Heavy scrap & shearing

Heavy scrap is thick steel — the stuff with real section to it. It is a better grade than light iron because there is more steel per cubic foot and less of everything else, but it is harder to move, and that is the whole character of the job.

What we mean by heavy

• Plate, RSJs, beams, columns, channel and angle
• Rail — track, chairs, fishplates, sleeper hardware
• Axles, hubs, half-shafts, gearbox and engine casings
• Agricultural machinery, implements, ploughs, harrow frames
• Industrial plant, presses, press tools, machine beds, large gearboxes
• Boiler shells, pressure vessels, heavy tank and pipework

Shearing, and why it matters to you

Shearing is cutting heavy steel down with a hydraulic shear — effectively a very large guillotine — rather than with a torch or a saw. It is how thick material gets reduced to a size that can be handled, loaded and melted.

The reason it appears on a page aimed at customers rather than in a yard manual is that it decides how your job runs. A beam that has to be sheared is not something anyone is dragging onto a tipper by hand. Depending on what it is and where it is, that means cutting it down on site before it moves, or bringing lifting gear, or both.

So the useful thing you can tell us up front is not the weight. It is:

• Roughly how big the biggest single piece is
• Whether a vehicle can get to it, or whether it has to be dragged first
• What the ground is — concrete, hardstanding, or a field in February
• Whether anything is still bolted or built into something else

A photo with something in it for scale answers most of that in one go.

Rail, and where things came from

We ask where rail and heavy track material came from. Not as an accusation — there is a lot of it in private hands perfectly legitimately, on farms, in old sidings, on industrial sites, and as garden edging where somebody in 1974 had an idea.

We ask because the yards that do not ask are the ones that end up in the local paper, and because a dealer who is casual about provenance on rail is being casual about it on everything else too. It takes ten seconds and it protects both of us.

Getting a price

Heavy scrap is priced on weight and grade like everything else, but access changes the job more than it does anywhere else on this site. Send photos — the pile, and the way in to it — and we will tell you what it is worth and how we would go about getting it out.