With Projects Like This, Who'd Want to be an Art Major?

I dragged Mom and David to a scrap yard downtown today. I was looking for 1/8" steel for my welding class. I was expecting tidy heaps of metal, separated by their composition. Or maybe, here is the pipe, here is the plate, here is the sheet, and here are the odd pieces.Instead, we drove in a potholed driveway, through high barbed wire fences. The yard was a mountain range of orange metal, buttressed by the odd train car or truck chassis. After explaining what I was looking for to an employee, I was told to wander around and pick up whatever I wanted. The pavement had rotted away in some areas, leaving huge sink holes filled with weeds and last night's rain. Up behind an old industrial air conditioning unit, I found my first rusted sheet. David and I tried to scale one mountain, where tires, wood pallets, and rubber hoses crossed guard rails, computers, metal cabinets, and small scraps.We eventually found the rest of the sheets I needed in a small dumpster, at the bottom, of course. It took 5 employees and a forklift to pull them out.

At a metal distributor, my metal, with delivery to the school, would have been about $200. At the scrap yard, for about 100 pounds of steel, I paid forty-four dollars and an interesting day.