Brass Grading at Shershah: Yellow, Red, and Why Radiator Ends Pay More

Brass gets treated at Shershah the way most people treat "aluminium" or "steel," as if it's one thing with one price. It isn't. Buyers here split brass into at least three working categories before they quote you anything, and knowing which one your scrap falls into before you arrive saves an argument later.

Yellow brass: taps, fittings, door hardware

This is the common stuff. Old taps, pipe fittings, door handles, valve bodies. It's a copper-zinc alloy with less copper content than red brass, and it looks it: a paler, more yellow-gold colour than a warm copper tone. It's the lowest-priced of the common brass grades because the copper content is lower and the alloy mix is inconsistent piece to piece.

Red brass: radiator ends, bushings, some plumbing

Red brass carries more copper in the mix and shows it visually, closer to a dull orange-red than yellow. Radiator end tanks (the caps at either end of an old car radiator, not the core itself) are usually red brass, and so are a lot of older plumbing bushings and bearing bushings pulled from machinery. This is worth noticeably more than yellow brass, often 15-20% more depending on the day, because of the higher copper share.

Mixed and "dirty" brass

Brass mixed with steel screws still threaded in, brass fittings with rubber washers still attached, or a bucket of assorted brass bits nobody sorted, all get priced as mixed. The buyer is accounting for the weight of whatever isn't actually brass, plus the labour of pulling it apart. If you have ten minutes before you leave home, pulling steel screws and rubber gaskets out yourself usually pays for the ten minutes many times over.

The magnet and colour test you can do yourself

Brass is not magnetic. If a scrap yard's scale attendant runs a magnet over your lot and it doesn't stick, that rules out steel contamination, but it doesn't tell you yellow from red. For that, look at the colour in daylight, not under a shop's fluorescent light, which shifts everything slightly yellow and flattens the difference. A clean cut edge or a light scratch with a coin shows the true colour underneath any tarnish.

Why sellers get shorted here specifically

Brass tarnishes to a dull, almost bronze-looking green-brown over time, and that tarnish makes yellow and red brass look more similar than they are. A buyer moving fast can grade a mixed lot of old taps and radiator ends all as yellow brass if nobody stops to sort it first. It isn't necessarily dishonest, it's just faster for the buyer to call the whole lot one grade rather than weigh two piles separately. Sorting into yellow and red yourself before you sell removes that ambiguity entirely.