MTFCA Forum

at auction Friday nite. Brass was stolen by vandals, otherwise appears to be correct car. 40 yr. old restoration. Sold for $16,000 plus the juice.

" .... Brass was stolen by vandals. "

=====================================

One shot, one kill. Problem solved. Problem stays solved.

Thanks for posting this. I forgot to watch it. Any results for the Model S? I bought a car through their auction house and Donley auctions was fantastic to deal with. Great people. Wish I was there to watch.

Model S brought $14,000 plus the juice

Thanks for the update. I thought it might go for a little more but then I didn’t see it up close either.

In the transaction where the brass was sold to the recycler, who do you suppose the bigger criminal was...the seller or buyer?

when I was poor and just starting out with my machine shop, I used to buy my turning stock from scrap dealers...they were cheap, and nearby, at the time. On occasion, I'd find the odd suspicious piece and one time I asked the dealer if he could recall when he got it. His response was that he didn't recall anything about it and didn't care where it came from or from whom, and why the he!! did I care?...it was all scrap to him. Shortly after that, I started ponying up the $$ for known alloy, new steel and have never been back to a scrapper since then. I am certain that this is not the attitude of all scrap dealers, universally, but it was for the one I did business with, and that ended our relationship.

Gads! Even the hub caps and valve stems! Shame. Wonder if this was recent or a while back?

Hi Bob,

Given the damage to the driver’s side of the radiator, it looks like they tried to pry or knock the radiator off, but those pesky mounting bolts twarted their efforts. Or maybe the damage came from something else.

Keep crankin’,
Eric

When I was growing up, my dad knew a recycler that was a decent, honest (I think?), man. I wound up going through much of the 8th through 12th grades with one of his sons (a real jerk, group bully, etc). The dad bought scrap in large and small amounts (often big truckloads!). His workers watched out for suspicious items (especially in the small amounts), as well as antiques or anything of real value. His office and shop walls and ceilings were covered in antique tools, thousands of them, all saved from the meltdowns. He also was an early collector of antique and classic automobiles, driving his '25 Lincoln to meets and shows all over middle Califunny. He also had a Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, and a dozen other neat early cars.
He was the exception. Most recyclers (those that make a living from the "work"), are somewhere between a rat, and a cockroach. Anything not good for food, is only good for "nesting" material. They are clueless to any sort of beauty or artistic value. Everything that presents in front of them is all for them and their short-term greed and needs. There is no "right", therefore no wrong. The finest work of art in the form of a brass statuette is only good for the few dollars a pound the brass will resell for. A hundred year old gold pocket watch in perfect working order is only worth what the melted down gold will sell for on that day. When silver prices went through the roof years back? Common silver coins were melted down by the MILLIONS! Why? Melting them down did NOT in any way make them ANY more valuable! And untold numbers of rare and valuable coins (some individual coins were likely worth hundreds of dollars!?!) were melted down right along with the rest them.
I don't personally know about scrappers in other states, but all I have met in Califunny in the past thirty years have been that way. I found some antique car parts in a scrapper's pile one time when I hauled off some real junk littering my yard. I tried to buy the stuff just to save it from the Chinese smelters. I figured twice scrap value would be fair (I probably would have gladly paid three times). But, no. He wanted a couple hundred dollars for about fifty pounds of rusty parts. Take it or leave it (the stuff I had taken in weighed almost as much and he would only give me five dollars for it!). He didn't care what it was. It was his. And it was going to the meltdown like everything else he bought.
There isn't much brass in a set of lamps. Lamps worth hundreds of, maybe even more than a thousand, dollars, are only worth about fifty dollars in scrap.
But if one is a clueless liar and thief? Any dollar in your pocket is a good dollar.