Scrapyard Photos; Any More?

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Cees: May I have a rest now?

SA Metals / SAAF Snake valley

Referring to the four Spitfires recovered by Larry Barnett from SA Metals yard in Cape Town it is worth noting the SAAF Museum pulled a further 5 going on 6 major fuselage sections from the yard prior to my visit July 1981. The SAAF recovered these sections to their Snake Valley facility.

Whilst at that time the pieces were ‘interesting’, who could have imagined what these pieces would grow into by the turn of millennium?

In fact you could say that 4% of the world’s Spitfires emanated from this scrapyard.

When I hear people talking of data plate Spitfires in connection with these and other recoveries I think they are actually missing the point.

One fuselage section/firewall, thought at the time to be ML196 or similar, was lost when an over enthusiastic owner ‘Brillo-padded’ the stencilled identity from the firewall. Infra red and police forensic photography failed subsequently to resuscitate the serial evidence. Pr**!

With an international flight to catch I had just one hour to photograph, identify, log serial stencils/data plates and remove a radiator assembly from a ‘ratty’ wing.

Summarising the recovered Spitfire with their current location and disposition:-

BR601 USA Restoration to airworthy – resting

LZ842 UK Restoration to airworthy in progress

MH603 USA Restoration to airworthy – resting

ML196? ** Lost

ML255 Portugal Restored to static museum display condition

SM520 UK Restoration to airworthy in progress

TA805 UK Restoration to airworthy in progress

TD314 UK/Canada Restoration to airworthy in progress

TE294 Canada Restoration to airworthy in progress

Mark

Photos by Mark12 & and couple from Peter Sledge from an earlier visit.

20 plus images to follow.

This is an amazing thread.

I find it interesting how untidy the scrap yards were. I’d have thought anyone scrapping aircraft and other things would sort different types of metals and materials out into seperate piles rather than just shove and bulldoze it into a big mishmash. It must certainly have caused much more work in the end when they were scrapped after this storage, sorting out what was what in the mangled twisted wrecks. Seems silly to me.

I saw a programme on Discovery the other week featuring one of the BIG US yards scrapping L1011s and such like – they were organised and tidy, kind of a production line in reverse.

I recall from my days as a kettle spotter >ahem< the Barry scrapyard where old engines went to die tackled easy to cut and lucrative metals first and left the other stuff as a reserve for leaner times to keep the cutters busy… thankfully for the wonderful world of kettles… shame there was no Barry for planes

10.007 and counting

Hope the photo posting will work soon

Cheers

Cees

The best thread on the forum. But I still don’t understand how the scrap business works. E.g. what was the point of having Typhoon elevators or Bristol Hercules cowlings knocking about in your scrapyard for 50 years? :confused:

A mix of steel and mag alloy and too much effort to scrapfor the money

Maybe they were just taken off and forgotten about?

The Best Thread

The best thread on the forum. But I still don’t understand how the scrap business works. E.g. what was the point of having Typhoon elevators or Bristol Hercules cowlings knocking about in your scrapyard for 50 years? :confused:

On next week’s Scrapheap Challenge….

😉

Next forum outing maybe, a visit to a scrap yard !!!

We had a stash of Bristol Hercules and Mercury cowl gill rings which came out of the old scrapyard at Chippenham in the 90’s, just before they turned it into a Sainsbury’s. Apparently the boss had been given a tip off that there might be something there, rocked up one day with a metal detector and a shovel, got told to ‘feel free to have a dig around over there mate’, got a trace, scraped away a few inches of topsoil, and voila! After stripping them down, cleaning them, inspecting them, and refurishing the ones which would go again, we got two Herc’s worth of usable cowl gill assemblies out of that lot. Just goes to show what’s still out there if you’re willing to go and look. 🙂

Question is, what is still hidden in these scrap yards today waiting for the likes of Mark 12 to uncover them???

i.e. like the Hind’s (not the Russian Egg Beater) etc in Afghanistan !!!!

How weird. I just found some old magazines last week, and amongst them an old CAF magazine from 1977 where there was an article by Larry Barnett on the recovery, and rebuild of MA793. He mentions that the deal was that they had to rebuild BR601 to be put on a pole in the front of his yard. This was completed just in time before the article was published (July 1977).

