ACRE OF METAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 135, 9 June 1934, Page 7

ACRE OF METAL.

SCRAP FOR JAPAN.

SHIPMENT FROM AUCKLAND. REMAINS OF OLD VESSELS. Possibly the busiest plot in the city for the next few days will be a yard in Beaumont Street in the midst of shipyards and bulk petrol tanks on the Western Reclamation. Here, upwards of an acre of scrap metal is being loaded on to lighters and lorries for transport to the Melbourne Maru, and thence to the smelters of Japan.

What a miscellany meets the eye on an inspection of the junk! The bulk of it is tile "bones" of old ships which carried the Northern flag and traded up and down the coast for upwards of a quarter of a century. The famous Wakatere and the flat-bottomed Aupouri have in the past twelve months been won from the mud and now lie in sizes convenient to handle in stacks fifteen feet high. The old trawlers Kapu and Simplon have been broken up by the acetone torch and contribute quite a respectable quota to the tonnage. Tangle of Junk. Heavy kedge anchors lie athwart ships' plates; boiler tubes intermingle with old hawsers; donkey boilers, tanks, funnels and all the paraphernalia of steam vessels in apparent confusion, but actually in good position for the mechanical lifter. The old and new means of land transport have their representation. Cylinder blocks, tyre rims, springs, mudguards and differential housings of motor cars flank tons upon tons of horseshoes. Seawards, the donkey-boiler of a lighter wheezes and the boom creaks in the strain of lifting aboard sections of a hull averaging well over a ton which are submerged at high tide. Ashore, a more ingenious method of loading is at work. For sheer difficulty in handling, scrap metal running to size, is hard to equal, but a steam shovel ovcr-

comes all the inconveniences of irregular shapes and protruding gussets. With ample drift in its jibarm, the excavator's falls lifts its load above the lorry without an effort. An expert application of the shovel places the steel into jts lowering position. With its caterpillar equipment, the excavator advances with the moving face of the yard-full of steel and promises by Wednesday next to have dealt with fully 1000 tons of scrap. Old Mission Vessel.

Not all the shipment will be the cause of so much concern and bustle against sailing time. Already some 200 tons repose safely in the Melbourne Maru'a holds. Upwards of hall of this portion of the scrap hails from the old mission schooner Southern Cr/ss, the only vessel that went up but did not go down the Harbour Board's slipway. This lot had been stored in railway trucks and had merely to be shunted to the ship's side. It consisted almost entirely of foundry puncliings and presented the final difficulty to the shipbreakers. These burrs, or rivet heads, had beeji run into the curved bays between two three-inch layers of concrete, right on the ship's skin and broken only by the coffer dams. Men who have gone down to the seas for more years than they are wont to own, declared they had no\ or seen the like in a ship's bottom. Originally a three-sticked . sailer, rumour has it that the Southern Cross nearly turned turtle in the Bay of Biscay early in her career. It is quite likely that | after this experience this means of giving the vessel more stability was adopted. Welded Together. But whence came such a quantity of uniform heads? Amstrong-Whitworth were the builders, and probably the welter of burrs came from their huge foundries. Shifting tliem was the job of the shipbreakers. Many said it "had them beaten." A form of encrustation had practically welded them together, defying the efforts of a. popper-drili. Arrangements were actually made for the floating crane to lift the three sections and dump them into the boat harbour at St. Mary's Bay. When the cost was assessed, the wreckers fell back on the original idea of tackling the proposition with the old-fashioned but effectual means of hammers and gads. Half a. dozen teams of ex-blacksmiths and miners kept up a steady onslaught

on the mass, and two days saw its undoing, though those with sporting proclivities had to forgo the Wellington - Auckland football match to get the job through! Packed into drums that carried 2cwt of carbide, the burrs sent the scales past the scwt mark. Agricultural Demand. And so "up to the Orient." "It will come back to us as bullets,'' declare the militant-minded. "Razor blades," facetiously remark the pacifists. In touch with the buyers, the vendors have no qualms on this score. The building and agricultural demand for steel in Japan is such that in a non-ferrous country this importation of scrap iron has been forced, and has proceeded apace from European countries ever since the Nippon became Westernised. The present activity in the Antipodes is merely a pursuance of this industrial policy. Should the steel render as good land as it did marine service, "the little brown men" will have no cause to regret their bargain.