Classic cars forum & vehicle restoration.

[Rick]

I can't remember the last time I visited an interesting scrapyard in the UK, so rare are they now. I think the most exciting yard I've visited in recent years was in Portugal, I think they're a little less pedantic about keeping yards overly tidy than we are here. Erindoors was understandably ecstatic when she also spotted the yard, after wondering what had caused the sudden three-point turn.

I used to frequent an excellent yard in Lymm (Cheshire), packed with interesting cars of the 1950s through to the 1960s and some 70s. I'd regularly visit just to have a mooch around in the long grass. A rotten Saab 95 offered up a rear window for the two stroke van I had, and I'm sure various A40 bits turned up there also. Climbing up the cars was a little precarious, but no-one seemed to worry unduly. Sadly it's all been cleared away now, although photos taken there appear on the main site somewhere.

The yard in Llandudno, Arch Motors, was another pleasant one to amble about in during family holidays. The yard is still there but I fear mooching has long-since been outlawed. I can still feel the anguish I had in spotting a near-immaculate early Herald that had been consigned to their care, tipped on its side, revealing the rotten rear outrigger that had presumably upset an MOT man somewhere. Apart from the outrigger it was in fine fettle. I relieved it of its chrome boot hinges, and carried on hunting.

The same yard turned up a near-perfect hardtop for the Mk3 Spit. They wanted £15 for it, I said I'd think about it (!). Six months later I returned, the tin top was still there, they now wanted £30 or £35 for it. I reminded them of their earlier price, so they let me have it for £15. A complete hardtop, with glass and tidy headliner for £15, even 20+ years ago I was very

I know of a yard that still, supposedly, has old aircraft wings crated up in its distant corners. I think a visit is in order!

RJ
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[P3steve]

Don’t get me going on scrap yards, I must have spent half my teenage years in them. Back in the seventies before the classic movement got in its stride you would see all manor of interesting cars dating as you say from the fifties onwards. I recall one yard while we were looking around for bits the yard owner asking if we wanted a nice tidy Austin A35 to good to break for £50 still with three months tax and test on it that some old chap had brought in as he was giving up driving, after a bit of haggling my mate got it for £30 and so good was it we went out in it the evening, he actually ran it for a year before selling it for £200. Another yard had a very sound WW2 Willys Jeep no body rot the only repair I could see was someone had welded a couple of patches on the windscreen frame full running order £500 the same yard had a ww2 coffee pot Scammel as well, now retired that had been used for motorway recovery in full working order with all its equipment intact. Another had a Bedford OB bus but that was rough and I wont even mention the two Austin princess limousines and the Austin princess hearse that a yard in north Nottinghamshire had in from a funeral business that had closed down that if the yard owner couldn’t sell them he would have to break them, I think he was looking for £250 each for the cars and £200 for the hearse or would do a deal on all three for about $600.

But going off at a tangent if I may I had the chance to visit the now famous Barry steam scrap yard on three occasions in the late seventies and early eighties when it was still quite full, while there on one visit I met a couple of guys from I think the Mid Hants railway who were looking to buy an engine and was lucky enough to be invited to have a cup of tea with Dai Woodham himself and a charming and friendly man he was too. I was also there by chance on the day that Standard tank No. 80080 was being taken out of the yard to go to at first Peak railway this was being filmed by Blue Peter and I met and talked at length with the then presenter Simon Groom. I think I'v already mentioned in another thread the aircraft scrap yard in Swindon that I used to see in the late sixties/early seventies that was full of WW2 planes As I said I could go on all day ps Rick I think a railway section would be a great idea as many on here have duel interests.
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If the world didn't suck we'd all fall off

[Rick]

[Aar0sc]

I feel I've missed out on all of this, but last year Grandad (who lives in Cumbria) and I went to a scrap yard near him to get some wheel trims for his Subaru. I spent the whole time going "There's nothing wrong with that XJS V12/XJ12/Rover 800 etc etc etc"!

There's supposed to one not far from me with a Vitesse in in restorable condition, but I don't know where exactly
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Aaron

[Bengt Axel]

In my teens I spent many a happy hour in Barrow Hall Lane Motors in Warrington, ostensibly searching for bits to keep my 2CV going, but really just doing a bit of "automobile archaeology" in the farthest recesses of the yard.

