As a customer looking to exchange your junk car for some cash, it is understandable if you do not care whether the salvage yard you are dealing with has a number of equipment or not.
After all, your involvement ends when you hand over ownership of your vehicle and you get your cash in return.
However, it is important to only transact with junk car dealers that have the right equipment and tools. Here are five tips to help you pick the right junkyard [5].
For a start, if a salvage yard does not have some basic tools, what does that say about them and how professional that are at what they do? A salvage yard that doesn’t have the required equipment cannot be trusted to have all the permits needed to operate. For example, good salvage yards provide free towing for their customers, can you really trust a junkyard without the most common equipment to do the same?
Also, opening up a temporary salvage yard with only few equipment is major red flag that a business may only exist for the short term before packing up shop; do not be surprised if you are ripped off by such a venture. Unavailability of some major equipment may also mean that such a salvage yard will not be able to meet your scrapping needs, meaning they will neither appreciate nor give you good value for your junk vehicles.
If at some point in the past, you needed to take scrap metal or any other material apart, you must know how many different tools are needed. For a scrap yard, even more equipment are needed to get the job done. Here is a list of equipment that must be found at every salvage yard that means business;
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A Standard Toolbox
Perhaps the most basic, but still very important. Handheld tools are needed to take things apart, and every salvage yard needs a fully-stocked toolbox. Apart from the tools that can fit in a box, there are some other basic tools that must be found at every scrap yard. Hammers to knock things out or beat them flat, crowbars to pry things apart, power drills to go through screws quickly, wrenches, and so on.
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Sawzall
In a salvage yard, it is sometimes important to cut through a piece (or some pieces of metal) to get another, more valuable piece of metal. A sawzall is a machine-powered saw that makes this possible.
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Wire Stripper
All salvage yards, whether small or medium-sized need wire strippers in their daily operations. You see, most insulated cables have copper wires inside them, and copper wire is one of the highest priced items at every salvage yard. As a result, a wire stripper is needed to go through large bales of insulated cables and strip it till the important copper wire is gotten. Wire strippers come in different shapes and sizes, and the best of them allow for variety as regards wire sizes. In some salvage yards, instead of a wire stripper, they have grinders.
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Fork Truck
If you have ever been to a salvage yard, you will have seen one or more (depending on how big the junkyard is) fork trucks moving round. A fork truck looks like a truck with only the driver compartment present, equipped with a large contraption that looks like two giant forks in front of it. The forks are used to pick up materials and move containers around at junkyards.
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Balers
Balers are machines used to load and package materials at salvage yards. They crush the scrap metal, cut it to size, and mould it into a bale. Balers are versatile and they can deal with small aluminium cans as efficiently as they do larger pieces of scrap metals (including vehicles). No matter how large the scrap metal is, the best balers on the market will compress it to compact sizes, making it easier to move around.
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Handlers
Material handlers are quite large, and in most cases, can be found in the back of large salvage yards. These handlers have lots of attachments, and they all serve the purpose of moving around and sorting materials. There are magnetic attachments (magnets are very high up on the list of the most important tools at any salvage yard) that are used to pick out ferrous materials from a large pile and transferred to a pile with only ferrous materials. Handlers also have shears that are used split large metals apart, making them smaller and easier to process.
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Roll-Off Trailers
These containers are used at salvage yards to move materials from one place or the other. Often shaped like the back end of a container truck, roll off trailers have wheels attached to them to ease movement from one end of the yard to another, quickly and efficiently.
