[Noisebridge-discuss] Tearing apart a bus...

Trent Robbins robbintt at gmail.com
Wed Oct 19 21:01:50 UTC 2016


The USA has a pretty big market for 'refurbishable cores'.  If you can
identify which components can go to a refurbisher, you should be able to
get good money there.  My guess would be radiator, engine, engine headers,
air conditioner, any complex intake and exhaust components, alternator, and
maybe the electronics controllers.

I imagine it's already gutted though?

I don't know much more about salvage than that unfortunately.

Scrap yards are essentially the worst case scenario, as they have a
constant flow of totalled cards from insurance and don't need anyone else's
business, so they do take-it-or-leave-it.

If a car seems totalled but isn't you can just fix it up and sell it.

If a car is legally totalled, you need to get a salvage license for the
vehicle and then can refurbish it from there.


Trent

On Wed, Oct 19, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Sparr <sparr0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I will soon be disposing of a not-running-for-much-longer transit bus. Of
> course I'll be trying more profitable and less destructive avenues first,
> but I'd like some contingency plan if that all falls through.
>
> My next-to-last-resort idea is (myself or someone else) to tear it apart
> and scrap / trash / sell the results. At a rough guess, the bus contains 4
> tons of aluminum, 8 tons of steel, 1 ton of useful easily resellable
> components, and 3 tons of misc garbage. My vague plan is to rent three
> dumpsters, a van, and a small parking lot, then attack it with power tools
> (of increasing levels of destructiveness) and sort the scrap and garbage
> into the dumpsters and the resellable stuff into the van. Then the
> dumpsters would go back to their homes, full of scrap, for two of which I'd
> be paid and from which I'd pay the rental and hauling fees for the
> dumpsters and the disposal fee for the worthless stuff.
>
> Can anyone offer advice on specific approaches to this plan/idea? Are
> there better ways to go about turning something that big into as much money
> as possible? Are there specific places or services I should use for the
> sorted metal piles (storage, hauling, sale)? Any insights would be
> appreciated.
>
> For reference, a straight up vehicle salvage yard has offered me $150/ton
> for the whole bus, which comes out to about $2400. I am pretty sure I can
> get that much for just the windows, or just the scrap aluminum, or just the
> air conditioner, if I get it all down to manageable chunks.
>
> PS: if you'd be interested in the job of coordinating this operation,
> and/or performing the teardown, let me know.
>
> PPS: half the aluminum is going to be in the form of channel extrusion,
> like 8020 but a proprietary profile. that could probably go to some project
> instead of a scrap yard.
>
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