hey welcome to a scrap life a podcast solely focus on the hustlers grinders operators and business owners who live and breathe the scrap metal industry every day we are the original recyclers no suits required just guts and hard work here is your host brett eckhart all right everybody i’m sitting here with uh a guy that we did some business it’s been a few years ago but the company that sold us our first catalytic converter sheer nigel dove with the vortex d pollution you finally made it out to idaho we finally uh got to connect and man i’m happy to have you on the podcast yeah i’m happy to be here it’s been i’ve been following the podcast for quite a few years now it’s been a while since you started yeah man i uh you know sako got me into it he convinced me one time to do a podcast and from then on i’ve just been like you know sako has his way of doing stuff and and i like how he goes about his podcast and i have my way of doing it and um i what i like like about

it is i get to talk to guys not just guys in the industry or gals that are you know that are in the scrap you know day-to-day but they’re also like the gym keeps of the world who are on the you know the the publication side guys like yourself who are building equipment and and for the industry and so it’s just kind of a cool i get to kind of span the whole the whole setup and so man i’m super excited to have you on here yeah that’s cool i’m happy to be here and it was great to do the tour of the yard and finally see the equipment yeah and we can we can go and do a little more there’s kind of like a quick like hey here’s what i’m looking for here’s what i need but i wanted you to see you know i know i’ve seen the newest video of the of your guys’s newest um converter shear and but i wanted you guys to see you know the kind of the the converter cutter that got us in the game you know we we started buying hole

converters um i mean we’ve been do been purchasing converters for a long time and a lot of these kind of started with just naturally us because we buy a lot of cars through our facilities so we just started we were cutting the converters and selling them to you know mobile buyers and whatever else and then we kind of decided you know we needed to get into the business ourself you know a lot of our customers were producing them and so then we were buying them and selling them whole and then i was go i was online like looking for the right cheer for us and i ran across your guys’s stuff and i was like you know let’s give it a shot and that was 2015 i want to say we bought that from you yes that sounded about right i think it was at an israeli convention or something yeah get it on the display floor yep and it’s out there and it’s running to this day yeah and so i mean that’s kind of a testament to you know the type of equipment you guys build so i love having people on

here that i can like this this isn’t like nobody’s paying me to do this you know you’re not like cutting me a check on the side definitely i’m like the shit’s still running it’s still working you know we’ve kind of built and we’re designed a whole different system but you know the main shear that got us in the game is is still alive and well today thank you guys well that’s the sort of thing we try and do with our equipment is build longevity into it you know we’re not probably going to be the cheapest out there in the marketplace but we build stuff that’s going to last for a long long time it’s going to keep working when i first sold my first bit of equipment here in 2004 a company called millicompressing out in um wisconsin yeah which is now owned by alter which is now alter so i i went back i know two years ago and i was walking around the yard because we were just doing some work with alta and as i was walking around the art i’m like there’s my old piece of equipment oh yeah that’s

how we drain the we still drain the gas every day yeah and this was a piece of equipment with old vacuum tanks and it’s the first model that we built in 2004 yeah and it was still there and it worked every day and that was awesome that was on the best days yeah so good yeah that’s it’s just something there’s something cool about when you and i don’t we don’t build any equipment here other than stuff that we use but it’s something kind of cool to look back and be like and it’s still operating to this day that’s why i was like all right come check this out you’ll appreciate this yeah yeah it’s still and that thing’s cut a shitload of convertibles and you don’t want that you don’t buy many spares yeah i think you probably had two or three things off of us in the time that you’ve had it exactly which is awesome you know the other thing i will say about this is when we bought that machine from you it’s shipped from the uk and i think most of your stuff’s now made here in the us it

is and when that you you shipped that from the uk it got it got some of the plexiglass and some some damage it took some damage through the container and whatever else but um you stood by it you said fix it we’ll take care of it and you didn’t just leave us hanging on it and so that’s one thing i’ve always kind of appreciated about how you guys went about it i mean it didn’t show up in perfect condition you know i sent you the pictures i’m like dude what the is this and uh you’re like all i can do is package it and then hope it gets there in one piece which is probably kind of why you guys one of the reasons why i would assume that you know you guys do a lot of your manufacturing here in the united states now so yeah worry about that ship shipping up on it yeah our manufacturing has just increased year on year in the us um so give me that being said give me a little bit of background on you and kind of how you ended up in this uh in

this world of scrap and equipment and you know kind of like that goes back a long way to when i still had hair and it was still dark yeah 1998 i started a business called power transmission engineering and we used to manufacture conveyors we’d make engineering parts we sold bearings and power transmission equipment and i used to do a lot of work for sims medals in those days in the uk it was mcintyre medals okay before sims bought them so we did things like making new bearings for the rotors for the for the shredders we did water separation plant we did all sorts of projects for them so i sort of worked with them became a bit of a go-to engineering supply for them um that in 2003 the british government changed the rules and decided that everything with to do with cars had got to be closed loop recovery so you’ve got to be sealed against the gas tank you’ve got to be draining the oil out properly rather than just hitting it with a pickaxe yeah and draining it into a bucket on the floor so they came to me and

