Well I am well into the research stage. Here is what I have found recyclers/refinery's willing to pay for each cat broken down by value to weight ratio. One individual with generous prices told me he made a clean 30% off all converters, so the prices I have listed you might find PGMs worth 50%-100% more (or maybe more?) then others will pay you for them. Of course part of this is for chemicals, manpower, etc but its a little unjustly high if you ask me
Also note the majority of weight seems to be the casing, when removed your going to get a much lighter product - so dont get your hopes too high
The 'Exotic' biscuit type converter - I have no idea what this is, told they can be found on select Toyota's. Somebody share some information please
$9-17 lb
'Foreign' converters (Nissan/Infiniti, BMW, VW, etc). All places break it down into small/large, regardless the honeycomb contents seem similar and their prices break to be about equal pound for pound of material. These are common, and probably are the cats that should be targeted for a high yield and high availability
$6-9 lb
GM - easy enough to find. It is however hard to purchase these, I dont know why but somebody told some amateurs such as ourselves they were worth an awful lot, and thus have been being targeted from junkyards
$4-7 lb
Chrysler/Jeep - off any Chrysler/Jeep
$3-7 lb
Domestic - think Ford. Personally this surprises me, Fords vehicles are usually pretty low on regulated emissions - and the only thing that can explain that is a cat or an efficient engine
$3-4 lb
Import Pre Cats - Any European or Japanese pre-converters. The problem here is that the casing is usually VERY heavy in comparison for the yield of monolith. Remember prices are for the monolith material only, so this may seem a little high to you guys who look at value of the entire unit
$3-4 lb
Domestic Pre Cats - actually might cost more in cutting wheels for an angle grinder then you can make in profit, I dont know
$1-3 lb
Here are some other things to consider
Diesel Converters - most people think its a dumb idea, I agree! The prices reflects how useful these really are
$1 lb
Extraction plants low ball the hell out of you for precats, most at a ratio of 3 precats is worth 1 regular cat
There is something called 'metal core' looks like a hell of a problem to me. I would avoid them like the plague, it would be prohibitive just by the amount of leach you use to break it down and have so many base metals floating around...
After Market - worthless crap! Probably worth less then a 20 year old precat. I would only buy if it was 1/4 or 1/5 the price of a stock converter. Lets face it our time is worth something, and our materials are too. No sense in extracting something that contains almost nothing of value
Wire converters (also called 'spiral' converters). Depending on what the wire is made of it could be hell to take apart. Very similiar to a metal core converter, and apparently extraction plants agree and tend to pay 1/2 the price you would expect for it. We dont have massive machines to break apart and cook converters, so its probably less economical for one of us hobbyists
A four door luxury sedan or a V8 sports car is your friend. Anything with a strong engine (especially an older strong engine) will be needing some serious catalysts to pass emissions. Also it was 93 or 94 some emission regulations came into effect that forced the majority of company's to use larger amounts of catalyst (rather then scrap all the cars they worked to design for years)... so that means if you can find cars that are 94-97 your in business. Plenty of nations had plenty of laws, check into them and you can easily pinpoint the most profitable years of cars to pick at. (with little error, efficiency has been slow to improve in engines)
Some PGMs are lost over time, however the majority of all failures in a catalytic converter is cause by something called catalyst poisoning, and I would guess maybe 95% of the time is because there is a coating of LEAD on the honeycomb (all this talk about carbon build up on converters, I dont know. I can tell you I tore apart an awesome converter from an older engine and it had almost NO carbon build up at all). The whole idea of 'cooking' Cats is insane in almost all cases, so many toxins are released, just read up on what is found in Catalytic converters OTHER then PGM's. The process of cooking them can be replaced by a chemical leach, I called two plants in Korea and thats what they were required to do - and it saved them money. I asked about the leach but neither wanted to (or could understand the question) explain it to me. Anyways unless you want to smell rotten eggs and wonderful carcinogens that your mask wont protect you from (or your neighbors, pets, or the environment, and the EPA would love that) you need to look into a better system then 'cooking'
This took me all of three weeks and 30 some odd phone calls. Like I said, I wouldn't be surprised to see maybe a 50%-100% value increase in all of the listed things if you do it yourself (and I didn't calculate shipping charges, so add a buck or two to everything!) and manage similar efficiency's in extraction and refining. This is so disjointed and such, I really need sleep but figured I would post this and see how it goes - I have more theoretical experience then hands on experience so those of you in the business im sure can tear some of this apart, and please do so. If this is of any value I will repost it in a more reader friendly form, along with some of the 10 pages of notes I have from those phone calls (related to their processes, not prices)
