These guides cover the questions that come before a quotation: which grade is which, how purity gets verified, how a price is built up, what the paperwork should actually prove, and how payment is structured. Every figure quoted is drawn from published trade practice or from the product specifications already published on this site.
Copper
Most disagreements between a scrap seller and a buyer come down to one question: which grade is this lot? The names are standard across the trade, but where the boundary sits between them is not. Here is what each grade describes, and what decides which one a lot is assigned.
Aluminum
A7, A8 and A9 are three grades of primary aluminium ingot distinguished by how much aluminium they contain and how much iron and silicon they carry. The difference on paper is small. In a furnace it is not. Here is what separates the three, and how to decide which one a job actually needs.
Heavy Metals
Refined lead is traded from about 99.97% upward, with 99.99% and 99.994% as the higher grades, while zinc is commonly supplied at 99.995% and called SHG. The differences look like rounding. In corrosion resistance, alloying and acceptance testing they are not.
Quality
A purity figure on a quotation is a claim. What a buyer actually needs to know is how that claim will be tested, by whom, and what happens if the result differs. All three are answerable before the order is placed — and answering them is what makes the analysis worth anything.
Sourcing
A price for copper, aluminium, lead or zinc is not one number. It is a reference price with several adjustments around it, and knowing which adjustments are in play is the difference between comparing two quotations and comparing two guesses.
Logistics
Every metal enquiry runs into the same question sooner or later: how much of this actually goes in one box. The figure stamped on the container door is a ceiling rather than a plan, and for dense cargo the real limit is usually set somewhere else entirely.
Copper
Grade A is the designation almost every cathode buyer asks for, and it is usually explained as a purity number. It is not one. Grade A is a ceiling on what the plate may contain, and the purity figure quoted alongside it is a consequence of that ceiling rather than a separate specification.
Sourcing
A metal shipment is traded twice: once on the specification, and once on the paperwork. The second trade is the one that decides whether the container clears, and it is the one buyers see least of until something turns out to be missing.
Copper
Copper rod is one of the few products where the headline purity figure tells you almost nothing useful. Two rods can both be described as 99.99 per cent and behave completely differently on the same drawing line, because what decides the outcome is oxygen content, temper, tolerance and surface condition.
Sourcing
Nearly every quotation in physical metal trade carries the same two-stage structure: a deposit when the contract is signed, and the balance against a copy of the bill of lading. It is not a habit sellers fell into. It is what a large-value, exchange-priced commodity with thin margins produces when both sides have to protect themselves at once, which makes it worth understanding before you try to negotiate it.
Aluminum
The three overhead conductor families are easy to tell apart and hard to buy wrong — provided the enquiry says what the line design assumes. Most conductor quotations stall not because the buyer chose the wrong construction, but because the enquiry left out a number the supplier needs before a price can stand.
Sourcing
A buyer who moves from copper cathode or aluminium ingot to tin, nickel or indium finds that almost none of the purchasing habits carry over. The unit of trade shrinks from the container to the pallet, the price reference changes, the packaging inverts, and the purity figure on its own stops being a sufficient specification.
Ruichuang Metal supplies the three forms of copper buyers ask for most often: Grade A bare bright copper wire scrap, electrolytic copper cathode, and oxygen-free copper rod and bar.
View categoryAluminum is the lightest metal in our catalogue and the one where grade confusion costs buyers the most.
View categoryFive dense, high-value metals that behave nothing alike.
View categoryFour metals bought by specification rather than by the tonne.
View categoryDescribe the process and the specification limits, and we will tell you which grade meets them — and which one is more than the job requires.