said we need a solution so i built them a solution and that was to say the first system that we’ve made with vacuum tanks and everything yeah and that was back in 2004 and they ordered 40 systems off of me so i thought you know we’re probably onto something with this so let’s see what else we can sell so we started selling that around around the world pretty much we got a lot of inquiries wonders of the website and um 2008 i started to explore the us market came over here did an israeli convention and was we were blown away because there was so much demand oh it was like was a similar year to 21 or 22 i guess you know when everybody was making money yeah everybody needed to spend some money give it to the tax man so yeah i could assume that you know that and like even to go even a little deeper is you know in the uk versus the us i mean it feels like the u.s sometimes is always you know a few steps behind as far as like you know you said in 2003

everything had to be closed loop you know there’s a certain part of me that says probably the reason why people were starting to see the trend and they’re like well we better probably get ahead of it and that’s just playing from behind but yeah anyways it comes back to regulation yep i think the triple a is europe is really highly regulated there are there are when i first came to america somebody told me it’s all about holes in the ground you know america’s got a lot of space and a lot of holes in the ground so you can you can landfill a lot of stuff in europe they’re digging up landfills to take things out to make space for others because it’s too crowded yeah so everything has got to be constant there they concentrated on everything and called it environmental and they started making systems and that’s why europe seems to be a little further ahead on the recycling side is because it was out of necessity for regulation whereas here there’s very little in the way of regulation and here it’s about is it going to make me money is it valuable

to do it yeah am i going to what’s it going to give me and so you’ve got to change the way that you build machines and the attitude to suit the attitudes of the people that are buying them and that’s exactly what we did i think because we were able to do that and then start building in the us which we did in about 2010 we opened the office in denver we just saw a boom in the business from then on and every year pretty much we’ve grown pretty steadily last couple years have been awesome yeah because i think it’s been awesome for everybody i think it’s yeah you can’t make if you’re not making i’ve said this a few times a few different podcasts like if you’re in scrap business if you have made money last year two you might want to go find another business right you’re not this may not you may not be suited you might not be cut out for it some of you have made more than others i get it but if you haven’t made anything yeah you might want to go try another another gig absolutely

but the one thing that we’ve seen throughout the whole thing is business is professionalizing what they do i i i i think that there’s a lot of that going on too is you know in the recycling and scrap business people are you know we we take our you know we laugh and joke a lot but i mean ultimately like we take our what we do very seriously right and there’s a reason why you know sacco says we’re the original environmentalists and i had i got into with the lady one time at the green expo in downtown boise in 2012 and i say got into i just had like a a conversation with her and she was like well you guys are just you know you guys are just minor urban miners that are you know you’re just as bad as and it’s like whoa whoa and i’m like just think about this i go for everybody running around here talking about we’re in the recycling and we’re we’re making green decking and this and i said think about how long most of these metal recycling companies have been recycling i mean we’re talking about

guys in the late 18 19 starting with rags and hides and moving into metals and moving into you know like we’re like really the original recyclers you know but we kind of have a bad rap just because a lot of what we do is heavy equipment it’s big stuff it’s oily cars and and trucks and you know as we get we have to deal with everybody getting rid of the nasty stuff you know old equipment that’s full of hydraulic fluid and oils and we’re the ones tasked with trying to deal with it right so we can actually put it back in the loop so we kind of get naturally a bad rap just because we have maybe done enough to promote our industry and promote all the positives that we’re that we’re doing but it’s also there’s a certain segment of guys like yourself on the equipment side that are that are basically putting out you know equipment that kind of helps clean that image up as well so yeah very much so i know um from the early days i mean people used to burn cars yeah literally to de-pollute a car

they just set it on fire yeah and there was this thick smoke going up into the air right dad told me some wild stories yeah it was horrible back in the days i mean before my time burning wire just throw it in a pile and then burn all the plastic off so you can have bare wire yeah so the industry’s come a long way from then and it’s you know and it’s still going further i mean just you know the look at some of the things in california and the way that they’re treating recyclers out there and they’ve just made gas a hazardous material you know i know which crazy and that’s where regulation can get you in trouble and get you kind of take you too far right yeah because now you’re demonizing the industry that’s actually doing some of the most you know i mean imagine how many tons and how much material they’re diverting from the landfills right like especially in a state like california where the tipping fees are astronomical yeah i mean what you’re what those guys are doing what the regulations and the battles they’re fighting i mean

that almost seems egregious instead of trying to get the state or the country or you know like you know to say okay like let’s let’s let’s work together and try and find the best solution where you guys can get what you need done which is to make be a profitable business so you can stay in business and we can kind of accomplish what we want which is to reduce you know any potential environmental issues and let’s find a way to make it work together versus it just always being like you know headbutt compliance issues yeah which is which is crazy and it’s causing a lot of industries to to sort of pull out of it a lot of people to pull out of this sector and in places like california yeah you know people don’t want to deal with that level of regulation i think it’s down to the regulators as well to realize the realities of recycling you know what are you going to do with people’s dirty stuff in the uk it was interesting back when these elv regulations first came on into the uk in 2003 the government said to them

