Where Can I Sell My Car

GETTING WIRED

In the vehicle scrap game, it literally is down to the wire...

Britain's best loved scrap yard The Scrappers have revealed they strip around 50 tons of copper wire from scrap vehicles each year, roughly equalling 11,700 miles in length.

That's 117,000 miles since they first started ripping out the wiring almost ten years ago. 

That equals four and a half times round the world! 🚗 ♻︎ 🌍

On a daily basis the team will rip out around 45 miles of copper wiring, a distance that would get you pretty much from their Waterloo Street site in Bolton to Leeds. 

Although labour-intensive work, copper wiring can be extremely lucrative providing a meaty payout each week when sold on.

Pluggy cable copper wire

In fact, The Scrappers founder Terry Walker, reckons he lost around £1million by not realising the worth of wiring during his first 20 years in the scrap business trade.

Terry, who starred in BBC reality show The Scrappers, explains how some vehicles have hardly any wires, opposed to others jam-packed with copper. 

"In a small car like a Citroen Saxo when you're ripping out the wire you find very little. There's nothing in them, maybe a mile of wiring at most," said Terry.

"In a BMW... say an X5 series - you'd easily get five miles worth of wiring in it. 

"There are loads and loads of wires they just go on and on through the car, in the boot, under the dash board through the floor - miles of it. 

"That's the same for Saabs as well. Well-built cars have got plenty of wiring in them.

"And the newer cars that now have more electronics in them, they've got plenty of wiring too. That's why we have started to rip it out. We were wasting it for years, we just baled it.

"Then when I started to rip it out, you'd get on average about 35kilos of pluggy cable in each car. We do roughly about one ton a week now.”

Great big pile of scrap

One metric ton of copper is nothing to be laughed at, it weighs in at around £1,800 a ton. 

Although proving a healthy money spinner now, Terry admits he regrets not cottoning on sooner to the copper market. 

"When we first started off we were just ripping and gripping and doing 50 cars a day. 

"So we bought a bailer and started to rip the engines out, throwing them in the baler to bundle them up. 

"Then I realised that we are not getting any copper wiring out of them. 

"When I went weighing my engines in one day I saw loads of cages full of copper wire and thought 'I wonder where that's from, why are they storing it, and wondered  where I can find it. “Then I realised - it's behind the dash boards of the cars. So I learned how to get the copper, and we started going for the wiring.

"But to think, we'd been bailing for 20 years, and we only started doing the copper about 9 or 10 years ago. 

"When we first started coppering it was worth about £1000 a week.

"So we could have made around £50,000 a year over the past 20 years.

"There was probably £1million worth of wiring under our noses and we didn't know it!."

In vehicles, copper is used for electronics, the battery, wiring harness and to pass on signals through vehicle systems including the car radio and any computing systems. It’s also found in the starters and alternators. 

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*If you're thinking any of the following; 'where can I sell my car,' 'I want to sell my car,' 'I want to sell my car best price,' 'how much to scrap a car UK,' 'sell my van online,' 'sell my van for scrap' or 'what do when scrapping a car'.. The Scrappers can give you all the answers you need in seconds. Call us or go online. (01204) 388488.