How Scrap Yards Help You Buy Smart
In South Africa, scrap yards are popular, it’s true, and located around every major city–sometimes it seems around every suburb! ” Cash 4 scrap” is common signage. For motorists looking for spares, however, those kinds of “scrap yards” are mostly dealing in waste metals, not car parts. Some, of course, will strip and stash auto parts they recognise as having common value, but usually, when you’re talking “cash for scrap metal”, you’re talking about a recycling yard, where they pay a fixed price per kilogram, whether it’s a car, a bakkie load of old steel you found lying around your yard, or the space shuttle. These are yards that are only interested in the cost per kilogram of recognised metals.
Old school scrap yards where you can browse stripped cars and refurbished parts are an entirely different kind of yard. In auto scrap yards, cars are stripped for spares that are then inspected, refurbished, and sold as spares, not scrap metal. When a car has outlived its usefulness, when it’s making constant expensive demands for spares just to stay on the road, or when it’s met a Greyhound bus and lost, it will ideally end up in an auto scrap yard. Because cars are fairly complex machines, crushing them and folding them up into a block of recycling metal makes no sense, not when there is a far higher value and far greater benefits for the environment in repurposing whatever can be salvaged from them. Not only the environment but of course motorists benefit hugely from the secondhand spares market. It saves money on parts, but it also saves a huge amount of time and hassle when you visit a well-organised auto scrap yard.
Can You Trust Scrap Spares?
The short answer is, of course, you can, and it’s likely several million South Africans are well aware of the custom and practice of using good secondhand spares to keep their cars on the road. It’s not about being cheap; it’s about the fact that engineered mechanical components simply have a longer life span than the average wreck allows for. Probably as many cars are scrapped before their time because of severe accident damage as those who die a natural death after a life of long service. That severe damage, however, belies the fact that beneath a smashed or missing or dramatically crumpled exterior shell lies a host of components that seldom, if ever, suffer in an accident.
It really is a full-time thing, stripping for spares, which is why most motorists on the hunt for good used spares will go to dedicated outlets involved in just such spares stripping. This brings us to the next level of need for motorists－with so many outlets stripping out spares, who do you trust? The short answer is－trust those who guarantee what they sell you! Perhaps equally important, look for an outlet that carries a good variety of spares, as that’s indicative of their time in the game, and a dedication to the process. It’s important that you can trust your used spares supplier because all of the value and utility in buying good used spares collapses, if you end up buying junk somewhere. Good used spares really can be as good as the new version, and sometimes even fit better too.
A Word About Scrapping Your Car
If it’s your vehicle that you want to scrap and strip for spares, you have a number of obligations and options in South Africa. Firstly, don’t forget that “scrapping” your car is more than just ransacking it for spares and leaving it standing idle forevermore. You have to get your paperwork right, and a scrapped car in this country demands that you deregister for the usual motoring expenses associated with the car, as well as make sure the authorities list it as scrapped. In South Africa, that means visiting the nearest registering authority, in order to formally notify them that the car is to be scrapped. If you visit a reputable scrap yard, of course, their scrap vehicles will have undergone the necessary procedures to be stripped out for spares. Unless you were planning on scrapping your car for spares yourself, you might consider selling it wholesale to scrap yards who make a living out of it.
This is common practice and a great solution for all parties. You get a market-related price for your scrap vehicle, based on the metals and components it contains, and the scrap yard gets another car to strip. Don’t forget, the price isn’t going to be great! In fact, so common is the practice of scrapping cars via scrap yards, the industry even has general norms on what you can expect. Typically, the better condition your old car is in, the more you can expect for it. Depending on the model and condition, you’ll get between 10 and 20 percent of the car’s retail value when scrapping it. That might seem low, but it’s more than anyone will be willing to pay for a car they’ll essentially have to rebuild, and the scrap yards also get the hard part of the deal. They have to strip everything out, test components, refurbish where necessary, and still put their gear on a shelf and wait for customers. On the whole, while the price for scrap vehicles might seem low, it pans out to be fair to all parties when you think about it.
Come to A.S.A.P. Spares for the Best Offers and the Best Used Spares
At A.S.A.P. Spares, we’re an auto scrap yard with drive! We’ll buy your scrap vehicle or supply you new or used parts to keep your baby going. We’re a general spares outlet, but we focus particularly on Suzuki, Opel, Renault, Peugeot, Citroen, and Chevrolet. We stand by everything we sell, and we’ve been the key player in more DIY repairs than we can remember! You can trust our spares, our advice, and our service, and we also go out of our way to pay those looking to scrap their vehicles the most for their car.
We’ll work transparently through its value with you so that you know you’re getting a fair deal. We’re all about taking the sting out of spares prices for the motoring enthusiast, and we’ll never compromise our relationship with you by fobbing ill-fitting or unsuitable components off on our customers. We’re the other end of the auto spares trade, the legitimate, professional one, and when it comes to scrap yards, we should be your first port of call. Call us, mail us, or just swing by. Let A.S.A.P. Spares be your go-to parts depot, and you’ll wonder why you ever bought anywhere else!