T J

This is an amazing thread.

I find it interesting how untidy the scrap yards were. I’d have thought anyone scrapping aircraft and other things would sort different types of metals and materials out into seperate piles rather than just shove and bulldoze it into a big mishmash. It must certainly have caused much more work in the end when they were scrapped after this storage, sorting out what was what in the mangled twisted wrecks. Seems silly to me.

When actually doing the smelting, do/did the scrappers go to the trouble of seperating each different specification of alloy type and keep them seperate for future use in the aviation industry, etc, or is the lot melted down into a slurry of undefinable metal usable only in low grade stuff like pots and pans?

The photo I find most sad is the one of the airliner (Britannia?) on page six, second photo in HP81’s post. It looks like a dead and decaying animal, with such a sad expression on it’s face. Awful.

This thread has got me wondering about the scrapping of aircraft here in NZ. As well as the massive aircraft grave yard at nearby Rukuhia, I know a lot was also scrapped at RNZAF Hobsonville, including a Seafire XV, a Firefly I, a load of Sunderlands (as late as the 1970’s) and goodness knows what else. I wonder if anything was buried, maybe in the base dump. I have a photo in an issue of NZ Wings of a load of Sunderlands all beached on Hobsonville’s airfield, awaiting the axe. Eventually one went to Motat and a cockpit was flown to Ferrymead in Christchurch.

S A Metals – Cape Town

Is this BR601?

Taken off the gate, exported to the UK, sold to Doug Arnold and via D1ck Melton exported to the US, and resting to be awoken again in the hopefully not too distant future?

Cheers

Cees

Cees,

Yes this is BR601, currently residing at the Lone Star Flying Museum awaiting its turn.

BR601 resided at SA Metals for many years just sitting by the fence, on its undercarriage, but shorn of most of its wings outboard of the wheel bays.

When Larry Barnett and Alan Lurie embarked on the recovery and restoration of their MA793 from the Meerhof hospital, my understanding is that they struck a deal with the S A Metals proprietor, Harold Barnett, a former Spitfire pilot, that they could remove visible Spitfire wreckage from the yard and parts from BR601, as they required for spares, and in return they were to remove BR601 and restore it to external display condition and return it for erection on a plinth. The result of this is my posted photo above with the Table Mountain backdrop.

By the then standards, the removed items at the time, 1968/9, were not seen as anything other than a potential spares source for the flying project MA793. It was to be a further twelve years before the RAF identities of these Spitfires could be finally laid down with 100% certainty, requiring a visit, a trawl through numerous photographs and a study of residue junk from the rebuild in various out buildings. All this not helped by:- 1) the fact that even to this day we do not have a definitive list of RAF/SAAF serial tie ups for their Spitfire fleet and 2) two of the fuselages had been traded to Canada and Australia respectively.

Here are a couple of shots taken at Benoni airfield near Johannesburg where the recovered aircraft were stored/dumped. The local flying club soon asked them to be removed assuming the project to fly a Spitfire was doomed. This was probably the greatest spur for Larry Barnett and Alan Lurie to succeed in their quest, and they did.

In these photos you can see BR601 on its shorn wings, MA793 with no no tail and its wings leaning alongside, the full fuselage with tail of 5632/RR232, the chopped behind the cockpit fuselage of TD314 and the short fuselage stub of LZ842.

This was only the beginning of what was finally to emerge from SA Metals.

Mark

Jeepman – She certainly deserves a safe home in the U.K . The Dutch machine isn’t very relevant to the U.K. However I feel it will take private enterprise to get her home!

Thanks David’thats another old query of mine answered!
Alan.

John – The Neptune is WX515 which at one stage was going to return to the U.K by air. However that plan fell through so she now languishes. Hopefully she will survive
and find a home in the U.K.

shame she can’t be swapped for the one currently on show at Cosford – an ex RAF example would be far more appropriate

Same machine- I believe there were problems concerning her airworthiness and what was required to correct those problems.

David,I seem to remember along(10-15 years!) ago that Air Atlantique were talking about bringing a Neptune over from the states,was it this one or do know any more info?
Regards Alan.

John – The Neptune is WX515 which at one stage was going to return to the U.K by air. However that plan fell through so she now languishes. Hopefully she will survive
and find a home in the U.K.