The weight wasn't what the guys or I thought it would be. Once we figured out that the lines reduced as they went down the halls, we knew the 10K pounds wasn't going to happen but we still thought (Ok, I was hopeful) that it would be around 7K. Nope, just over 5K of #1 and #2 combined. We didn't turn in the brass yet, so there's still that but it's not going to be crazy money. Total was $10,396.00. I'm not complaining by any means, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit I was disappointed in the overall weight. But hey, I had a good time and we all made great money vs the hours we put in on it.
I'm glad I found this site though and would like to thank everyone for their advise/opinions. I've learned a lot reading through everything on this board. I'm going to change the way I do things starting next week. We keep all of our scrap copper at the shop and bring back every unit we change out and scrap those too. But, we throw away literally thousands of pounds of sellable scrap a year. I don't have the time to spend taking apart contactors, motors, transformers etc. Stainless...I don't have the room to store a bunch of stainless, so I usually just tell our customers to throw it away (we cater to restaurants mainly) There's just not enough time in a day to run the shop and try to scrap all of that too. But after reading this forum, we are no longer going to be throwing those types of items away. I have a guy that comes by and picks up our compressors pretty regularly and I'm sure he'd be glad to take that kind of stuff off of our hands. Seems now like such a waste to trash those items when someone could benefit from it. The only motor I've ever taken apart and scrapped for the copper was a 300 hp motor. It sucked. It was worth it, but I hated every second of it.
I'd gladly do this job again, but I'd go at it a little differently. I'd do it with 2 guys and the 2 kids again. We could have cleared that building in the same amount of days if we'd have worked longer hours and had the boys stripping the pipe. The other two guys I had help us were green to say the least. Neither had ever used a sawzall and had no understanding of where to make cuts, etc. I spent too much time trying to "teach". Not a big deal. Those guys worked their butts off and both needed the money badly, so I feel right about the way I did it this time.
I'll continue to check these boards on a daily basis and try to offer up any advise that I can (probably only on HVAC/Refrigeration stuff). Thanks again to everyone.
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