Urban Treasure Hunt Ideas

Can't get out to those islands with their hidden pirate chests, or those ghost towns out west? Here are some urban treasure hunt ideas that may help, as long as you are open minded about what constitutes treasure.

Look for old antiques in attics.

Look for cash in old books.

Hunt for old movie posters and other memorabilia that may be valuable.

Collect odd items from ancient buildings and sell them on Ebay.

And now here's an excerpt from my ebook A Survival Guide for Interesting Times. It is from Chapter Five, Survival Businesses, and since scrap metal is a "found" item that has value, it really does touch on the essence of the treasure hunt experience.

Scrap Metal Collector

Collecting scrap metals and junk to sell is kind of like a treasure hunt. I used to know a man who was paid to demolish old buildings, and I know that hi favorite part of the work was finding things that could be turned into cash. This included any and all copper pipes and tubes, as well as aluminum doors and window frames - and that's just for starters.

He sometimes found old collectible magazines that could be sold. He also salvaged old furniture. This he sold in an antique store that he owned. Who knows what else he found over the years as he tore down old homes and offices.

He once told me about another gentleman (perhaps his mentor?) who somehow got permission to scrounge the junk in many small-town dumps. This entrepreneur/treasure hunter looked for the metals exclusively, and loaded them into his pickup truck. He apparently could pull enough aluminum and copper and steel out of the debris to make more than $100 per day. He hauled it straight to the recycling places that bought scrap metals.

The dark side of this business is the drug addicts who strip the aluminum siding off homes while the owners are on vacation, to make $50 for their daily fix. Whole neighborhoods in Detroit have had the copper plumbing stripped from the vacant houses there as well. There is money to be made with metals, and fortunately also in honest ways.

I can tell you from experience that there can be a lot of work involved in doing this. I never made a business of it, but I did once tear apart a lot of aluminum door and window frames to sell to the scrap yard. They were part of an old house that a family member bought and demolished, and separating the glass from the metals was tricky. After the few dollars I made for my efforts I recommend looking for the easy-to-process scrap metal.

I read about a man who discovered that he could pay a reasonable fee for each catalytic converter at auto salvage yards, and then extract the platinum to resell. He had to remove the converters himself, but the cars were lined up close to one another in the junk yards, so he could collect many quickly, and make a few dollars profit on each.

You'll have to look up the details of how to process these, and find a buyer for the platinum. At the time I read about this, I think this man was selling a book on how to efficiently collect the converters and remove the platinum. It also had the addresses and phone numbers of buyers. Perhaps an online search could be used to track down this information.

For more urban treasure hunt ideas, see the page Lost Treasures - Where To Find Them.