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I've been holding off selling all my stripped copper wire, hoping copper would go back over $3. I'm starting to run out of space to store it and was thinking about heading to the local scrap yard to cash in.

I know no one has a crystal ball but what's your opinion? Am I a fool to sell now?

Cal a few yards some yards are needing copper bad to fill orders and they bump up price in order to get the copper.

You asked a question which is hard to definitively answer. However, you may have answered your own question when you said you are running out of space to store it. So you may have no choice but to sell.

Also, copper has gone down much less than silver and nickel have (from the highs of the last several years). One could argue that copper is therefore acting better than silver and nickel and may be bottoming out. On the other hand someone could argue that copper has more room to go down.

The future price of copper is way too hard to predict as there are many factors that can play into copper pricing:

1) Less demand from China since they've already built their ghost cities
2) New supply coming from a gigantic mine coming online soon (Resolution Copper mine near Superior, AZ)
3) Kennecott Copper mine (near Salt Lake City, UT)- when will production be back to normal from that mine which is huge (collapsed ~2 yrs. ago)...
4) Is there another Yasuo Hamanaka (aka Mr. Copper) out there trying to manipulate the price of copper up or down?
5) Is Indonesia still banning exports? They were banning nickel exports- I'm assuming they were also banning copper...

I'm sure there are many more factors that can affect the price of copper as well. The point is that predicting the price would be an incredibly difficult undertaking.

Anytime you're making a profit is a good time to sell copper.

The price will go up. But will it be one month or ten years from now? Historically, copper is still high.

Everytime I've decided to sell something to make space, I've been happy with the results. Everytime I've tried to play the market I've lost money and wasted space.

Sell the copper, then use the acquired money and space to get more copper.

Thanks for the feedback...heading to the scrap yard tomorrow

You would be surprised about the ghost cities. Supposedly apartments in China are built and sold like empty concrete bunker, you finish it later, they probably run conduit and leave it at that. They warehouse copper, back in the recession guys were using it as collateral for loans. I think copper is still historically high, I follow some miner newswebsites, figure it's one way to figure out metal. Copper I think is high enough countries are getting into sourcing their own, I mean .. look at China, just buy the mines and lands, they buy plenty of RE here, I believe, and they will give citizen ship to the rich, anything to bring money into this country. Kind of surprised how well copper is holding up, it just took a bump down not to long ago. But, I'm no expert.
I just got free wire today, at an estate sale no less, home wire, about 20 feet of regular housewire, another, probably 10 feet?, then some in ground wire which was heavy, maybe it's the plastic, need to check it out further, looked like the gauge is more, maybe 30 feet? I plan on bringing it in as soon as possible, is that worth stripping?, sounds like a big project for me, need to call around and see what the price difference is, I like mundane easy work.. Kinda had fun working in a valve factory once, so many interesting machines, they would work you up to a better machine but if you broke it all the time you were stupid.

I strip almost everything I can get my hands on...but then again I'm able to do this while on the clock at work...lol. $2.50 lb stripped, $0.85 lb not stripped.

Worried I'd cut my finger bad eventually, lazy scrapper. I thought we had a threat about how to easily strip copper. Got a free snowmobile today, craigslist, wanted to scrap but will get more if .. I think I'll be able to get it running.

I got the stripper tool that's at the bottom of this page, best $50 I ever spent!

http://tnttooling.com/store/

Cant sell stripped wire here unless you have a business license

adding to my copper stockpile... bought 6 bags of xmas lights to de-light

I went through the work of scrapping some christmas lights and got just about nothing for them, I avoid those things, of course the ones I found were all wrapped around some reindeer, plastic connected to metal. Got the sled running, 1980 Yamaha 440 fan pulled some dents out, washed it, shined it, and now it's up for sale, who is going to want it, but they race these, it's worth more parted. I just wanted to scrap it, always liked tearing stuff apart, would be interesting to know what it's worth that way.

