Raped curbside sets
 

So this is the new thing... I am seeing it all over LA. on every street. Every sense digital there have been crt sets everywhere on the streets, now someone is busting every single one open and stripping them. They take everything including the crt neck.
I guess its better than the whole thing going to the dumb but this is just messy.

I grabbed the mirror for my convergence needs
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This action is nothing new around here. It's really bad at the county green boxes (which are about to be done away with in favor of curbside pick-up). Most of what I've seen destroyed was '80's and later crap; but, I did see the busted remains of one '50's Zenith console.

This older guy that I know called me from his cell phone to say there was a '50's Zenith B&W console at the dump and it looked decent. He had no help and was in his car. Otherwise, he would have brought it to me. I rushed over to the dump and by the time I arrived, all that was left was a busted cabinet and some broken glass from the CRT.

In the early '90's, I would often bring home 3 or 4 TV's at a time when I'd visit the dump. Then, the "copper grabbers" got real active and I swear all they do is make the rounds from dump to dump seeing what they can destroy.

A friend of mine, who used to have a TV shop, would often put junk TV's outside for the garbage. More than a few times, he'd hear noise behind the shop only to find someone about to swing the hammer or proceeding to dismantle the set for the chassis. He would always tell them, "Either you take the whole set or you take none of it because you're not leaving a busted mess for me to have to clean up"

I see that all the time too. They're going for the copper in the yoke.

A lot of these TV's that are being destroyed probably worked just fine or could have easily been fixed. It used to burn me up, back when used TVs were still a somewhat hot item, to see a nice set that I could have gotten good money for had some idiot not busted it to pieces.

Pretty funny that there's a packet of smokes in one of those gutted BPC sets...

Copper thieves strike again! They'll take anything made of copper, illegal or legal....kind of crazy how bad it's gotten...

Never heard one say it that way:thmbsp::D

We have them here too, I call 'em the "copper smashers" and boy do they make a mess. I can't wait until I catch one smashing a tv in front of my house.
They won't be happy..:no: I just missed one a while back and he was lucky I wasn't around with a bat. My house sits very close to the road so I get more pissed than most about this kind of stuff. That and I'm sick of all the kenosha losers.

Although the copper prices have gone down, several enterprising folks here in Norfolk make quite a bit from TV and copper scrapping - we're talking about 400-600 dollars a week! One gent I met at the metals place gets every bit of copper out of a TV - chassis, yoke and degaussing coil. We discussed the "best" sets to scrap - he agreed that Sony puts the most copper in sets. He also likes the projection jobs - easy to gut on the curb.

He hooked me up with an Admiral black and white 15" tube portable - not much in the way of copper, or tubes - it was missing all but the RF amp tube in the tuner.

What we see as a missed opportunity, he sees as income.

Me, I sell copper from BPC sets and the occasional extension cord I find when trash pickin' - but most of my metals are aluminum chassis parts from gutted test and computer equipment and aluminum cans from my Diet Coke addiction. :beer:

Cheers,

A while back, we had a serious issue with copper grabbers stealing the copper pipes and wiring from homes and other buildings that were under construction (and some that were already built). It got so bad that they passed a law where the only way you can sell copper at the junkyard is to show a valid ID and valid car tag. I think they also take your picture and take down other information. Once it's been determined that your copper was obtained legally, the scrap yard will mail you a check. Otherwise, law enforcement will come haul your butt to the pokey.

I'd tell you to move to Mississippi; but, we probably have just as many losers down here.

About 2 weeks ago, I stuck a dud 2003 HP computer monitor out on the curb. Some guy pulled up in a clunker Cadillac and picked it up. He wouldn't have wanted to face the wrath of my Mother had she looked out and caught him smashing it. We have enough problems with garbage blowing in our yard from all the idiots in the neighborhood who don't have sense enough to tie up a trash bag.

There is one guy that I call when I have a load of crap and he comes and haules it off and acts like he's glad to get the crap. I told him the kind of stuff I was looking for and he said he'd save any that he found. So far, nothing has surfaced.