It was an odd place in that precious little car breaking seemed to go on, beyond folk like me unscrewing our own bits. Cars had obviously just piled up and up for decades, and at the back there were the barely recognisable squashed remains of family cars from the forties and fifties (and we are talking the second half of the eighties when I frequented the place)

Any visit was always concluded with the same ceremony, in that you presented your findings to the owner (who looked like he lived there, and was preserved in a mixture of Woodpecker Cider and Castrol GTX). He then examined it closely from all angles, sucked through his blackened teeth a little, maybe consulted a random dog-eared parts book in his shed and then invariably came the reply "that'll be a fiver".

On my desk where I'm typing this I still have the grille badge of a Nash Metropoiltan that cost me a 'fiver'.

Happy days ....

[peter scott]

When I was a frequent scrap yard user the nearest one to me was run by tinkers. They didn't have guard dogs. They had a guard horse! This thing was very scarey. I can remember being there quite legitimately and this thing took a disliking to me. It chased me around the yard rearing up on its hind legs whilst "boxing" with its fronts. The really nasty bit was that it could jump over the cars much easier than I could. I did get away unscathed but I've always been very wary of horses ever since.

In another, more legitimate yard that I used to visit, the owner used a Rolls Royce 20/25 as his office. That yard scrapped a lot of the Edinburgh trams and for a time there always seemed to be a few burning trams at the bottom of the yard. My father used a couple of the tram entry rails as side members for a boat trailer. They aren't terribly obvious in this photo but they formed a triangle with the axle. The centre pole was scaffolding.



My SS Jaguar was scrapped in 1964 in a yard near Shepton-Mallet. See below. Even in the 1990s the owner had some nice stuff tucked away in old vans and broken down sheds.

Peter

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1939 SS Jaguar 2 1/2 litre saloon

[P3steve]

Hi Rick here's the artical to where I was talking about that aircraft scrapyard


Posted: Sun Jun 01, 2008 7:38 am Post subject: Aircraft scrap yards

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Back in the late 60s I would visit an uncle who lived on the Oxford road in Swindon, down the side of his house was a foot path that lead to some allotments and then to a foot bridge over the London to Bristol main line, between the allotments and the railway was a scrap yard which was full of ww2 type aircraft some just sections of bodys others like a row of Dakotas standing almost complete, many of the sectioned bodys were I believe Lancs they were all black on the underside with brown and green camo top sides with large roundles on the body sides but I was too young to remember to much detail. In those days no one worked on a sunday and the yard was empty so we would slip through one of the many gaps in the fence (even part of the fence was one of the lanc bodies pushed in to plug a big gap) and explore the yard playing in the aircraft - we even found a parachute in a locker on one dakota. I just wish I had been older so as to remember more details and even to have had the forthought to take a few photos, the site was cleared in the 1970s and is now a housing estate. Steve
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[Rick]

Looks like it was a fascinating place to crawl around Peter, here's a typical scene at the Lymm scrappie circa 1989 or so:



It was one of the few places where I've ever seen a VW K70 in the metal, not sure I photographed it though.

RJ
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[exbmc]

The Derby area used to have plenty of scrapyards, most of them have gone now. The best of what's left is Albert Looms in Spondon, known usually just as "Albert's". You can still walk around and remove goodies yourself, the cars are only on the ground, no stacking in public area's. I try to get up there at least once a month, for nothing in particular, just to have a mooch and see what's come in.
I never got to see Woodhams yard at Barry, mores the pity, but i did get a look at all the loco's in Cashmores at Newport. I'm not sure if they allowed any to be sold for restoration, or any parts were sold. They seemed to just cut them up as fast as possible.

[Castellated nut]

There used to be a wonderful yard at Hevingham in Norfolk (Lennie Medlar's). The central open area of the yard was full of 'moderns' (i.e. '50s, '60s, and perhaps later) and the woods surrounding were stacked with mainly pre-war stuff, which I would guess had been there since the introduction of the MoT test put them off the road.

There was a sad story behind the owner's reluctance to allow people to salvage parts, though in the late 1970s and '80s he was beginning to let a few in, and there were still some good mechanical spares. The last I heard, probably about 20 years ago, he had passed on and the yard was being cleared.

Later in the '80s the 'famous' yard at Adversane, Sussex was being cleared, which was also full of pre-war vehicles. One I remember was a very neat little special with an aluminium body on a tubular frame. It had a flat-twin engine at the front, though I'm not sure what it was (Jowett? BSA?). It looked eminently saveable - I often wonder if it survived!

