Is This Old Lincoln Welder PACKED With Copper?! Teardown & Upgrade Announcement

Behind the Scenes: The GoPro 5.2K Editing Struggle and a Big Upgrade Welcome back to the channel, everyone! Before we dive headfirst into the heavy steel and premium non-ferrous metals sitting on the teardown table today, I need to give you a quick behind-the-scenes update on the channel's production side. If you’ve been watching my videos for a while, you know that I have historically done 100% of my video editing directly on my mobile phone. It’s always been fast, familiar, and convenient—but ever since I upgraded my camera setup to a modern GoPro, the technological bottleneck has become completely brutal. The GoPro shoots in an incredible, ultra-crisp 5.2K resolution. The beauty of shooting in 5.2K is that it gives me total flexibility in post-production. I can easily zoom in on a small piece of stamped brass or a thin copper wire without losing an ounce of image quality, and I can seamlessly crop the wide shot down into a vertical format for YouTube Shorts. The massive downside, however, is the sheer size of the files. Even though I have completely cleared out my personal phone gallery, wiped old archives, and offloaded files, the phone simply doesn't have the storage capacity or the processing power to handle these high-bitrate files. Right now, my workflow is a painstaking game of digital musical chairs: I have to pull a single GoPro file from the cloud, drop it onto the phone, edit it down as fast as possible, export it at a compressed 1080p, upload it, and instantly delete the source file just to clear enough megabytes to bring the next clip in. I’ve officially hit a wall where my current 10-minute video project is simply too large for my phone to handle the next segment. Because of this, I finally bit the bullet and ordered a brand-new, high-performance video editing laptop! It is fully spec'd out with the speed, RAM, and graphics processing power required to handle 5.2K rendering without breaking a sweat. It should be arriving by the end of the week, which means this video will serve as the first half of our project. Once the new machine is up and running, I’ll be dropping part two with the full, glorious copper scale reveal. Thank you for your patience as we upgrade the tech behind the scrap! Diving into the Guts of a Vintage Lincoln SA-300 Welder Now, let’s get to the main event. Today, we are cracking open the control side and electrical guts of a classic, industrial-grade Lincoln SA-300 welder. The Lincoln SA series is legendary in the pipeline and heavy fabrication industries. These machines are massive, heavily engineered workhorses, and for a scrapper, they represent an incredible opportunity for high-value non-ferrous recovery. As we inspect the wiring harness, it’s clear this machine has seen some field modifications over its long lifespan. The original, tightly bound, vintage industrial wiring layout is still partially there, but a previous owner spliced in some standard residential Romex cable to keep the unit operational. We also have a fantastic array of heavy selector switches that feature solid brass internal contacts, alongside several large terminal blocks that look like pure copper coated in a protective layer of aged insulation resin. The Mechanical Battle: Frozen Fasteners and Deep Creep Strategy Disassembling a machine that has spent decades exposed to the elements means wrestling with frozen hardware. The back of the control panel features a series of three main retaining nuts that I managed to loosen off to free the primary wiring harness. However, moving deeper toward the central core plates revealed a much tougher mechanical challenge. The main assembly is securely bolted down from underneath the heavy structural frame. To make matters worse, I discovered a frozen cotter pin wedged tightly into the main control shaft, completely preventing the selector mechanisms from turning or sliding out. Looking closely at the seams, it almost looks like certain sections were intentionally tack-welded or heat-shrunk at the factory to prevent vibrating loose on job sites. To break this stubborn assembly down without instantly destroying the non-ferrous value with an angle grinder, I deployed a scrapper's best friend: Deep Creep penetrant spray. I thoroughly soaked the copper bolts and brass nuts to let the fluid eat through the corrosion. While waiting for the chemical to work, I noticed a really interesting metallurgical feature: the factory connections utilize premium solid copper bolts secured by heavy yellow brass nuts. Strategy for Extracting the Coils: Pound, Nip, and Slide Once the penetrant spray loosened the grip on the main studs, it was time to figure out how to isolate the heavy copper bars running through the center of the steel core sheets. I grabbed a small punch and a hammer to test if the internal bars were molded solid or free-floating. Luckily, they do pound out!