well we’ve got to have this done by this date yeah well we’re not ready to do it by this day we can’t we can’t physically do it so they said well we’re going to start finding you so i said okay well we won’t take any cars so they stopped taking cars for three weeks they shut the doors to any cars coming into the into the recycling facilities yeah the government were begging them to take cars by the end of the three weeks because they were piling up on the streets and people don’t understand what happens with their material that needs recycling and you can’t go throw a car in a landfill no i’ve heard the same thing in hawaii right they’re there for a while for years they just park them on the side of the road and right they were just everywhere until somebody finally came in and i think the state was like subsidizing yeah people to go get them and recycle them because if you don’t have a spot for them that’s right these people are like you know like just like buses and motorhomes around here sometimes yeah they’re just

not easy to recycle items so people just park them and say good luck figuring out how to deal with it absolutely so i think you’re right i think it’s got to go down the road of going into the talk to the legislators and getting them on board and getting the bigger message out of what recyclers do 100 and we’re kind of having those conversations like on the catalytic converter end right now right i mean there’s there is valuable material inside of a catalytic converter which is kind of a two-pronged deal a if it makes an easy score if somebody’s a thief to get underneath your car and cut it and basically get a couple hundred dollar bill right to anywhere from a hundred to five six seven eight hundred dollars right i mean just in a minute’s time right easy so there’s that side of it but there’s also the side of it that all the legitimate automotive recyclers the mechanic shops the muffler shops the tow companies the scrap yards all these other facilities that are they’re legitimately processing and and uh and recycling converters and so it’s kind of like anybody

now they see a converter you know getting processed like oh it’s stolen like no no no like there’s 12 million cars in the united states recycled every year that’s just the united states right each one of those cars has a catalytic converter under it that doesn’t include all the mufflers and all the ones that get plugged and all the ones that need replaced and yada yada yeah and that’s on an annualized basis but i mean so it’s kind of hard to explain to people like yeah there has there been more theft in converters lately 100 does that mean we should just make it so hard and so difficult for the recycling companies to recycle these items considering that all these new cars are going to need platinum palladium and rhodium yeah for their you know for the to meet all these even higher emission standards sure and what’s the environmental cost of mining that new exactly compared to reusing what’s already existing an existing catalytic converter yeah but regulators don’t get re-elected by looking at the long-term effects they get re-elected by like oh there’s converters being stolen let’s just make

a law and let’s just make it hard for everybody okay okay you know like you got re-elected but you made it hard for everybody else to to even understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and i think that’s the and even on a bigger scale right from a you know oil gas deep pollution standpoint from in the light vehicles you know times that by four or five and and that’s where we’re at you know today trying to figure out what those regulations should look like and what they can look like and yeah you know and i don’t have all the answers i’m just trying i’m just giving it from our perspective on the recycler and saying hey like we want to do what’s right but help you know let’s make it let’s make it to where it’s work together yeah yeah did you see the epa published that um white paper on volatile organic compounds coming out of shredders yeah this is something that they’re looking at and one of the biggest ways of reducing that is is taking out as much of the vehicle fluids and engines and everything else as possible

and processing as much before it goes through the shredder yeah which i thought was pretty interesting white paper and it’s sort of collaborative because i think everybody in the industry gets to comment on it and work with it before they start certainly regulations crazy laws yeah yeah exactly and you know i mean at some point and it all depends on the price of the i mean scrap is a commodity it’s like wheat or corn or whatever right so whether it’s steel aluminum copper you know platinum platinum rhodium i mean whatever you know you’re you know whatever material you’re you’re basically taking out of that vehicle as it right there as it runs through the shredder and on the downstream and everything else and when you start you start looking at i mean there becomes a point when depending on how far you have to dismantle process before you even run it through a 20 million dollar piece of equipment yeah you know and have a million dollar material handler feeding it and at 10 million dollar downstream and a 5 million 10 million dollar piece of dirt that captures all the you know you

start really adding that up and like at some point plus you have to buy the material on the incoming side but if you slap even more regulations on it at what point does it become not even profitable to even handle the material exactly and i think that’s where the rubber meets the road we need the steel we need the aluminum we need the copper for so because it’s going to basically reduce the amount we’re gonna have to mine out of the dirt and if we can figure out a way to get that material to market and and not hamstring the recycler so bad that they can’t even profitably do anything yeah that’s kind of the key and we seem to sort of net export most of the material so yeah with the recent changes in the world economy and the things that we’ve seen you know so more of that should be being brought back in yeah and reused within the us you know you the us has got a lot of old stuff that it’s selling to china or to whoever to the rest of the world yeah because there’s a lot of

metal here there’s a lot of product here yeah so we’re shipping it abroad but i think we’ve seen with the latest issues in the world markets with china closing down and ukraine factories being bombed and yeah it’s it’s crazy so we’re starting to see this now turn inwards a little we’re starting to see more you know more companies announcing and the part of it’s because they’ve been making money like domestic steel mills i mean they’re starting to build i mean i don’t know how many new domestic steel mills are slated to come online in the next two to three years but a significant um significant amount of new steel capacity is going to be here a significant amount of you know i you know there for for for a long time you know copper smelters and some of that stuff you know there was you were never going to do that here and you’re never going to find it but you’re starting to see i think there’s one being built a couple being built right now um these refineries that are starting to come back to the united states and yeah whether it’s a