Here too! Here, no copper wire bigger than 4-ought (0000 gauge) can be sold without a business registration. Keeps the utility workers legit. They also get your drivers license info when selling. But they pay cash...

This is so sick and a sign of the times. Druggies and other useless will do what they can (besides getting a job) to support their habit. Used to be that if we found some electronic gear on the street we would try to fix it. I got several TV's that way that we used for years. If something turned out to be unfixable, the good parts were stripped out and the rest disposed of properly. Lately they've let the hooligans out of their cages. Here a couple of years ago one cutie got his trying to take down a big copper overhead catenary line. Ditto the geniuses stealing copper out of street lighting. Darwin at work.

I don't condone the thieves, but not everyone scrapping and selling copper is a druggie or useless. I've been the victim of the copper thieves - they stole the copper flashing right off of our church a couple years back. But TVs on the curb are for anyone to take and do as they please, just not right there. I've snagged sets only to find a bad fly, bad CRT or munged tuner that was beyond economical repair - and I happily scrounged the copper and aluminum to sell. If only ferrite had a market!

I guess it's kinda like yard sales - early bird gets the worm.

Oh, sure, legit scrap metal recycling is OK, done it myself. I was just on a rant about druggies and mess makers. If you clean up after yourself I give my seal of approval! In fact, I had a big coil of old used copper pipe with some holes in it , about 60 ft, I think, a couple of years ago, that I got about fifty bucks for. I was amazed.:eek:

It got so bad with copper thieves after Katrina - they were stealing the water pipes before homes were finished and cutting them off at the slab, so a plumber had nothing to hook onto. I know of two houses near me that were sold to the state and torn down rather than restored because of this. Some folks ran Pex through their attics.

There's a decommissioned power generating plant in the city (Market Street power plant) that was (is?) being targeted - the thieves were lowering themselves down into the massive generators with ropes and cutting out the copper with torches mounted on their backs.

This was a big problem here too, at least until last year, there was almost no way to get a TV in one piece, as soon as it was laid on the curb, someone came, smashed the CRT to rob the yoke, and often also mangled the chassis to remove the large wound components.
The fact that i often spotted TVs while riding my horses and had to come back with my car to pick them up made things even worse as they'd often be wrecked by the time i came to pick them up.
I was very lucky in that i saved a really nice Phonola tube B/W before the wreckers got at it.

Luckily this doesn't happen much anymore now, Credit Crunch i guess, and maybe some changes in the copper market.

I read that in New York they rip the living and breathing copper right out of the walls and heating pipes in tenements. In new construction, the contractors paint the copper pipe black in the hopes that nobody will steal it "thinking" it's iron. They weld bars across the entrance doors so they can't steal the appliances on new construction. Law of the jungle.

I almost forgot - thieves stripped the copper wiring from a newly completed 2-mile road a few years ago - they ripped out all the wiring for the freestanding streetlights. While the circuits were hot.

Of course, the road was a shortcut through the woods to the back end of a VERY large subdivision that has turned into a ghetto, so I guess I wasn't totally surprised.

I was in Oklahoma recently and saw a item on the news that homebuilders there do not install the air conditioners in new houses untill someone is ready to move in. Theives make off with them otherwise.

Yes... Welcome to the new third-world America where we scrounge through the debris of prior generations of prosperity so that we can sell the raw materials to more technologically advanced nations. If we're lucky, the finished goods will return to the hands of the ever-shrinking middle class, and the cycle shall continue until all wealth is exhausted.

Sad but true.

Yep, redistribution and all that. it is sad indeed.

Someone snatched my central air conditioner condenser last summer and left the case sitting there. The unit was in a fairly hidden place. It happened when I was out of town, and the neighbor, who lives 10 feet from where it sat didnt hear a thing.

When I replaced it, I moved it to the back of the house. It's more out in the open, now.

I hate how brazen people are becoming! It's like "I want to take what you have, and you cant do anything about it!!"

I thought maybe they were after the metals in the crt guns. They are now encouraging recycling light bulbs and they even have bins in front of Home Depot.

After the few ounces of copper in the yoke....thats desperate!

