Scrounging opportunity

[Nick]

In the spring and fall the city of Marquette has a cleanup, where you pile your spring cleaning garbage on the curb and the city will pick it up. The fun part is, there'll be stuff on curbs for a couple weeks (different parts of the city have their pickup at different time) and if it's on the curb, it's fair game So I keep seeing trucks going by full of stuff. One man's trash is indeed another man's treasure.

I'm leaving the country for at least a year in September, so I haven't been scrounging as much as I would otherwise, but I picked up some bike chains (thought I'd give chain damascus ala Billy Merritt a try), and some other pieces of steel and plate.

[evfreek]

We have these in our neighborhood twice a year. I have found them to be a mediocre resource for smithing. A lot of junk washers, dryers and water heaters. The sheet metal on these things is hard to reuse into new shapes, since it releases shrapnel if you try to bend it. I thought of making an auto gas shutoff with a thermostat valve from a water heater, but the response time and pressure handling capacity looks unsuitable. There is a lot of chrome plated, painted and galvanized stock. I'd rather have clean stuff. Since the scroungers tear stuff up, people like to put things out at the last minute. That means that the night before, there are a lot of really junky trucks cruising for stuff. Once, I asked one of the fellows what he was grabbing, and he replied, aluminum to sell to the scrap dealer. These guys dig pretty hard and scatter trash and break glass.

My striking partner has a good idea. He makes psuedo-traditional gates, but incorporates junk bicycles welded into them. Oddly enough, these gates are a hit.

I have been hoping to score a big piece of steel or some new OEM leaf springs or something like that. I did get a disposable helium balloon tank, but ended up giving it to a student for a gas forge.

[johnny99]

In my neighborhood there are certain item's they wont actually pick up, but they will let you take them to the dropoff point. Which happens to be the city vehical maintenance yard. Row's and rows of bicycles, lawnmowers, truck axles, leafsprings,etc. that they used to let you take, last year they stopped though because someone hurt themselves climbing in a dumpster. Oh, well!!