matter of you know um are we going to see more or not and down the road i mean i guess probably if the investment makes sense somebody’s got to try it you know someone’s got to get their foot back in that water but at the moment while the shipping costs are so high yeah man to ship that thing if you even if you can get a container or you can get a ship i mean once it took us a month to get an actual container to come to our shop to load up some equipment to ship ship out yeah in a container i mean it’s it’s taken a month to get containers i know and that’s the whole another like a conversation in and of itself right so you we were talking earlier so an o4 is kind of when you when you started um yeah 2000 deal we started vortex properly and started making vortex equipment yeah and then that grew throughout the u.s uk oh wait you came to israel i came to israel uh 2010 we opened the office in denver okay 2012 i put the uk factory into a

company called gmc mcintyre okay who is um a good friend of mine in the uk and he um he makes the alligator shears and the catalytic converted guillotines and things like that that we’ve talked about so real quick why denver a lot of places crazy story i i was got paid by the british government to do what they called an overseas market investigation service okay and the guy that did the work for me in the u.s lived in denver but worked in chicago and he was quitting um working for the british government and he was just looking for another job so he’d done a real good job for it for me so i employed him to start the us business okay um and he was based in denver so really it’s as simple as that yeah it makes sense i know i also love skiing yeah so okay there you go and that’s a good spot to be it’s a great spot that’s right yeah there’s a lot of skiing around absolutely okay so i’m sorry to catch you yeah so we we opened uh 2010 2012 i came over through 2014 was

a little quiet um took a little bit of getting going again but those are some rough years there were some rough years yeah but we kept it going and we we worked at it and we started to build more and more product to give me more design time we added to the range so that we grew from everything from like a little mobile tool for the self-service y’all they’re full service yards the guys that you know pick parts off of cars and they just want to drain a car right the way through drain racks through single touch train wrecks where you put the car up and it’s got gantries around it you can walk around the thing drain under the hood empty the car out great for the self-service guys okay um then we we started going into other things so we started selling the mcintyre shears we started selling the cat guillotines we designed our own cat guillotines we got saw where the cat market was going yeah and we got quite heavy into that so we we’re working on projects now for um assaying equipment you know we’re going to

try and put in mills and samplers and we’ve taken on hitachi as uh xrf analyzers okay so we can we can analyze the samples we’ve got grinders that go at the end so we’re slowly putting all that equipment together so we’ve got a full service offering for everything catalytic converters we’ve built a machine that does 500 cans decants 500 an hour yeah i saw the youtube video the other day yeah and it’s got the vacuum system on it and you know the originally the one we bought from you had its own its own vacuum uh system for the dust but look like the newest one has a uh what’s the manufacturer the um donaldson donaldson which is what we have now right because we have a couple that in operation yeah so you guys kind of went away from having your own vacuum system to kind of have yeah we went to a cartridge type yeah and we use two we use uh act dust collectors and we use donaldson and um they’ve been really reliable and good partners to work with so we we build this it build their dust collectors in and

it’s the customer’s choice yeah also it depends on how because selecting an air system is there’s a lot to it it depends on the openings you’ve got how your flow is what are you using to increase the velocity of the air so there’s a lot more to it than just going hey here’s a tube put it there and suck it yeah exactly it’s it’s it’s pretty uh depends on the volume yeah you said how many how many cutters you’ve got going exactly there’s a lot that goes so so we’ve done it now so that basically there’s no dust loss everything pulls inside of the machines um so which is a big part of that that uh you know anybody that doesn’t know a lot or knows a lot about you know actually decanning converters you know i don’t know that there’s a ton of extra money in decaying a converter versus selling it whole depending on how many units you sell and who you sell it to whatever but the the value of decaying a converter for us is a we get to keep the the 400 series stainless shell well it is what

it is you know it adds a you know basically that covers maybe the cost of cutting but when you do cut you you create dust and you squeeze the honeycomb out and so then if you lose any of that dust the dust is actually you know by weight by by pound is the most valuable material that you ship on the whole load right probably two to one yeah the dust is you know there’s there’s a lot of value in it so you want to make sure whatever route you go whether they buy one of your systems or another system um you want to make sure that you’re capturing the dust yeah for us the win is just we can ship more weight at a time so we’re not necessarily you’re not making a ton more money by cutting but you’re basically allowing yourself you know to get a proper assay you’re allowing yourself to ship you know if we can ship 25 000 pounds of honeycomb and a load and that will probably cube it out maybe 30 000 pounds but you’re if you ship that in with with cans it’s maybe a third

of the load right so it’s yeah so that’s why we do it yeah that’s a couple of dozen gaylord boxes exactly yeah also the more people that touch the converter the more of that margin is disappearing yeah you know there are people in the chain so you’ve got to figure out who you’re dealing with and and make it you know make the right choices also sampling uh like say getting their assay yeah understanding the value um when you’re dealing with the smelters because you know there’s there’s a lot of money sitting there and if you’re off by two percent yeah that’s two percent on a thirty thousand pound load yeah is a huge chunk of money yeah if you if you ship it you know two million hundred one point five two million dollar load of converters two percent you know it adds up it does very in a big way yeah yeah yeah you want to make sure you’re you know a you want to make sure who you’re dealing with is reputable yeah like from a smelter standpoint and b you want to you know like you said you want to know