How did they do it without being electrocuted? :scratch2:

I guess we're fairly lucky here in my small town of 3215 population as I haven't seen any ruined TVs (or any televisions, period) here, on the curbs or otherwise, in years. The last time I saw a junked TV in this neighborhood was about eight years ago. It was a 1978-vintage RCA Colortrak 25" console, all in one piece. Haven't seen anything like it here since, although now that TV is 100-percent digital I had expected to see CRT sets being trashed left and right since June 12 last year--but it hasn't happened yet.

Another thing I haven't seen much of--yet, anyway--is trashed flat-panel sets, although there may not be that many such sets in this town yet, almost nine months after the DTV transition. Perhaps a lot of folks around here are using converter boxes with their old reliable analog sets and have no intention of getting a FP set anytime soon; however, I am surprised I haven't seen more FPs in the trash here (if the truth be known, I haven't seen any such sets on the curbs yet) with broken screens since the end of football season, or sets that have been smashed accidentally when they fell off of or were knocked off their stands. My RCA XL-100 analog table set, which weighs something on the order of 50 pounds, has fallen off its stand once since I've had it (ten years), the only damage being a bent shadow mask in the CRT. I was able to repair it in five minutes with a couple of sweeps across the screen with an old speaker magnet; the set has worked flawlessly, with an excellent picture, ever since. Had this been a flat-panel set, however, it would likely have been ruined the second it hit the floor, :yikes: despite the fact that the floors in my apartment are carpeted.

The foregoing is only one of several reasons I am in no hurry to replace my TVs with flat panels--which I refuse to do as long as the old sets work as well as they do. The older analog sets were more durable and will take much more abuse than today's flimsily-built flat panels. Strike the screen of any recent-vintage or older analog set and you'll get away with it most of the time; try the same thing with an FP and the set will be made into an instant pile of junk. The fact that flat-panel TVs, in particular the Chinese and Korean off-brands (Vizio, Haier, et al.) no one ever heard of until very recently, do not last nearly as long as the older analog CRT sets did :no: bothers me as well, but that's material for another thread.

Breaking the necks off CRTs and throwing rocks at the screens of otherwise restorable televisions is nothing new. By the '90s this was fairly common in the Cleveland suburb where I used to live, but since I moved here I've only seen two TVs in the trash, the 25" Colortrak I described above and one 1980s-vintage RCA 12" portable. I did see two large stereo consoles in front of a house just down the street from my apartment about three years ago (one was a Morse Electrophonic, the other a GE, IIRC). The stereos seemed to be in excellent shape from the looks of the cabinets (no scratches, doodles or other destruction that I could see), so I guess if there are any copper thieves in this town they are steering clear of these. Stereo consoles, even solid-state ones, have transformers with copper wire in the windings, but they probably aren't as desirable as TV yokes; the latter, after all, have much more (larger gauge) wire in them so they will fetch more money than the small-gauge wire in transformers.

Here in north TX, they've been stealing the wiring between live streetlights by hooking a truck to the cable and pulling it all out, a half mile at a time. They've even hit the lights along freeways. Lots of dark neigborhoods.

The neighbor across the alley from me was renovating post flood (attic mounted water heater leaked, molding up all the walls) and someone stole his copper sink from his kitchen!

We've even had an instance of a substation that got its inch-thick live wiring stolen. The guys know what they're doing to avoid electrocution and have professional tools to do it.

These ruffians should be taken out and summarily shot. Just my humble opinion, thank you. If you don't want to live by the rules of decency and society, then get out of it.

This discussion keeps reminding me of this video :lmao:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pWBJiW0Xpo

:lmao::lmao::lmao::lmao:

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Copper spiked after the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes - much like the cost of drywall spikes up after a hurricane. Our metals company that buys our aluminum and copper shut down until things settled back down. He wasn't going to pay high prices, only to lose it later. They settled down, but only by a margin of a few cents off the high. I haven't sold any copper recently, and when I do, it's just the cheap stuff - old extension cords folks throw out all summer and the like. Highest I've seen it was in June 2008 - about $3.75 a pound. It's getting close to that now, I imagine. It was 2.76 a pound before Christmas. A Sony XBR set gives up over 3 pounds of copper - yoke, d-coil, common mode choke, the pincushion transformers and even the IHVT - they buy those as "motors and transformers". Gotta say, we see treasure, and they see tomorrows paycheck. :worried:

This to shall pass.....this too shall pass.....this too shall pass.......

