Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/372

 The Graveyard of Automobiles

How much is an automobile worth, not as a vehicle but as so much metal, hair, rub- ber and wood? The '"junkie" knows.

��SOME makes of cars have a large proportion of the rarer metals con- cealed within them; some have starting and Hghting systems; some have mag- netos; and some nothing. The "junkie" knows just what a rum- bling scrap-heap is worth.

Hair from the cushions sells for fifteen cents a pound at present prices. Copper is worth twenty cents; aluminum twenty-two cents for cast, and thirty-five cents for sheet.

���Rubber tires and other rubber parts are valuable and are kept in separate piles

��finer divisions into bearings, vanadium steel and other classifications the junkie leaves to the buyer.

The junkie can tell you how- many pounds of aluminum, hair and copper there should be in a 1906 Packard. He knows where he can use un- broken parts and he often has a standing order for certain parts of certain cars. These he is of f Durse careful about.

In a well regu- lated junk shop

��Some cars do not have these ingredients; they are on the junkie blacklist. Lead comes chiefly from elec- trics, brass runs from fifty to one hundred pounds per car, aluminum from fifty to two hundred pounds and hair about twenty. "Iron," which includes all the alloys that look like iron, sells for only twenty-five cents a hundred pounds; their

��the automobiles which have outlived their usefulness are dismembered and the most valuable parts sorted out and placed in separate piles or compartments. Wheels, tires, lamps, upholstered parts, glass, etc., go to their respective storage places, where they await their resurrection or transformation, as the case may be. Only such parts as are hopelessly irre-

���Thc records of the machines which supplied the component fragments of this chaotic would make interesting and perhaps sensational reading. There is nothing pleasing

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