what you’re shipping you want to have a pretty good idea of what that value is before it even gets there absolutely you know so you you at least have a leg to stand on it’s like hey something’s not lining up so that’s why we’re working on this new new assay system which is going to process the individual converters down to a 5 30 seconds grade and then um it’s going to go through there from a sampling system where it’s going to get ground up small enough to assay okay um and do the sample so yeah you’ll have to come see it when it’s oh no i’m excited we were talking about it before the podcast and you’re explaining i’m like yeah that makes it makes a ton of sense to me yeah you know we’re pretty sad about the facility we’re building in caldwell and i think that’s probably a pretty pretty smart addition for us to be able to do that um so you moved to denver so full-time in 2012 you said yeah okay yeah missed the family but we see them every now and again the kids were all at

college by then how many kids three kids three kids boys girls uh oldest a girl then two boys my son is actually my middle son is now working for mcintyre back in the hometown in nottingham in england um so we we talk a lot more regularly now yeah he used to be all over the world he was in dubai and then malta but we talked him into coming back to the uk and he’s now working for philip at gmc so okay he’s out there selling the same products that we’re selling nice which is which is very selling them in the uk he’s selling them in the uk yeah okay yeah so that’s that’s worked out well my youngest son’s just graduated uh he’s just finished his masters in back in england so what was his degree in oh he’s he’s clever one he’s uh he’s in uh finance and investment banking nice good friend so he’s gone to uh gone to work in in london okay in the city good yeah he’s followed the money rather than hearing yeah i never minded getting my hands dirty and doing the building stuff i don’t like

that at the end of the day go do what you want to do right exactly i’ve said that with my with my own kids my kids are a little bit younger but people ask me that question a lot you know what are you going to do with your kids and i was like i’m not i if if they don’t want to end like i’m happy it is what it is right like i’ll sell it i’ll be done i’ll you know my friends and i that have built this business will walk away and chalk it up we had a good run had a good time i don’t need my kids to do it you know so i feel good about what i built you know like i’m doing it for me yeah i’m doing it you know because i i was lucky enough to have the opportunity but if they don’t want to do it i’m i’m okay with that right you know i’m not gonna be too bad do you think they will are they showing interest you know it’s they’re so young it’s so hard to know you know i’ve offered them to

come down to work they’re both they both kind of have a business mind so but i think when it comes down to is is in 2004 when i i always knew what i was going to do i loved you know being around the scrap yard and it wasn’t nearly what it is today but you know just hanging out in the as a kid in my grandpa’s office and watching cartoons on saturday when my parents were working and it was just a dirt yard you know go throw rocks through windows of cars like that was like the excitement of the day you know um shoot my bb gun out in the back but i always knew what i was going to do but my kids haven’t spent as much time around here as i did growing up because my parents i mean we were broke you know we didn’t have any we didn’t have i mean and we worked hard for everything they worked hard for everything they had yeah and so we went to work like that’s my if i wanted to see him i went to work like you know and so that’s

just what i that’s just the way i grew up and my kids they haven’t really had to do it you know because you know they got a good mom that’s you know a teacher and so she has similar breaks as they do right so the time off together so she can so they just haven’t really had the necessity or the need to just if you want to hang out dad you better get your ass to work type of deal you know so i don’t know it’s hard for me to know but because they have business minds if i can prove to them that there’s money to be made i can prove to them that it’s a good life maybe and if not then you know i guess yeah i hope they just go find something they like to do as much as i like doing what i do right like that’s because if they do that then we’ll all win because they you know won’t be at each other’s necks all the time you’ve got to enjoy what you do because you spend a long time doing it yeah so how does it you

know i mean on the engineering side i mean what’s one kind of cool thing about the scrap the industry that’s kind of evolved over the years is i mean the equipment before you didn’t used to see as much scrap recycling specific equipment it was like equipment that kind of got put together like for like other you know industries and we just kind of made it into something that could handle scrap you know and it feels like as the years have grown and the years have gone by there’s so much more like scrap specific you know recycling specific equipment because people are like hey like that industry is here to stay like they’re not going anywhere yeah so we can actually kind of afford to you know focus in on absolutely and it’s a growing part of the of industry i mean recycling is the environmental industry is something like the 17 17th largest industry in america yeah um and it’s really growing but i think like say it’s come from necessity in places like europe where they had to build solutions for how to deal with stuff how to remake stuff i once went

to this show in uh i think it was ifat or something like that there’s a guy that made a machine that makes fence posts out of black plastic bags it’s just like yeah i mean people are sitting thinking about these things and i think the environment has been right for people to say okay let’s take a process and let’s make it as good or as safe like the catalytic convert thing that we’ve been talking about how do you keep your operative safe how do you not have fingers chopped off how do you keep them not breathing in the dust yeah you know there’s all these things that you take it to that next level whereas perhaps the the guy in his garage that’s making you know a wire stripper to strip the 25 cables he gets a year yeah and you know all of a sudden his thumb split in half because he’s not built it with safety in mind exactly um so yeah there are certain things that i think have been thought out for the scrap industry by people in the scrap industry that have really seen these innovations jump forward i