[baconsdozen]

[quote="Castellated nut"]There used to be a wonderful yard at Hevingham in Norfolk (Lennie Medlar's). The central open area of the yard was full of 'moderns' (i.e. '50s, '60s, and perhaps later) and the woods surrounding were stacked with mainly pre-war stuff, which I would guess had been there since the introduction of the MoT test put them off the road.[quote]


I spent many a happy hour at Medlars,he used to have a monkey and parrot in the house,pigs and cattle would often wander through the yard.One day a cow was in there with a calf hanging half in and half out,a young bloke was running round frantically saying that Lenny had left him in charge and he hadn't a clue what to do,and that Lenny would kill him.Me and my mate put a rope round the calfs legs and pulled it out,the cow though obviously tired and distressed started to clean it and a while later lenny arrived.
From that day on we could do no wrong and our cars were well supplied with spares for little if any money.
Medlar baught many of his wrecks at an auction on Aylsham Road and it wouldn't start till he arrived and he'd buy virtually all the no hopers 'out the back'. Most of them he or his assistants drove back not worrying too much about the legalities of tax disks etc.
The yard is cleared now I suppose it will soon be (if it isn't already) affordable housing.
I wonder does anyone remember Cherry and Cecil Dawson who owned the huge yard (once again now housing) at Hellesdon Low Road ?. Another happy hunting ground with everything from double decker buses to on one occassion a Mk6 Bentley
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Thirty years selling imperial hand tools for old machinery(Now happily retired).

[Rick]

Years ago I used to pop over to see a small-time car dealer in the midlands, he had a few cheapo cars for sale out front, and many more around the back, rusting away in the long grass.

A pal and I went for a nosey one day, to be greeted by a snarling Alsatian dog. "No problem" our host assured us, as he tied a rope to the dog, and attached it to a nearby caravan (a Sprite as I recall).

Confidently we strode around, admiring the junk parked up. The dog was getting increasingly angry at our presence, but as he was tied up, we ignored it. Finally his patience ran out and he came bounding towards us. Fortunately the knot held as the mutt reached the end of his rope, sadly the same couldn't be said for the corner of the caravan, which came away and trailed behind the slobbering beast as he made haste in our direction.

I don't often move quickly, but this was an exception. We legged it in the opposite direction, finally finding sanctuary on the top of an old car, the snarling hound desperately trying to attach his teeth to our shins.

A few minutes later the owner wandered by, grabbed the mutt, and found something more substantial to tie it up to. Ever since I've been very wary of oily scrapyard dogs wherever I've encountered them.

RJ
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[clan chieftain]

I used to love going to the scrappies and having a good rake around. Now most yards have everything stripped off the cars and its not the same. Not many yards up here have old cars now. A lot were weighed in when scrap yards were offering £200 for scrap cars.
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The Clan Chieftain

[Carcruiser]

I went to Medlars once, in around 2002 I think to rescue the remains of a '33 Hudson Essex Terraplane for spares for the Railton OC. All the modern stuff had been cleared, but a lot of the older areas remained. The Terraplane was barely recognisable and was hoisted out of the ground beneath a well established bush with a tractor and bucket. The chassis broke, so it was really a collection of mechanical spares. We probably spent more time mooching round in the sun, discovering exciting finds such as Morris J van, Wolseley 4/44, and Series one Land Rover (slightly worse than the one I was using to collect the Terraplane with, but not much!). The boundary to the, now empty, main field was lined with large American cars - late 30s, 40s mainly and all collapsed. Eventually managed to identify a late 30s hudson, but never got round to coming back for that before the rest was cleared. I also wanted to return for the LWB Series one Land Rover and one of the J types - it was like being a kid in a sweetshop....
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Iain McKenzie
www.fairmilerestorations.co.uk

[MVPeters]

Does anyone remember a Rolls-Royce "junk yard" somewhere in the New Forest? This would have been in the late 50's.

I was very young, but my re-collection is of a field with a row of perhaps 20 or 30 old RR's. Most were largely intact, perhaps missing wings or headlights, but basically in one piece. It may have been just storage for cars being worked on. My even younger sister & I were able to just wander around them & to sit in one or two.
Nearby was a petrol station & cafe where we'd stopped for lunch. Being in the NF, the pumps were camouflaged with fake logs & the rest of the premises had no garish colours anywhere.

Ring any bells with anyone?
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2002 MINI Cooper 'S'