A local metal recycling yard quoted $1.15 / lb for "yellow" brass. He said ammo cases qualified as yellow brass. I have about 100 lbs and have decided to trade it for WW lead priced by them at 40¢ / lb. They let me pick out the clip-on lead weights. Nice thing is that their clip-on's are mostly the large truck tire weights.

I keep finding small rural tire shops with wheel weights. 40¢ seems to be a standard price here in the south central USA.

There are several types of brass in the eyes of recyclers. Yellow and red are the two most common with red being worth more than yellow. But many of them downgrade the price for cartridge cases because so much of the weight is lost in shipping - they can leak out of the containers in which they are shipped much more easily than sink faucets, for example.

Upon retirement in 2008, I spent three years in the non-ferrous metal recycling business running a buying station for a friend. Wow, some of the stuff that was brought in! Shotgun primers that were believed to be brass (they're mostly steel), faucets that actually were brass-plated, co-ax TV cable that is mostly plastic ("low-grade copper wire" as opposed to more valuable "insulated copper wire") and the list could go on.

One time, an older gent brought in a window air conditioner. I told him that if he stripped it down to its various metals it would be worth a lot more as I had to buy the whole unit for its weight in its least valuable metal, which was steel. He declined and accepted $6 for the air conditioner. I set it aside for the next rainy day (they usually were slow) as I wanted to see just what that difference would be. That small air conditioner, when dissembled to the same weight in #1 copper, #2 copper, insulated copper wire, copper/aluminum cores and steel (if I'm not forgetting any) would have paid that man $56!

With brass cartridge cases, it pays to shop around. The huge recycling plant to which we sold our metals by the ton downgraded them to us so we had to pass that along to our customers. All the other plants within reasonable trucking distance of south-central Pennsylvania did as well so we had no alternative but in other parts of the country, that's not the case (yet).

Ed

You could sells the brass for $2 to $3 per pound if sorted.

$.40 is a pretty good price for wheel weights.

AveragED,
You seem to be way above average in your knowledge of the scrap metal business, in particular the down grading aspect, which I never considered. I'm confident the OP's brass would be worth a lot more to reloaders if sorted.

Absolutely!

I used to keep a list of bullet and fishing sinker casters who wanted scrap lead. The only problem was that I never got a lot of it. Many folks waited for prices to go up before they would bring it in and that never happened to the extend they wanted.

In "full" retirement, I now work full-time delivering heavy-duty truck parts for the company that owns all the Kenworth dealerships and service centers in Pennsylvania. I work with a guy who is hoarding scrap metal while he waits for prices to go up and has been for years. I told him he missed his chance when Obama left office - when the stock market is high, scrap metal prices are low and the market is up since Trump took office.

Ed