field trip

Today I cruised up to Denver to help a buddy of mine out so that he could help me out. Troy is a police officer and does a lot of stuff with Cherokee's on the side. He finds them and buys them up and flips them or he just salvages what's left of good ones and then scraps them. He had this early 90's specimen living on his trailer and needed to pull a few things off it. So we yanked the radiator, power mirrors, hatch struts and the steering column out of it and then took it to the scrapper as the rest of it was pretty played. I had not been to a scrapper before and it was pretty cool.

This guy had a front loader on it and he swapped out for the forks in seconds and then cruised over after we had unstrapped the Jeep.

Then he picked it up and carried it off to have the catalytic converter cut off, the battery removed, and all the fluids drained before heading to the big "chipper". The Jeep was smashed flat and then placed on a conveyor belt of sorts before being chewed up by these 2 massive gears. They grind the whole car down to nothing and then, somehow, what's created is sorted. Fabric stuff goes down one chute, copper into another, aluminum down another, steel in another, and so on. Pretty incredible how things go in their appropriate places. Not sure how they do it.

This was a pile of debris. There were washers and dryers, refrigerators, you name it. They had the cranes that have a claw attached to them and they come down and grab hold of whatever is too big for the front loaders to push around and stack them on top of each other. This pile was probably 2 stories and the guy said they can stack the stuff over twice that high. There were entire cars in that pile. While we were waiting a semi pulled up with a trailer that was getting scrapped. The driver unhooked and left it there. It was picked up by the claw and dropped near the big pile. Then another machine that was basically a massive hydraulic lobster claw came over and started wrecking it. The claw grabbed the axles (after they had been smashed from the trailer frame) right in the middle and snapped them like toothpicks. Pretty impressive. Troy said that sometimes when the place is slow the workers operating the claw will grab a car by the front end and flip it over so it's upside down and then drop the claw on the underside of the motor and rip the entire motor out. I was impressed and wanted to yell out, "Do it again!!!!"

After we got that taken care of we went back over to Littleton to where my van has been on strike. We loaded it up onto the flatbed. We joked about going back to the scrapper but then decided to take it to Commerce City so that my buddy Rick could check it out. It wouldn't turn over so we winched it up onto the trailer backwards. Once we got to the shop, Rick and Troy pushed and I let it run off the ramps and then steered it hard right just as it hit the ground so we didn't have to push it through snow.

Sorry for the terrible cell phone pictures.