What started you down the rabbit hole of scrapping?

I am not good at telling stories lol.. so I am 46 now.... my dad is 84... up until 20 or 25 years ago, he used to make his own lead fishing weights for salmon river fishing.... when I was around 16 years old, my older cousin who was working for the hydro provider as a lineman and splicer would bring my dad lead to melt... in the lead was some copper... this old fella my dad knows said the cooper is worth money and took it to the scrap yard... is was like 20 or 30 bucks worth... 1/3 of what its worth today... well my buddy and I used to go do dump runs and we would dig thru the construction waste looking for copper... would also dumpster dive.... fast forward to about 10 years ago and the previous owner of the scrap yard used to get my to tear down electrical cabinets and I would get half value on the scrap.... 7 years ago scrap yard sold. took me a year to get my foot in the door again with doing side stuff for them... then they stopped opening saturdays.. was hard to get my stuff in when i had a week day job...

fast forward to 3 or 4 years ago... I started selling to a friend of a friend who had a one man scrap business.... so after going to him for almost a year, I was at his place one day and he had to have had about 100 old aluminun cased lights from one of the highway tunels... i half jokingly said to him, I would strip all them down in return for half value... he replyied... I might have to take you up on that..... a week later I called him to see if he was picking up at my place that night and his reply was he was a hour away and had like 80 of those lights on his chevy top kick for me to take apart... now I mainly strip large diamater teck cable for him and upgrade the low grade tech to bx and get a hourly rate...

I still have my monday to friday job
still dumpster dive when I have time
and spend my evenings and half the weekend stripping wire



I need a holiday! lol