I continue with my campaign of cleaning up the grounds around the farmstead. This main focus is on the scrap yard, a large area near the back of the lot where I've tossed random scrap materials and old shit for possible future use in projects where I might need something metal, whether its sheet metal, tubing, angle iron, etc. Only problem here is 80% of the shit that ends up here never gets used and just rusts away or gets overgrown, and in my case, the overgrowth is fucking blackberry briars. My plans have been to clear up the scrap pile and in vague terms, process the scrap into more usable stuff. I split things up based on type of scrap, whether its sheet metal, tubing/pipe, angle iron, and corrugated sheet metal (roofing). There are scrap items that either don't fit in any of these categories or need to be processed into one of these materials. One of the things that I had to address was the growing pile of copper wire that I've made as I cleared the scrap pile. I dug up a lot of old wiring from the scrap yard, some of it old car wiring, others just large sections of wiring that ended up here for future use. Over time the copper corrodes or tarnishes, making it hard or impossible to solder, even with the use of flux. Problem is the scrap yard we sell our scrap to won't take copper wire, its gotta be bare wire, or at least bare enough so the weight of the copper isn't diluted with insulation. The easiest way to accomplish this, which the guy at the yard even said, was to just burn up the wire to get the insulation off. I had to figure out how to do this and the way I came up with was to take a protective grate from a large shop fan I scrapped and set it over my half drum burn can that I use for heat when I'm working on a car in the yard. I got a fire going with some oil wood and other scrap wood I keep outside for this purpose. As the fire got going pretty good I piled a bunch of wire onto the grate then set the whole thing on top of the burning drum. As the wire burned, I moved it around and continued to add more wire to it, letting it burn until there was nothing left on the copper. I dumped off the burned wire and started over again, repeating the same process until there was no wire left. At that point I let everything cool down so I can stuff the processed copper into a couple of 5 gallon buckets, staging these by the F250 for loading up later when we get ready to do a scrap haul. With this I can continue to clean up the old scrap yard, moving materials to their respective spots in the new scrap staging area and outgoing piles. The next thing that I want to do is move the appliance skins over near the storage trailer so I can cut them down into sheets that can be stacked up neatly and have a much smaller footprint than what they have now. Also I have to continue cutting through the blackberry briars to help clean the grounds more to help in moving more metal out of the area. The end goal is to have the grounds completely cleared where we can go over the grounds with the lawn tractor whenever we need to. Clearing the scrap yard will make it easier to manage the grounds, no more shit growing up around all of the scattered scrap. The scrap that I keep will be neatly stacked in the area under the trees over where the kayak rack and the dog yard area is at where nothing grows due to lack of sunlight and the thick layer of pine mulch that is on the grounds. It'll also make it easier to find what scrap I may need for a project when everything is organized neatly.
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