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Gusman Short long story... I went to my parent's farm for a visit last summer, one of many throughout the year to demonstrate to them the exemplary daughter than I am.
While participating in a little father/daughter bonding adventure, I made myself available to ride shotgun with my Dad in his pickup truck, sitting shoulder to shoulder with him on the black vinyl bench seat of his 1969 fully-restored Ford F-150 pickup truck with it's factory installed 8-track tape player and it's little no-draft triangular-shaped, tilt-out windows if you wanted air conditioning.
We were on our way to the county 'dump' to do a bit of mid-week scavenging with an unplanned side trip over to the local wrecking yard where he would show-off his faithful daughter to all of his semi-retired cronies who work part-time taking parts off cars and then talking about them all day long.
Yes, I will admit, I became the immediate focus of attention from the moment I stepped out of my Dad's truck as I sat there until he came around and opened my door for me like a true gentleman, despite me feeling tremendous anxiety the whole time in knowing that my only competition at the scrapyard was a 1946 Dodge pickup truck in the middle of the yard which some farmer had dragged in there behind his tractor, after extracting it from his fence line.
Yup, all eyes were on that beauty until I stepped out of my Dad's truck, then it became all about me... Oh, the pressure of natural beauty blending with testosterone weighed heavy on me.
The words "She really is a beauty, eh?!...", didn't necessary mean that I had won the scrapyard popularity contest on that hot and sultry day, oh no.... that would be purely speculative self-aggrandizement on my part. So then it became a tossup between me and that more mature-looking Dodge truck.
What I noticed when we first drove into the scrapyard with it's gravel base now sprayed with motor oil to keep the dust down, were three 40 foot long steel dumpster containers that were overflowing with aluminum specialty rims for mid-sized trucks I'm assuming, all of which looked brand new in my humble opinion.
Leaving the boys to talk shop while giving them ample opportunity to rate my own unparalleled beauty amongst themselves and of course behind my back, I went inside the yard sales office and spoke to the woman in charge, who of course was the scrapyard owner's wife but who actually ran the show and controlled the $.
Her and I hit it off really well when I asked her if anything was on sale or if I could use my points card if I bought something!
She replied "no and no, but if I wanted to buy something for cash, she'd offer free delivery to my home!".
I then inquired as to the history of the new-looking aluminum truck rims in the dumpsters and why on earth anyone would bring them to the scrap yard?
She informed me that they were junk... meaning they were knock-offs of the original style rims, but were made in another country and sold in Canada as 'after-market' identical versions of the original. The originals cost $1000 CAD and the after-market rims were $300 each at the retail level.
The only problem was, the knock-off rims were just microscopically different than the original rims produced and supplied from the car manufacturer's tech specs (which is what I research), but just different enough that the wheel nuts would back-off and loosen over time no matter how much torque was applied during the wheel's installation process.
This anomaly caused numerous incidents of wheels flying off pickup trucks in Canada and hitting other vehicles traveling in the opposite direction. Those knock-off rims were then banned by the Ministry of Transport which is why they were in the dumpster bins sitting out front, now rendered as scrap metal worth about $60 per metric tonne.
So I asked the woman if I could buy one of those aluminum rims? She said "Oh sure, how does $30 apiece sound, or 4 for $100 cash and delivered of course?!".
I didn't buy one because I don't actually drive a pickup truck myself, though my point was, that despite them being banned for being unsafe rims because of their dubious origin, she was still prepared to sell them to anyone who came into their scrapyard who was in search of a rim for their truck!
Just because some car part is banned or no longer deemed safe after exceeding it's time/shelf life, doesn't mean that it is illegal for a scrap dealer to sell those same banned or time-expired car parts to anyone who's got cash to buy them, which was the bottom line of what I found out that day.
And just for the record, I lost the scrapyard beauty contest to a 1946 Dodge that had 4 good tires.... and I'm still getting over it.
