Scrap price of HSS/Cobalt Endmills?

Last time I checked maraging steel (10% cobalt) was selling for a bit over $20/pound.

Last year I sold a box of endmills, about 40 lbs, for $600 to some guy that sharpens and resells them.

Unless all were totally ruined and could not be resharpened, odds are those are destined to be resharpened and put back into use. Lots of industry and small shops trash salvageable cutters all the time, as for them to get them resharpened is not feasible for various reasons. I can go to the local scrap yard and they have barrel fulls of all kinds of HSS tooling. I pay about 5 cents more per pound than regular steel costs. Visit my website:

expressed are those of my wifes, I had no input whatsoever. Remove "nospam" from email addy.

Wow. Were they special in some way? Does he want another 3000 pounds at that price?

Most places around here keep very little scrap on hand, or are not interested in selling it in small quantities. How much are you paying for regular steel?

That's new and in what form?

You know, I didn't really look them over too carefully. This was at a foreclosure auction of an Pratt and Whitney subcontractor. A lot of the tooling was exotic stuff for cutting aerospace materials, very costly. After some hours of auctioning off a few hundred lots of big machines, small machines, tooling, etc., we ended up in the warehouse, which contained a lot of stock and various machine parts and broken things. I had looked over the stuff and while it was a lot of junk, I did find a few items I could use myself, and some real gems that would be worth a lot to somebody.

The auctioneer came in exhausted and wanted one bid for the whole warehouse contents to end the day. Nobody was prepared for that. I bought it for $600. Everybody else was afraid they'd have to actually carry away all that tons and tons of stuff if they won the sale. I stood there shocked, sure hoping I wouldn't have to.

The auction was over, and people started coming right up to me and saying will you sell me this item or that item. I had my own little "retail" auction and sold a few $1000s in a matter of minutes, for cash. This was things like new toolholders, an old tailstock for some lathe somebody had, a box of endmills, some expensive looking electronic thingy (later I found out it was a VFD), etc. I didn't know what most of it was, but I figured a quick nickel beat a slow dime, and I was net ahead. I kept the couple of items I really wanted. I hauled off a vanload of heavy aluminum drops and fixtures that the recyclers paid $500 for. Another vanload of wonderful old tooling that my son made into a lucrative summer job selling on eBay before be went off to college.

I wound up abandoning most of it that I couldn't get out by the end of the pickup period. There was a piece of 18" dia by 6 feet long steel, literally tons, that somebody wanted to pay me $150 for, but the clean- up crew said the deadline had passed and kicked us out, wouldn't let us even drag it out the door to pick up later (with what it weighed, I wasn't worried about it getting stolen off the street before I came back!). I had this fantasy of cutting it into a couple of antique style cannons on the monster lathe at the local steel yard, the replicas go for quite a lot. The clean-up guys must have sold off these remnants and pocketed a bit more cash.

replying to Richard J Kinch, Adam wrote: Can you help me find buyer for cobalt bits scrap

replying to Richard J Kinch, Adam wrote: Can you help me find buyer for cobalt bits scrap