# 25,000 pounds of copper wire



## silversaddle1 (May 22, 2012)

Yep, just my luck. I have over 25,000 pounds of copper wire, all grades from cat 5 up to bare bright, just sitting in the barn, and copper prices are weak again. I hate to sit on the stuff, but I guess I'm gonna half to. 19 gaylords of wire takes up a lot of room.

Did you know you can cram 1800 pounds of cat 5 cable into 1 gaylord? :shock: :shock: :shock:


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## schomisch (May 22, 2012)

Haha Yeah luckly my buddy's family owns a scrap yard here and they locked in on there copper price through the end of the week. I have a feeling its going to be a longer wait then we think till it goes back up though. If I did my math correctly you can fit a max of 35,584 lbs of copper in a gaylord. lol Well good news is maybe you can save up 40 gaylords by then hehe 

~Chris!~


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## trashmaster (May 24, 2012)

Now that would be one big forklift;;;;to pick it up;;;;:::


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## johnny309 (May 24, 2012)

Give it a touch of your cat 5 wire with a magnet......for severals years is been made of iron(same colour on outside).....and still large conductors in car industry are aluminium plated with copper.....
Not intended to be rude......just to open your eyes....
Hope it helps...


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## silversaddle1 (May 25, 2012)

johnny309 said:


> Give it a touch of your cat 5 wire with a magnet......for severals years is been made of iron(same colour on outside).....and still large conductors in car industry are aluminium plated with copper.....
> Not intended to be rude......just to open your eyes....
> Hope it helps...




Well after 20 years of scrapping computers, servers, and data centers, I hardly think there is much that I need to open my eyes for, as far as wire goes. I have never ran across any magnetic cat 5 cable yet, and it would almost seem to be unheard of around here. When you have a data center doing millions of dollars worth of transactions a day, you don't go cheap on your networking. 

All this wire came from 1 data center we just finished removing. It was a older center, set up in 1999. Of course, there were lots of upgrades to the site over the years, but most of the original equipment was still in place when we powered the site down. Not only that, but all the cabling was still under the raised floor and throughout the building. So I'm thinking there is little chance of magnetic wire being in this lot.

But now you have me curious about the wire. I am going to the scrap yard today. I'll have to be sure to ask them if they have seen any of this cat 5 wire you speak of.

I have seen copper plated steel wire once before, but that was along a railroad years ago. We took down about a mile of old railroad comm lines and poles. Out of 14 wires, only one was solid copper.


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## johnny309 (May 25, 2012)

It is hard to find today cat5 wire or even RGU6 cable(for tv in Europe) made of copper.
In shops I find 10 meters (2 wires) of 10 mm2 (section....square milimeters) for 2 USD....it is aluminium plated with copper....
As for the cat 5 wire ,yes you are right,where tehnology demands the use of copper and money is not an issue,but for low budget(general public),cheap it is the key word.


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## gold4mike (May 25, 2012)

Shhhhhhhhh... Not too loud, I don't want my local scrap yard to hear this disucssion.


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## necromancer (May 25, 2012)

schomisch said:


> Haha Yeah luckly my buddy's family owns a scrap yard here and they locked in on there copper price through the end of the week. I have a feeling its going to be a longer wait then we think till it goes back up though. If I did my math correctly you can fit a max of 35,584 lbs of copper in a gaylord. lol Well good news is maybe you can save up 40 gaylords by then hehe
> 
> ~Chris!~





you might want to check the math again. 35,584 lbs on one gaylord ?
think of putting 24 gaylords on a 53" trailor (we will round down to 35,500 lbs)

35,500 lbs X 24 = 852,000 lbs. (almost 1,000,000 lbs)

1,000,000 pounds is 12.5 max-weight 18-wheelers (http://www.thetruckersreport.com/facts-about-trucks/)

i used to load gaylords of broken CRT leaded glass & i dont remember them weighing that much, 3,500 lbs maybe

did you maybe miss a decimal piont ??


here look at this.

1 of these weigh about 380,000 lbs

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Usaf.c5.galaxy.750pix.jpg


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## silversaddle1 (May 26, 2012)

necromancer said:


> schomisch said:
> 
> 
> > Haha Yeah luckly my buddy's family owns a scrap yard here and they locked in on there copper price through the end of the week. I have a feeling its going to be a longer wait then we think till it goes back up though. If I did my math correctly you can fit a max of 35,584 lbs of copper in a gaylord. lol Well good news is maybe you can save up 40 gaylords by then hehe
> ...



Copper weighs 542 pounds per cubic foot, so I guess if you just melted it all down it would all fit in 1 gaylord. Good luck moving it araound!


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## schomisch (May 29, 2012)

Necro I was referring 1 one solid chunk of copper lol Not that anyone would have a 4x4x4 foot chunk of copper. It was more of just a fun fact. Stating that around ~35,000lbs of copper would fill a gaylord solid of copper lol.

~Chris!~


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