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Of the videos that I have seen, I can't find any with the wiring harness still in these cars. Makes sense...recycling, right?
I was watching a guy crush cars at a nearby self service yard...Using some big hydraulic controlled arm (And amazing skills) he picked a car up, swung it over, dropped it, opened the hood, pulled the engine and trans, then the radiator. Then he picked up the car and dumped it in the crusher. Pretty cool to watch.
We had one of these locally. I used to take junk cars there when I was unemployed back in the early 1980s. Quite a thing to see in action, and amazing how the ferrous and non ferrous metals were separated. There was another conveyor for the "fluff" which was upholstery, insulation, plastic,etc. I was there one windy day when a spark from the operation ignited the fluff pile. I got the heck outta there quick!
Looking back, it WAS the 1980s, and todays muscle cars were cheap and plentiful. I wish I could bring back several of the cars I took. They were junk then, but would be $$$ now.....
I scrapped a 69 Chrysler New Yorker about five years ago. Before I could get out the gate at the scrapyard,that car was already cubed. They pulled it off my trailer,with a forklift,the claw machine picked it up,and put it in the crusher and it came out as a 3x3x3 cube. There could have been bodies in the trunk,but nobody checked or cared!
That Turbine car crushing video was hard to watch. This is a picture of my wife and her sister and her brothers riding in a turbine car at the 1965 New York worlds fair.
Been a licensed auto recycler for 35 years. Things have really changed. Anything possible to make a dime on is done. We save as much aluminum/copper as possible BEFORE sending things to the shedder. (the stock pile of aluminum in metric tons is staggering right now.) So the price is waaaay down. Years ago we didn't mess with it to much. For years, we also separate auto cast. (brake rotors and such.) You don't see a shredder chewing up ol' cast iron blocks either. Or things that go "boom" - seen both, not pretty
I remember seeing guys burning the interiors out of the cars ,before crushing the cars,like they did in the turbine video. I doubt that the EPA would let them do that these days.
That was a very common practice back in "the day". The technology then was not real capable of separating "fluff" from metal. Today they can do fluff, ferrous and non ferrous all in one operation. So they would burn it. The EPA mega frowns on that type of **** now.
You wouldn't want to fall into,or be helped into one of those shreadders. They would be lucky if they recovered enough to make a hamburger out of what's left!