When we first started out scrapping we were always pressed for room to stockpile scrap. I always liked to pile the copper up but clean wire takes up a lot of room. So I made a compactor for copper wire. I took a 3 foot long piece of 4x4 inch square tubing and made a removable plug for one end of it. It was just pinned in place and quickly removed. Then I had a piece of 1 1/2" solid barstock as a packer (ram). It was about 4 feet long. Simple enough. You would cram the burnt or stripped wire in the tube and pack it down and just keep adding untill you had a 8 inch long "brick" of wire in the tube. Pull the pin on the plate, grab a 2x4 and knock out the brick. Start stacking!

silversaddle1 wrote:When we first started out scrapping we were always pressed for room to stockpile scrap. I always liked to pile the copper up but clean wire takes up a lot of room. So I made a compactor for copper wire. I took a 3 foot long piece of 4x4 inch square tubing and made a removable plug for one end of it. It was just pinned in place and quickly removed. Then I had a piece of 1 1/2" solid barstock as a packer (ram). It was about 4 feet long. Simple enough. You would cram the burnt or stripped wire in the tube and pack it down and just keep adding untill you had a 8 inch long "brick" of wire in the tube. Pull the pin on the plate, grab a 2x4 and knock out the brick. Start stacking!

I'd love to see a photo or two of this.

Recyclersteve wrote:

silversaddle1 wrote:When we first started out scrapping we were always pressed for room to stockpile scrap. I always liked to pile the copper up but clean wire takes up a lot of room. So I made a compactor for copper wire. I took a 3 foot long piece of 4x4 inch square tubing and made a removable plug for one end of it. It was just pinned in place and quickly removed. Then I had a piece of 1 1/2" solid barstock as a packer (ram). It was about 4 feet long. Simple enough. You would cram the burnt or stripped wire in the tube and pack it down and just keep adding untill you had a 8 inch long "brick" of wire in the tube. Pull the pin on the plate, grab a 2x4 and knock out the brick. Start stacking!

I'd love to see a photo or two of this.

LOL!!! No, that was 25 years ago! I'm afraid the compactor, and copper bricks are all long gone.

I was thinking about consolidating my old copper into bars or ingots using a homemade forge and some muffin tins. You can make one from an old propane tank, refractory cement and an old fire extinguisher or sona-tube. There are lots of how to videos on you tube to make these pretty cheaply. They're also usable for melting aluminum. Bars and ingots as you know stack nicely! Of course you may reduce the size of copper (or aluminum) into bars or ingots, but then you have another problem of needing space to store the homemade forge.

hobo finds wrote:Cant sell stripped wire here unless you have a business license

You can sell it to me! Or Ebay.

silversaddle1 wrote:When we first started out scrapping we were always pressed for room to stockpile scrap. I always liked to pile the copper up but clean wire takes up a lot of room. So I made a compactor for copper wire. I took a 3 foot long piece of 4x4 inch square tubing and made a removable plug for one end of it. It was just pinned in place and quickly removed. Then I had a piece of 1 1/2" solid barstock as a packer (ram). It was about 4 feet long. Simple enough. You would cram the burnt or stripped wire in the tube and pack it down and just keep adding untill you had a 8 inch long "brick" of wire in the tube. Pull the pin on the plate, grab a 2x4 and knock out the brick. Start stacking!

Wow...this is a GREAT idea. I can't believe I never thought of that.

Shazbot57 wrote:I was thinking about consolidating my old copper into bars or ingots using a homemade forge and some muffin tins. You can make one from an old propane tank, refractory cement and an old fire extinguisher or sona-tube. There are lots of how to videos on you tube to make these pretty cheaply. They're also usable for melting aluminum. Bars and ingots as you know stack nicely! Of course you may reduce the size of copper (or aluminum) into bars or ingots, but then you have another problem of needing space to store the homemade forge.

One other problem you will have is selling the ingots. Most yards shy away from ingots as they don't know what you melted to make them. When you scrap is in wire or tube form, they know what it is, ingots, not so much. Any gain you make in conserving space will be lost in values when selling.

DaMangRon wrote:

hobo finds wrote:Cant sell stripped wire here unless you have a business license

You can sell it to me! Or Ebay.

Selling stripped wire on Ebay is a great idea. It often sells for more $ per pound than you can get at the scrap yard. Fill a large flat rate box, weigh it and snap a picture.

Just checked Ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/50-lbs-Scrap-co ... 3aa9b74e42

Fifty pounds for $170, less Ebay and pay fees $23.80?, less cost of shipping large flat rate box $15.80 nets $130.40. About $2.60 a pound, which is about what my scrap yard is paying now.

last week I turned in some xmas lights. at all of .23 a pound