Dumpster Diving

One of the commodities that we moved frequently was scrap metal. It was one of those things that moved in both directions on the river and, not being “in the know” about the dimensions of who was shipping it to where and why, remained something of a mystery to us. Usually one barge, seldom more that two, they were often mangled steel and sometimes a load of mangled stainless.

What we did know was that we had a potential cornucopia for our personal use. The deckhands were always on the lookout for decent sized and straight bar stock to use as “toothpicks”* and (with the addition of a cut chain link from a strap & links), C-bars for opening and closing pelican hooks on their ratchets. For me, steel plate in whatever thicknesses was fair game as long as it was straight, bar stock (gotta fight the deck crew for that!), pump shafts, angle iron, pipe, whatever looked useful for whatever project was currently underway or coming up in the near future.

Any engine room has a number of hoses and such that need to be hung up, so finding old car rims that weren't bashed up was always a plus. For a little bit of work with the torch, an angle grinder and the welder, you could have two decent hose hangers made from your find. On one barge of scrap, I found several eight inch trailer rims, and those made a nice rack for our stock of Aeroquip hoses that we kept on board.

When the deckhands found scrap that was useful to them, I would be the one that actually did the cutting and welding, the companies being fussy about who was wielding the things that got really hot, but I never minded. Spending a morning doing a little fabricating was a pleasant pastime.

One afternoon in the mid-nineties, we were working the Illinois River, and I was visiting with our pilot prior to supper. Shaggy was on a mild rant about the fact that where he lived, the kids liked to get drunk on the weekends, and cruise around smashing mailboxes with baseball bats. He was carrying on about this at length, and I was standing there eyeing the scrap barge we had in tow, one length out from the boat... I interrupted him to say, "Shags, I think that I'm looking at the solution to your problem." He asked, "What are you talking about?", and then he followed my gaze and went, "Oh, shit. Just what are you going to do?" I grinned and asked him what he had his mailbox mounted on, and he said a 4x4.

I grabbed a life jacket and took a walk out on tow to the scrap barge. Sure enough, there was a large amount of 5/16" coated steel plate in the barge. I sorted a few pieces out, headed back to the boat with them, and got busy.

Over the next few evenings, the plate steel was reshaped into a ball bat proof mailbox that had a lockable door that was hooded to prevent a bat from getting anywhere near the door and had two pieces of plate welded to the bottom spaced and drilled so that it could be mounted to a 4x4.

Shaggy took it with him when he went home. Grinning, he asked me if he owed me anything. I laughed and said that this one was on me, just get a photo of their teeth lying in the dirt after that aluminum bat had connected with the mailbox.