mean look at the sorting technology that’s come oh yeah downstream from shredders yeah that’s why that has jumped on i mean their color separation visual separation when i was involved in it i literally we made a floatation tank system so you increase the specific gravity of the water in there to float different metals yeah and that was the sort of height of technology back then now it’s all done with optical sorters and you know what’s crazy about that whole deal and i’ve talked to multiple people with shredders you know people with multiple shredders and it’s going back to that right you know i know there are still some wet systems yeah well the people are now you know employing and deploying these wet systems once again right because the big issue and and correct me if i’m wrong i’m not a you know 100 expert on this but the it was a big issue like you’re just creating this water issue right like you’re contaminating the water whatever else there’s no closed loop system on how to do it and then all of a sudden we have this better technology to come along but

the way i see it now is now all of a sudden they’re going back to these um because people have solved the water pollution issue right that’s right okay now we can go back and and run these systems because we know how to deal with the the water that’s running the yeah you know and it’s very efficient it’s very low maintenance yeah when you’re literally just pumping water in and adding lime to it or even making it increase in the specific gravity yeah you know you’ve just got chains that run around inside it was it was a real simple system but it was pretty cool i mean those days it was you know very much it was built i need this what can you build for me yeah so you’ve got to use a bit of imagination you’ve got to talk to the guys and understand what they want from it how they perceive it yeah and then try and put some prototypes together and make things work i heard somebody say you know we got into the tire recycling business recently and and we were talking about screen sizes and you know what

products you can make and this and that and they said really what you’d need to do is go find a consumer and figure out what they want and make that problem so it’s like almost reverse engineering the process absolutely i tell anybody that’s going into tire recycling yeah what are you gonna make yeah what’s your end product i had one guy who made um in the old days used to get carpet back and you just get that rubber on the back of carpets yeah and you could make that from tires okay but you’ve got to granulate it down like your copper granulators yeah you’ve got to granulate that down real fine and make it dust almost but it can then be reconstituted but it’s finding the niche market yeah so when you talk about engineering like on the back end of shredders you know you’re like okay tell me what product you want to make and then let’s figure out how we can engineer something that makes that product that’s right and after whatever material you’re generating and that’s always the hard part is when you when you make machines is getting people to

explain their vision of what they want because they don’t always know what they they can see a potential yeah but they can’t always see what that potential definitively is yeah so it’s a lot of start stops restart stop just reset like recalibration you know trying to figure out absolutely and that’s with any business right i mean i think that’s kind of part of the deal is like you know you start off in one direction and then you’re like well maybe you know this might be a better direction for us and then you know it’s i always figure is who can pivot the fastest who’s willing to pivot yeah you know and then you know can you can you pivot in within doing what you’re doing and not just totally have to reconfigure your whole setup you know and i think but business is all 100 about pivots and how you guys you know go about it so i mean for your business say from 04 when you first started like what’s the biggest pivot that you have made over the years or pivots that you can kind of look back on and say you

know i thought i was going to go really hard down this way and i ended up kind of another direction is there anything you look back on i don’t think there’s any one specific thing obviously coming to the states was a huge change in mindset for me yeah because there’s a whole it’s a whole different business we had the core product but it wasn’t americanized it was a it was made for a european market and that’s what i think a lot of people in europe don’t necessarily get you’ve got to be in the market here to actually understand the needs of what people want you know we were punching this with this tiny little brass spike and it was punched in a tiny little hole and it sucked the gas through but it was like no this is going to go faster and it’s going to wear a lot longer and we’re going to beat the crap out of it yeah so we know that this piece of equipment has got to be really resilient robust yeah so we’ve written through probably three or four redesigns when we first came to the states and

worked with customers fortunately we had some really good customers to work with and they wanted to work with us to to make it happen a guy called six though down in florida um just worked really closely with us great guy and we we built things and we tried things with him and we kept sending me new bits yeah um similarly you know we’ve got a really good relationship with the guy in georgia and we’ve recently made a change to the to the punch technology that we use so that it when it punches a hole it pulls the tank back down which makes 100 you think about it yeah it makes 100 huge difference because it funnels it out versus creating a ridge yeah can’t get over but to do that we had to create a whole load of extra engineering inside the machine because we have to increase the pressures and air will only work up to like you know 200 psi so it’s getting the air to that stage there was a lot of engineering that went into it it wasn’t just the case of yeah okay we can go up and go

down and it will hold down yeah so there’s there’s been a lot of things i think the big change that we’ve really done is we’ve looked at the whole process and gone okay from a car coming into you to a yard it’s going to be drained but then what else what what needs to be done to where can people make more money yeah so pulling the engine out so okay you pull the engine out what do you do with that engine or you can sell it for whatever cents a pound yeah or you can break it you can break the engine and separate out the aluminum from the steel you’ve got a separate clean a380 aluminum stream you can pull the wire harness out or the wire harness is worth a load of money so then okay let’s have a machine that will granulate the wire harness so we’ve taken on the mg line of cable granulation systems okay um so yeah then you’ve got that so okay what’s next well you’ve got the catalytic converter let’s go into the cat side so what we’ve done is we’ve sort of streamed the business off

into different processings so you’re going to process the engine you’re going to process the cats you’re going to process the wire harness you’re going to process all of these things so basically when you come to crush that card and you’ve just got the shell yeah and you know you’re going to take off the aluminum wheels you can take out batteries going to take all the all the value value out of that vehicle so what the shredder gets is a nice clean shell that they’re going to shred and get their money from they won’t thank you for it that’s what i’m saying i think i’m sorry you have to do that the shredder the shredder guys uh like yeah absolutely yeah because i mean where the shredders really i mean the gravy everybody i’ve talked to that runs a shredder you know the gravy or you know and used to be the gravy and now they have to build it into the price is the non-ferrous that comes off of the you know the wire the you know the the electric motor starters alternating as you know which you know turn into meatballs and

