[Saturday’s run: 3.2 miles; today’s run: 3.2 miles; Gym workout today.]
I was a bit miffed at our local scrap metal place today. I called to tell them that I wanted to bring in the helicopter body, to get the procedure for getting it priced and weighed. I had talked to them about it in the spring when I bought it and I understood there were things I needed to strip out and that the price would be somewhere in the $.30/lb area.
Today that same place said they wouldn’t give me more than $.07/lb as “irony” aluminum.
I’ve been through this “irony” aluminum thing before. When living in Colorado I purchased a old computer tape drive and tore it down. There was a large piece of thick aluminum as the structure behind the big spools. It was painted blue, probably a foot or 18 inches wide and I think it was 2-3 feet long. I remember it being like half an inch, or 5/8″ thick. A big chunk, all aluminum. And I drove down toward Denver and took it to a scrap yard and they pulled out the “irony aluminum” thing and paid me almost nothing for it. I was ignorant of their ways so I just slunk away with the pittance.
You could haul in the wing off a 747 and some of these guys would mark it down to 5 cents a pound and act like they are doing you a favor.
You have to realize that for scraps of screen doors they pay $.30/lb and for aluminum cans it may be double that per pound. The range of possible prices for scrap aluminum is from under $0.10 to over $1.00 per pound depending on how they want to categorize it.
So yeah, “irony aluminum” is true in both senses because they are talking ferrous iron but also the literary kind since they ain’t going to give you nothing… but, recycling, and all that.
Well anyway, so I called another scrap yard and told that guy what I had and my frustrations with the Columbus place and he said he would take it as mixed aluminum for $.25/lb which was nearly 4x the irony price.
It ended up weighing out at 400# so I got $100, the same amount I paid for it.
The guys at the scrap yard were having a good time looking it over. A fellow with a forklift picked it off the trailer and set it by the stack of screen doors and assorted bits.