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

For the guys far more advanced in this industry than me (larger). I wanted to create a fallback while expanding at the same time. E waste is my primary business. So let me explain a few things I am considering.

Wire granulator: Why? Well in my entire county the best yard is only doing 80 cents on power supply wire which I know is coming out at a 60-65% copper by weight. Solid Core Romex is also doing 80 or at best 85 cents a lb. And the yards offering this price are going gangbusters right now from my personal observation. I'm asked by many of my smaller customers if I buy wire as well as e scrap and computers. Top this off with a daily 70-100lb of wire output in my escrap business. I'm interested in a small granulator for something at or around 100-125lbs an hour. I feel I'd be better positioned overall to take out a loan for a machine and spend what I have on hand advertising locally to buy enough wire to run the machine. Expected costs starting at 20 grand, I would be buying new and making sure the company who sells it comes out to help me set it up and shows me the ins and outs of running and daily maintenance.

X-Ray Gun: This sort of costs just as much as a granulator...and it explains itself what it does. Being able to positively identify alloys for purchasing on site would save me a massive amount of time spent sampling and confirming a load before I turn around to buy it. Expected costs from 12-25 grand.

Property: I need to move up to a dedicated facility probably in the next year or so. My intake stream can fill every space I have in a week. The plan would be pretty simple, buy a warehouse property with 3 phase 408 volt power. This would also force me to include material handling, such as a forklift. Also need to consider retail space, after all, it's better than a third of my business.


Overall I feel like the granulator has the most potential but also comes with the most risk. IF I size it right for the cost I believe this would lower my risk. I'd like hear what the older and or wiser has to say on the subject and if you need more information from me I can answer additional questions.

If you are doing the volume then it might be the right move for you

also look into prosper.com....alot easiest than a bank...individuals will loan you money based on a variety of factors....best part is it is small risk to them as they could give you say $10 each and not have alot of skin in your loan in case it went south....again there are LOT's of these investors so they can all fund it with small amounts and feel safe about it. just another option.

We had a seller of granulators and wire strippers on here a while back but cannot find their link right now.

I spent half an hour looking for the same thing. If you find it let me know I want to contact the guy.

This is my thoughts on a loan for the equipment, most traditional banks will want a form of collateral, mainly property you own or have equity in. There are other nontraditional company's that do loans for machinery exclusively at a higher interest rate than you would get at a bank. Business loans and lines of credit through banks are not an easy thing to acquire. My $0.02

Well Army I would advise you to dig a little deeper as far as the wire granulator goes, I know a few guys that have bought these machines and it was supposed to be the next new get rich thing, it hasn't worked out so well for them, there main problem was and still is they are always searching for wire, one other thing they all agree that all they strip is number one wire only,they lower grades just don't work out to be profitable, is there consensus. there are also a lot of these machines for sale all around the country with low hours the dealers will finance you with decent credit. Another hurdle to over come right now is the price of copper keeps slipping and realy shows no sign in the near furture of rebounding. As far as the X- Ray gun I bought one in 2001 when I was a yard owner, payed 22,000.00 for it then it is still working my ex partner lets me use it on samples of lots I am trying to buy or bid on, any dealer will let you shoot a sample of something to see realy what you have if they are doing business with you. They are nice to have but for the amount of times you will need it if not having a high volume yard I think it would be a very high priced dust collector. And the investment required in my opinion would be better spent on something else. I don't want to discourage you in any way, good luck to you you asked for advise and that's what I am giving you. P.S. the guys that have the granulators are well seasoned in the scrap business and all have deep pockets for purchases, money is not there problem getting enough material on a steady basis is.

FORKLIFT! My pal Raymond is invaluable in the warehouse. Picks up a Gaylord with 1,200 lbs easy peasy lemon squeezy. Mine is an electric walk behind model. It lifts about 15 feet high and about 2,000 lbs. bought it slightly used. You need a constant source of wire to keep feeding a granulator, but I certainly hope you can make a go of it.

I buy alloy scrap and am forever trying to beat the traditional yard prices buying alloys in larger quantites. I specialize in nickel alloys and things of that nature. Ive considered not being able to acquire enough material for a granulator but I hit solid core commo cable and govliquidation lots often enough that if I ever felt SHORT on material id be a few auctions away from monthly quota.

