Copper grade quiz.

Six questions, one likely grade family

Answer what you can — color, magnetism, insulation, heft, and where the material came from. The quiz suggests the most likely grade family and tells you honestly when it cannot tell. Educational only: real grading happens with eyes, magnet, scale, and often XRF.

What each answer points to

The quiz scores six grade families. Bare bright wins when the metal is reddish-orange, non-magnetic, dense, and stripped clean — the top of the ladder. No. 1 copper fits clean tubing, bus bar, and solids in copper's own color. No. 2 copper fits material with paint, solder, or heavy tarnish — still copper, just life-worn. Insulated wire is its own track: jacketed cable is bought on copper-recovery percentage, so form matters more than surface color. Brass is golden-yellow and non-magnetic, from fittings and valves; bronze is reddish-brown, heavier than brass, from meters and machinery. A firm magnet stick overrides everything — that is steel (possibly copper-clad), not a copper grade at all — and silvery strands or suspicious lightness mean the material needs physical verification, not a quiz. Ties and contradictions resolve honestly: when the answers point in too many directions, the quiz says it cannot tell, because a wrong confident answer costs more than an honest shrug.

What a quiz cannot do

Description-based grading has real limits, and this page states them plainly. A quiz cannot weigh your material, cannot feel the difference between heavy-for-its-size and merely heavy, cannot see the soldered joint hiding under a pipe shadow in your photo, and cannot run the XRF gun that settles brass-versus-bronze arguments. What it can do is narrow the field: most sellers arrive with a bucket they call "copper wire" and leave the quiz understanding whether they likely hold bare bright, #2, insulated cable, or an alloy that should never have been in the copper bucket at all. That understanding is worth real money at the scale — misidentified material discovered at verification gets repriced, and the repricing never favors the seller. Use the quiz to sort smarter, then confirm with the physical tests on the identification page: color in good light, magnet, heft, file, and XRF where it counts. And when you are ready for a number against today's market, the path is the same as everywhere else on this site: send photos for today's price.

Copper questions, answered.