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 



