No, no, not the furry pet kind!

Has anyone had a go at extracting the Platinum (and Palladium and Rhodium) from scrap cats?

Starting to look like just another silly idea but I thought a bit of research wouldn't hurt

Could you just smelt the platinum scrap and add flux to sepparate the pure platinum from the other metals? (simply put there)

You wouldn't need to faff about with the assay process unless you wanted to know the platinum content, and therefore its worth, as the end user/buyer could do that to determine how much to pay you.

Once you've chopped the cat open, how do you determine/seperate what is needed to start processing? As there would be ceramic dust in there too wouldn't there?

This is probably totally unfeasable......I just like to cut the middle men out!

The platinum is a microscopically thin coating over a lump of ceramic with thousands of holes through it.

I doubt if you'd end up with much money, and you'd probably spend more on gas and/or chemicals to separate it! It would probably be quite polluted as well.

scrap value is any where from £30 to £75 at the moment.

down my way the tinkers pay good money for old cats

I've just had a google - as chilli said above, there's good scrap value in a used cat. Apparently there's a rising crime level in some US states where SUV's and other vehicles with high ground clearance are losing their cats to thieves with a hacksaw!

Basically.......my friend buys/sells/fixes/scraps cars and has accumulated about 100 cats and wanted me to cut out the middle men and find him a company that the middle men sell to. I have found 3 companies, one will only take 200 at a time.
I just thought lets cut everyone out and extract the platinum ourselves!
Not really worth the hassle/expense then.

david its not just U.S, its in wales too we had a customer come in with no cat on his hilux, robbing bastards cut it clean off!!

[Edited on 17/3/08 by COREdevelopments]

There was summat on the radio the other day about people nicking fuel now....... by drilling a hole in the tank and draining it out!

quote:

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Originally posted by James
There was summat on the radio the other day about people nicking fuel now....... by drilling a hole in the tank and draining it out!

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you know what, im surprised there are not more fuel tankers being stolen....

its gonna come to it with the rising prices of fuel.

Got to be more money in it than re-cycling pet cats. You can only make Davy Crockett hats with them and the demad for them is minmal these days.

got 3 cats for free if you want them.
just dont tell the wife !

My mate has just weighed in 5 LandRover cats today. Got £240 for them

Last nights Cambridge evening news reported a break in at a garage in Cambourne , 30 alloys and a load of cats cut off vehicles in compound . 40 years ago platinum was £40 per ounce scrap price , can't imagine what it is now?. We had some scum bag nick a propshaft off of a Renault Scenic 4x4 in the last few weeks

Somewhere around 1000 pounds per ounce!!