In the Pgh area on Thursday No.2 Copper was $2.50 No. 3 was $1.10 small electric motors were paying $0.95. Thats an awful lot of busted TVs to pay for lunch.

Just checked here - we have two yards, one which sells to the other! The highest payning of the two was 3.17 a pound for #2 wire. Could be that because we are near the port (where the copper gets shipped to God knows where) there are less transportation costs? Electric motors and transformers are 95 cents a pound here too. IHVT flybacks get that price.

One of my favorite trash pickin places is a post-WWII neighborhood with narrow streets and on-street parking. The copper crowd with their wide trailers can't fit, and so the stuff is left for the folks like me. I got my Portacolor in that neighborhood, and also a 6-year old roto-tiller that needed some TLC. :thmbsp:

Guys around here don't just go for the copper - it's aluminum and steel too, albeit not as profitable as copper. I make a mad dash on Wednesday mornings in the summer to get stuff before the copper crowd. My wife is into it as well - she trash-picked one of those plastic playhouses that was only a few months old and being discarded as part of a military move. Still, I'm in it for sets and parts (if it's something trashed already or too large for me).

Cheers,

Found another one in the alley today. At least they did a neat job of it.

I stopped to look at a set on the curb a few days ago - it was an '88 Samsung 19" in a neighborhood where you'd think this kind of stuff would occur. It doesn't seem like anyone is yanking yokes out around New Orleans, not yet.

I don't usually see this here in Rochester (people do pick up sets, but usually no one does the smash and grab). We do have a lot of scrappers and they are apparently after steel - I threw out a stack of cheapo 90s VCRs and it was gone the next day. However I saw a good curbside yoke removal victim today, 36" late 90s Zenith (so the tube was probably trashed before the TV was thrown out). The carpet is a nice touch. I grabbed the main board prior to taking the picture.

Damn scrappers got to this vintage capehart-farnsworth ! At least someone saved what they could. That would be quite a challenge to bring back to life.

http://www.bobandersen.com/images/misc/capehart.jpg

In my area, I never saw this kind of stuff happen until just this year during the annual "spring clean-up" bulk-trash days. Before this year, the scrappers would clip off the power cords (and coax, VGA cables, data cables, etc.) off anything they could find, but apparently never realized that there's a lot more copper in a TV set than the power cord. In fact, it wasn't unusual to see a console TV with the back removed and the yoke just sitting there in place on the CRT in plain sight-- completely unmolested-- even though the scrappers had made off with the power cord and sometimes even the (clipped off) yoke and/or convergence harnesses.

This year, however, it appears that some of the scrappers in the area have discovered TV yokes, as I've seen a fair number of TVs and computer monitors on the curb with their backs *bashed* in, busting off the CRT necks to remove the yokes. Bleehhh... :no: I suspect it's only a few scrappers at this point, because the "bashed-in" sets on the curb always seem to appear in clusters within a few blocks. Fortunately, I haven't seen anything potentially "collector-worthwhile" ruined by the scrappers in that particular manner-- they've mostly gone after cheap modern "BPC" TVs and the occasional computer monitor.

This year I've also seen several TVs and computer monitors on the curb with destroyed CRTs, but not because of zealous scrappers. Looks like some kids think it'd be entertaining to throw rocks or whatever at the face of a CRT TV to see what happens. Double bleehhhh... :no: Amazing how those tension bands around the CRT really do seem to keep the glass from flying too far when the face gets smashed in though.

I'll post more about spring clean-up trashday finds in a separate thread once I finally get around to taking pictures and writing up something..!

I cleaned out a TV shop that had many TVs with the yokes missing. It was not scrappers, this was years ago. The serviceman had cannablized the sets for parts to fix other sets.

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