then you’ve got you know any of your fines and everything that’s coming off is usually kind of where they you know their sweet spot is that’s why that’s why they’re spending 10 15 25 million for the downstream to get that material out they can do that way more efficiently than a guy pulling it out with an engine puller cracking the engine doing the harnesses they can just drop that whole car in and process it and it’s a lot faster and they’ve invested huge money into that yeah and you know at the end of the day still probably 80 percent of the vehicles they get have still got their whole cars yeah apart from the cats and things which obviously are disappearing at every every opportunity from the tow companies to the yeah most scrap recyclers you know this you know if it’s a tow company or somebody else on most of those are you know they’re cut before you even see them now on the converter side or you know depending on how how in-depth they go you know it’s just it just kind of pans like one of the things we did

is we take the tow companies and we say hey leave your cat on there and we’ll cut it and grade it and pay you for the converter right right i mean we have a process to do it and catalog that converter with that car and from that company and basically it’s like our way of saying like you know you may not get you know if you had a 200 converters you may not get the same values if you leave it on your car and send to us but we’re going to get you close enough that right make it worthwhile you know for us to do it and for you to leave it on there and the you know the organizations like the ara and israel are doing a great job of educating people yeah as to what is valuable things where they’re going to make that money exactly i mean because i mean ultimately that’s the job as a uh as one of those organizations is to make sure that people that are involved in your organization are maximizing the value and of their business so they can stay in business and keep paying

their fee their dues yeah absolutely yeah we’ll pay our dues yeah exactly exactly so i think one of the reasons like uh hey one of the reasons that you came down to connect is i i want to show you our we’ve been talking about our car racking systems and whatever else and how we can basically be you know more efficient and also more environmentally sound on our you know processing of our wet vehicles at our facilities and but the other side of that coin is is i mean i’ve i was talking to jim keith the other you know for a while now about his scrap expo that that they’re putting on and i’ve just been excited about it because i think it’s kind of a it’s it’s something new it’s something different and it and it feels like you know you’re actually going to be able to see some of the equipment like in operation and see it work and then you know it’s versus seeing something on a factory floor or on a showroom floor where it’s like yeah this machine does this and it does that here’s the video and in the

perfect lighting in the perfect scenario and everything is you know this is how many tons it can process there’s just something else about actually you being able to get in the equipment run it or watch it actually work and do it so when he approached me about putting on the scrap expo and actually having real equipment there real people you know processing it real dealers manufacturers all that i was like man that sounds like a kind of a good idea and he’s like well to be honest it’s that that type of expo has been happening in other countries we just have never had it here in the u.s yeah so what’s your experience like with other countries and like some of these types of expos cause you and i were just talking about this a few minutes ago um what what were you what was the name of it that uh you were in the uk yeah in the uk i i came up with a show called the car show which was the complete auto recycling show okay and it was very much the same thing it was a live event so

i was really excited when jim told me that they were doing this show i was like this is exactly what the industry needs yeah because the big organizations don’t want to necessarily put on you know a dirty show you know they don’t want to have cars draining they don’t want to have metal cutting but from your guy’s point of view in yards that’s what you do every day and that’s what you want to see yeah so i was really excited when jim came up with that idea and i was i jumped straight on it and said yeah we want to participate we want to be there um but back in the uk i’d been to a show here in the states called the it show okay it was uh it was a long time ago now but it was a live show for car processing and you could just rock up with your pieces of equipment put it on display and show people and pay a minimal fee it was live in a yard which made it even better because it was actually in somebody’s facility so you’ve got all the feed of the

material and everything else available to you which was really exciting so i took that idea back to the uk and got with my partner chris and he ran a media in the uk called atf pro which is a like the industry magazine okay and we sort of promoted this show and it was the first show in the uk that we charged to go into nobody had ever charged to go into a show before and people are complaining like crazy here it’s like normal yeah but we had something like 1500 visitors oh wow and everybody came we put a free bar on it was live on the site at night and we did a hills in skelmersdale up in northern england and it just turned into this great show and people were clamoring for it and we said okay yeah we’ll do it again and we i sold it because i was coming to live in the states yeah but i i sold my interest in it to another company but every year they’ve carried it on and it’s become a bigger and bigger show and it’s now incorporated metal recycling properly it’s called cars

and mre now okay and that show just gets bigger and bigger every year but it’s got a live element to it which people just love because they go outside they can see the machines they can touch it feel it play with it and it just works so well my buddy uh my business partner up in uh legrand oregon jake hanson he told me about a show that they went to up in new york one time and it was a i think it was one of those aras or like you know automotive recycler it was a it was a pretty big show and he went up there with another guy and they went to this huge auto salvage facility you know where they’re processing all these cars and he said man and you were actually able to see how they were doing what they were doing but it was on site at another at a company you know i forget the name of the business that it was at and and even to this day he’s like man that was one of the best the best shows one of the best things that i’ve seen

