Last week I decided to clean out the bed of my Jeep pickup. I haven't used it in about 8 months and we have been putting cut off scraps of steel in the bed to get them out of the shop. So I loaded them into the trunk of my Crown Vic and hauled a load to the local scrap yard. Ended up I had 480 lbs of it in there, and I figured I would walk away with a $ 20 bill. Surprise, surprise!!! It brought $55.80 !! No wonder the junk yards are being picked clean of all the old cars, they are worth a bunch of money right now. Sad part is, these are the very cars that most of us look for to do our projects, either as the base car or for the components.

When I was at the scrap yard there was a line of trucks and trailers hauling stuff into the yard, everything from complete cars to a big old farm tractor. I remember a time when the junkman wouldn't even come to pick up an old car because it wasn't worth his time, boy, has that changed.

By the same token, new steel is up too. We just paid $ 200 for a stick of tubing that we used to pay $ 100 for.

Don