The forklift would have to come woth a buulding that is certain. The xray gun...well that falls into my future expansions so I can in theory hold off on that as long as possible.

Just for giggles I turned in 4900lbs commo wire and 7340lbs power supply wire last month from my own operations. Granted thats 2000 machines plus what im pulling from raceways and thw multitude of workstations and server removals last month. Ive already got one full gaylord of psu wire again so i dunno...something needs to be done even if im building it myself.

The two things I have been told by a couple guys chopping wire was what the others have said a constant search for insulated to feed it. And the other is the narrow margin on the chopped copper.

Is there another item that there is a good supply of that a granular would work on? Mike

Well I could by a plastic grinder so Id be able to manage my abs plastic output...cheaper and probably a better logical next step...if were just slinging ideas around.

army - MOST plastic companies actually prefer BALED plastics, not regrind from my research...in fact you might not get as good of a price....and a baler is FAR cheaper anyways. Plus you can bale a number of things with the correct baler....plastics, paper, cardboard, old clothing to name a few. AND you are looking at way less than $10-15K for one of those...even a pretty large one capable of 700-1000lb bales. Just throwing that out there.

When I worked for a plastic place we would custom make parts and pieces for all sorts of companies. Custom van company, boat co. just to name a few. My job was to run the grinder (not really a grinder), where we had a conveyer that would feed into the input of the grinder so you had to feed it at a certain speed. It was blown up and across to the other side where we had gaylords lined up. When one got filled we'd transfer the overhead hose to the next gaylord while covering up the other one with a lid. They were weighed and usually ran between 800 -1000 lb. That stuff was granulated in a hammermill affair and reused to make the new plastic. What I was feeding was messed up parts, or the outer edges of the parts where they would router out the parts they needed. They were using the ground stuff inhouse.

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.

Sounds like your are trying to run before you walk.
My advice? Slow down a bit, learn the market some more and slowly get into it.

I would man, but at this point I'm growing too fast to keep up with my current methods. Every time I turn around I have to haul off something that I don't have time for. My shred trailer needs to be house sized to keep me from it every day or two. What I'm talking about is something to plan and implement starting this winter and have in operation by april or may. So while it appears I'm moving fast, I have aggressive strategies in place too, thus far, gangbusters.

I know the feeling.......Shred is in the way has to be dumped before more material can be picked up........Shred can become a nuisance but what are we going to do give it away??

Well I'm not trying to make it appear anything other than what it is... a trailer full of shred is barely worth the two hours and 35 miles to the yard to get rid of it. Especially since steel seems to be taking an unending dive.

I have 7 gaylords on tin to go the yard. It is just a byproduct of our primary operation. I used to give it to a fellow scrapper, but that was just as much bother as taking it in myself. I am thinking about a dump trailer for the tin, and a replacement for the box truck I sold last year for picking up surplus electronics from my customers. I say take the tin in, be happy: you can at least use the proceeds to fill your gas tank on the way back from the yard... If you are doing it right, you will also have some aluminum, brass, copper, circuit boards, wire or something else good for your trouble.

army - Your thoughts seem to have some research behind them and I dont think you are moving too fast. If you arent looking toward the future it would be pretty hard to grow.

One of the best pieces of advice I got, and has been easy to do, is "Stay in the Black"
My question! If you are hauling in 12,000 pounds of wire in a month arent you making enough to start banking money while you make this decision? Bank the 15k and by the time you have that im sure you will have a clear mind on what you want to purchase. Especially if your an auction guy... you may stumble upon a great buy while saving that 15k!

ALSO! Im with Spin. FORKLIFT!!! Absolutely my next purchase. Two of my pickup locations have forklifts on site and dont mind me hopping on and using them when picking up (I used to work there). Every single time im using that thing I think about how much I need one. Efficiency and Safe lifting

No way I could load things like this without the lift =P
http://i1152.photobucket.com/albums/...psff5ebe1f.jpg

OhShz
http://www.govliquidation.com/auctio...&convertTo=USD
Maybe I will have one soon!