I want to expand, approaching a bank for a loan.

Hi, Army,

I've looked into granulators as well...my take on it is to question just how well they actually separate the copper from the insulation. It seems to me that the process will be very sensitive to just how fine the wire is chopped up to how much copper remains attached or stuck to insulation.

Imagine a chunk of #8 wire--it is mostly copper because it is so large compared to the insulation that may be on it. So the copper should fall out of a chopped piece of #8 pretty readily. Now compare that to a chopped piece of #23 solid copper wire--one of the wires in a common piece of 8 conductor LAN cable. That piece of copper is about 0.025" in diameter and small compared to the insulation it is surrounded by. That piece of copper may not be as readily separated from its insulation.

Apparently the shredders in granulating systems are pretty important. Some setups use two or three shredders in a row to get the stuff down to the sizes they need.

Bottom line: try before you buy. Send a seller a gaylord of your common wire you deal with and witness them processing it. Take the separated copper and insulation away and investigate just how well they did yourself. Have them write a separation guarantee into the sales contract. Find out how finicky the machines are to keep in adjustment. Know how much copper you are willing to throw out with the waste insulation.

I believe this is the real problem with granulators...they don't work (read separate the copper) very well, NOT that the feedstock for them is hard to find...

As an alternative to the granulation route, you could consider just using the process of how insulated wire is sold in bulk today without being granulated: It is separated into grades, as you are well aware of, baled, and sold as a certain recovery %. Usually by the truckload or shipping container load. Your challenge then becomes finding a baler and locating the big end user customers, bypassing all the middlemen. Ive seen wire baled with a 500 ton press, making a 3000 lb bale about 3'x3'x4' but there might be smaller presses making smaller bales that could be stacked together and banded.

That press could be put to good use baling other things like aluminum and light steel.

Lots of scrap stuff is sold without baling, in gaylords. The real reason stuff is baled is to make the shipping economical. You need to be able to get to weight limit in a truck van or sea can or take a hit on the shipping cost. An idea here is to ship wire in gaylords, but chop it into short pieces so that a gaylord can hold a shztload of wire. I'm blue-skying it here, but I do know that stuff like scrap steel banding is just horrible to deal with--in quantity its hard to handle, bulky, dangerous to work with, etc. But it becomes a puppy once it is run thru a banding chopper that cuts it into 2" lengths and fills barrels with it. The barrels are 500 lbs, easy to handle and truck, etc. Betcha chopped wire would work similiarly. And those banding choppers are pretty cheap--couple of thousand bucks.

It all boils down to if the end user--your potential customer-- would (or could) accept wire chopped rather than baled.



So maybe your problem becomes finding those potential volume customers and talking to them about how they would or could accept your product.

Not a lot of definitive answers but some food for thought.

Jon.