Precious Metal Run

Well, if by 'precious' you mean stuff like lead, aluminum, brass, and copper. Because in addition to all the iron we've been taking to the scrapyard, we've also been putting aside stuff like small motors (which contain copper), bits of aluminum my dad saved, old scary wires (more copper), bit of brass and bronze from old pipes or fittings, and even the odd Volkswagen cylinder head made of magnesium. The scrapyard takes all these things, though they have to separate them out.

By today we had accumulated enough of this miscellaneous stuff to make up its own trip to the scrapyard. Witness:



Oh, and there's also a few old dead car batteries in there and, and this is nice, a catalytic converter from some latish car (since the Volkswagens are too old to have had them).

So off to the scrapyard we went; but when we got there instead of driving all the way round back to the post-apocalyptic piles of metal, where the giant magnet-crane was, we pulled into a building closer to the front, where we filled up a flat cart and two large plastic bin-cart things. Meanwhile, over in the back right corner of the warehouse-sized building, guys in blast-shield masks raked red hot stuff in a furnace/smelter. Seriously, this place is heavy-duty industrial. In Sim City, it'd be zoned in that dense yellow.

The kid there (yeah, he was pretty young-looking) pulled the carts over to a scale-plate set in the floor, then punched some buttons on the computery-thing there. Then he took some stuff out, and punched some more. Then took more out, punched buttons again, &c until there wasn't anything left. I don't know how he knew this stuff by looking, but we had the cylinder heads in with the aluminum, because that's what they looked like. But not only did he know they were VW cylinder heads, he knew they were magnesium too. So he knew his stuff.

When he was done the computery-thing (I couldn't see the front of it, and from the back it looked like some boxy once high-tech thing that you'd see on old Doctor Who) spat out a receipt, which he handed to us, saying that the guys up front would pay us.

Okay. Now you have to understand, this wasn't all that big a load. It wasn't as heavy I don't think (or Tara didn't think) as a regular iron run, which is about 1000 pounds at the heavy end. So we were a bit surprised, to say the least. But here, see for yourself. Oh yeah check out that tasty tasty scroll-down action—



I'd say that's not bad. Not bad at all.