Complete and Utterly Clueless NEWBEE

Hello, my name is Tina May. I am from a small town in Alabama. I am very new to scrapping. The past year has been hard (of course it has for everyone), lost our home, daughter going off to college, and things in general. But hey, that's life. No biggie. So the other day I decided to try scrapping for the first time to earn some extra money. Boy was I ever wrong. I gathered up a bunch of wires. Some was bare copper, some was old appliance wires, a entire rolls of 500 ft AWG 10 gauge green copper wire. I think it was THHN (whatever that means), and a small amount of various scrap. I walked away with $14.67. How do you actually make money?

Honestly it takes years to build a client base and start making some actual money........Sure you will probably get lucky and have a few nice pickups when starting out but the key to scrap is you have to do the same thing over and over and over again!

I agree totaly with mikeinreco. it takes time to bulid up your scrap contacts. It took me about 8yrs of doing this to get to the point im at now. But the contacts you want to make your not going to find doing street scrap. yeah sure someone will take your number and call you for a appliance, or a bike, or lawn mower for example but thats not really making any real money. You have to go to where the scrap is generated on a daily basis and hopefully one day you can become their scrapper. usually company's take their own scrap in or already have someone they work with but over time you can get your foot in the door. start small and work your way up the latter. no one starts out scrapping and makes descent money. Its hard work that many dont want to do. mabey we are all just crazy LOL Just have fun and be happy to get something for junk.

But as Olddude once said..... "If someone says scrapping is easy, they aint doing it right."

Thanks so much for the advice. I really appreciate it. I have been reading all the forums and it has helped out a lot with helping me determine what kind of metal things are and how it should be separated.