For the cable armor, a magnet will separate the steel stuff. Most of the stuff I've seen is that the BX cable armor is aluminum, and the flex cable protection armor is steel. The very little amount of stainless cable protection I have seen can be separated from the steel and aluminum by a magnet and a grinder. Magnetic = steel Non-magnetic = aluminum or stainless. Touch any of the non-magnetic stuff with a grinder. The aluminum will not spark at all and be kind of gummy on the grinder. Stainless will be much harder and give off small short sparks.
If you have a lot of the BX cable where insulated wire is inside the armor, you might want to do a little recovery test to see what your best approach to scrapping it would be. You might be better off separating the aluminum from the copper wire and stripping the wire to bare copper. Depends on you and how you value your time.
Removing the wire from BX can be entertaining. I cut most of my wire into 18" lengths with a bandsaw or zipcut. With that kind of length you can "unscrew" the spiralled armor so it enlarges just a little and lets the wire slip out. You can't cut the wire with a sidecutter because it will crush the ends of the armor and the unscrewing of the armor won't work as well.
Hope this helps!
Jon.







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