because it just it opened your eyes up to a the volume that some of these big cities are processing yeah be other how these guys are operating what they’re doing and you know willing to open the doors and be like here’s how we do it right and so that that isn’t necessarily this show but the fact of being able to see the equipment and watch it operate and watch it work because like you said i mean guys like myself you know they’re they’re i got guys at all of our facilities that they can operate an excavator shear a baler 10 times better than i can right right that’s what they do all day long right and but i i still have a strong appreciation for what it takes to be able to do that job and because at one point or another i’ve done them all right but i’ve but to this day there’s a there’s something about you know watching that machine work watching that guy you know wiggle the joysticks and and make it do what it they what they can do because you know they’re the ones that are in the

in the dirt and the everyday and and trying to figure out you know how to be more efficient and so me i’m an equipment junkie so no i’m gonna love this show yeah then it’s right up my alley so but but like you said it’s it’s guys like myself that are in it every day that are like true operations guys that like we’re in it you know boots on every day like let’s go let’s see let’s go make it make it happen that’s who’s gonna really probably appeal to the most right you know it’s nice to go to vegas or whatever city and walk around in some fancy shoes or shirts or whatever and overpay for a tourist life no it’s like 12 books yeah i’m like come on now like i could buy at home i can buy it 18 pack for what you’re charging me for one you know and uh but either way like it’s it’s it’ll be nice to just say all right like let’s just see how like look go back to the real world like the where we all you know kind of let’s operate well we’re using

it for um demo we were going i wanted to do the whole show that we just talked about where we de-pollute the car we pull the engine out we process the engine we do the wire harness we do a cat but some of the equipment because of the situation in the world right now we just cannot get the equipment quick enough yeah um so i think the engine crackers run like a 30 week lead time or something right now it’s just crazy yeah every equipment i mean i’ve talked to many that aren’t that way yeah so we’re putting um we’re putting a vortex combi system on we’re going to show our bigger midi system but we’re not going to be having that using that we’re just going to have it with a car sitting on it yeah then we’re going to put um some alligator shears so people can chop up and we’ll maybe have some you know safe using of alligator shears training or something like that no i think and i think all of that stuff um i think all that’s like what you’re saying like that’s what means that they

people need to see that stuff they need to see it work yeah and you see what it is we’re gonna have one of our cat guillotines there that’s gonna be good with the vacuum system the vacuum system and everything and then we’re doing a big launch um we took on last year uh a company called zdas which is a czech company okay and they make these big monster um shears very cool horizontal shears so you feed it in from the top horizontal cut okay and just chops up big i-beams and things like that so we’ve got one of those coming over for the show nice and we’re actually going to have that working so that’s going to be a real uh a real nice bit of kit oh yeah yeah that’s going to be cool yeah i think that so i’ve been looking forward to that and so it and one thing that the jim mentioned mean i kind of i didn’t really think about it but he’s like so it’s in louisville or louisville however you want to say it louisville louisville is uh he’s like with he was telling me this

um it’s within like a five-hour drive for seventy percent of the popular i can’t remember he split some fact to me that i was like really like i didn’t really realize because i’ve been to louisville or for other reasons for uh our pipe company and but i guess i didn’t realize that you know it was that essential to so many people being able to access it yeah so it is in a great part of the country i mean forty percent of our industry is in that line sort of mississippi two you know the north of uh mason dixon in that quarter of the country yeah 40 percent of the business is a disproportionate for the amount of space it takes up 100 yeah that’s where the industry is yeah so go where it makes it make sense yeah i don’t know why i moved to denver really well because that’s where that’s where uh that’s where your buddy is you know so last thing is um what what are the g what are the dates on that again uh the dates are the uh 13th and 14th of september 13th and 14th in

louisville kentucky okay well man i so much appreciate you coming into town and taking a look at a our situation and kind of see what we can do together but b we’ve talked on the phone a fair amount of times and but we just have never ever finally been able we saw a slight israeli yeah and able to connect but for actually to get you to come out to the facility and walk around and see you’re one of the original one of your way out of one of your original conver cat cutters and it’s definitely our our main voyage down that road it’s it’s always a good time very cool yeah thank you for coming yeah look forward to seeing you at the show oh yeah you’re presenting on the stage aren’t you yeah i got it i got a podcast yeah so it’ll be interesting i’ll try not to drop too many f-bombs yeah i’m like i don’t know any other way like i’m a bad salesman or something i don’t know like i just this is how it is like so if you can live with it then uh let’s do

it so but yeah but he’s like nope let’s go i said all right let’s just figure it out so no i’m excited i’m i’m excited man just because i don’t believe it like leave it on kind of the finishing note is i feel like it’s getting back to like the grassroots like the people that probably will come to this show are the guys that are in the every day yeah like you know and it and it won’t be as much like pomp and circumstance yeah paying 1500 bucks to walk a show floor yeah i think it’ll be more like it’s a bit more real yeah it’ll be the real you know the real guys that are in there every day and and you know maybe less bankers and insurance and brokers and whatever else but it’s the other guys that are they have to cut and process and do it every day yeah so i’m looking forward to that absolutely that’s what we’re looking forward to too all right awesome appreciate you thanks for seeing me again it’s been great coming up here yeah thanks for shooting the with me