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Any way to remove coating off copper wire?
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Why 😕 at the copper thieves? For them it's real easy money. Copper prices have gone through the roof the past few years. Couple that with it being extremely easy to remove piping and electrical wire from new construction homes. The result is they're making a lot of money for very little work. Junk yards don't care where it comes from.
A lot of money.
In retail prices, you're talking in the thousands of dollars for piping and electrical wire. The retail cost of just the service entrance wire will run you $200+ for a 30ft run.
And they do go for other metals as well, it's just that copper theft is the most prevalent. I think it's about $3/lb of copper. Figure the scrap yards pay them 70% of that price.
On the copper theiving part, yeah they have that problem around here too. I know alot of substations had grounding wire stolen (which isn't just illegal, its dangerous for both the thieves and maintenence people). There is a grid of thick copper all buried in the substations to provide a cood contact to earth ground, and I'm sure in a big substation thats a million bucks in copper probably.
ShotgunSteven
Lifer
They're also using cordless power tools to steal catalytic converters from cars at park and ride lots, as well as other places. A guy on another forum I post at had his cut out from under his truck while he was in a mall for forty-five minutes. He tracked it down to the junkyard where the guy sold it off. Proprietor at the yard said someone had just sold forty to him, but the cops won't even bother with the case even though the guy found his among the forty, it being the only Toyota one.
Definitely NOT new technology. Bare copper wire coated with a varnish or enamel has been around for a very long time. As another said, sometimes known as magnet wire, because it is used mainly in multi-turn windings in magnets, coils and motors. Because the coating is thin it adds little to the wire diameter, so you can make high-density windings with it. And in a winding the voltage drop from one strand to an adjacent strand is very small (a small fraction of the voltage across the entire length of wire in the whole winding), so the insulation does not need to be able to stand up to high voltages.
To OP: if you're simply wanting to use it as bare copper wire, go ahead. As others said the coating will scrape off or burn off easily for many applications, and its presence will not impede many normal uses. Its main limit is that it is not well insulated against larger voltages, but then bare copper is completely UN-insulated, so there you go!
Modelworks
Lifer
Acetone will do the job nicely .
sdifox
No Lifer
http://www.boingboing.net/2008...on-railway-bridge.html
I figure that bridge is on a ship on its way to China. May already be there.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/as...China-bound-copper.htm
I figure that bridge is on a ship on its way to China. May already be there.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/as...China-bound-copper.htm
DrPizza
Administrator Elite Member Goat Whisperer
Law in NYS: you have to have photo ID now at the scrap yards when you sell your scrap metal. When I go to the county landfill, I practically drool when looking at the scrap metal bin. People are idiots for throwing away a lot of the stuff that they do. I separate all my scrap metal from my garbage and take it to a recycler instead. Last trip, I got about $70 for what was otherwise my garbage.
This weekend, one of the local cities is having a sale of old office furniture, etc. The people who run those sales are morons. I'm hoping I can beat the other scrappers to the sale, fill my grand caravan with crappy looking items that are worth much more for scrap than the morons sell them for, drive from the sale to the scrap yard, and net a few hundred dollars for 30 minutes of my time.
imported_Jdo
Member
Ok, I tried burning it but didn't work. I've got a little piece of copper that I can make do with and I'm just going to return this spool.
BoomerD
No Lifer
Aluminum cans here are $2.10/lb. Of course, that includes the 2-1/2 cents per can redemption value, but still...that's pretty good money for cans. The homeless have their "established routes and areas", and there are often fights over those areas. At school, we had a couple of them come right into classrooms to dig in the trash looking for cans...Campus security escorted them off camups.
That's pretty bold I must say! :Q
ShotgunSteven
Lifer
Been a couple of more reported thefts in the local paper. Someone stole a big spool of copper wire from TESCO a month or two ago, and in today's paper someone stole a spool with three thousand feet of copper wire on it from a house somewhere out here in my area.
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