our results of the dirty brass and hammer mill hand sorting
I will walk you through a couple of sheets and let you know how it went
These are the scrap prices, its November, 2014
Right now my scrap yard will take dirty brass at 55 cents a lbs
I had a 160lbs of dirty brass and if I took it in it would be worth 88 dollars.
here are the results of the hammer mill test and this is all hand sorted
I ended up with 58lbs of clean yellow brass
They paid me a $1.70 a pound so that was worth $98.60
38 lbs of red brass at 2 dollars
8lbs of number 2 copper at $2.35
11lbs of stainless
8lbs of what they call pot metal
17lbs of steel
I ended up with a 140lbs of material
I have the 20lbs of fine material that I kept
So that's why I didn't bring back 160lbs
The total value being a $199.45
So if I had taken it in as dirty brass it would have been 88 dollars
I took 140lbs of clean brass and got $199.45
I made $111.45 by running it through the hammer mill and cleaning it by hand
and like I said I had a 160lbs of dirty brass and it took me about 4.5 hours of work
and that number is actually probably a lot higher than what it would take on a production basis
I didn't have the right tools and kept having to go get a hammer or screw driver or whatever to clean the last litttle bit of brass.
and when I was sorting it i'm not very good at telling the difference between yellow brass and pot metal and red brass
So there was apretty steap learning curve for me having to sort all this stuff by hand
Thats a pretty high number but even at that
it's still about $25 an hour or so
the value was increased so if you cut that number in half
if you got real good and you know the difference between pot metal and brass
and become pretty fast at it, your looking at $40 or $50 an hour
Looking at it another way, I made $111.45 out of 160lbs of material
I increased the value by 69 cents a pound
If you take 69 cents a pound and multiply it by 2,000lbs
I increased the vale by $1,393 a ton
If I would have taken in a ton of dirty brass I would have been paid .55 cents a pound
or $1100 a ton
and if I ran that same ton through a hammer mill it would be worth $2493 a ton
When I cleaned it.
and I will also say that
when I went and got the dirty brass
I didn't cherry pick it, I didn't pick all the valuable stuff
I really tried to be as neutral about it as I could
I picked a lot of dirty
kitchen faucets and plumbing stuff
I took a lot of valves
from water lines and gas lines
Things that I knew were fairly common in the industry
and if you went and tried to get dirty brass you would run across a lot of the stuff
that I ran threw
hopefully this was a help to some of you guys
and it always helps me to put some numbers to some of the ideas I have and make sure they work
So looking at these numbers I think they are pretty promising
and I'm going to do a couple more videos like this with different
metals over the next couple weeks or months so stay tuned
and don't forget to like, subscribe and comment.
and if you guys are interested in any of our hammer mills
or other recycling equipment please give us a call or any email
All of which is in the description, so thanks for watching