WANTED : Kinner Exhaust Assembly

[crusty old aviator]

Are you looking for a collector for the R55 on Cam Harrod's Finch?

I was taking to some old geezer last fall and he told me of what he believed was a stainless R55 exhaust ring, hanging on someone's barn as a decoration. They do sort of resemble horseshoes, and you could hold a LOT of luck in one, so...following the geezer's directions, I went to the farm and met up with the owner.

He said he'd bought the place about six years ago and there had been some kind of "artwork" hanging up in the gable of the barn when he bought the place, but it went with the stanchions and other metal scrap. "Where did the scrap go?" He didn't know, as the local scrap man hauled it off. "Do you remember his name?" Yes...but I don't know where he lives.

I went to the local general store (every village in New England has one) and asked about where I could find "Tink" the scrapman. He was in some happy camp for geezers over in the next town...so I found that place and located Tink. Nice guy: he couldn't find his reading glasses, so I spent almost an hour reading the latest issue of Mother Jones magazine to him. I asked if he remembered picking up the scrap with the "artwork." He did and he distinctly recalled the collector ring because he had to hang out the loft door to pry it off the wall and it came down on his head! He figured he'd get extra for it because it was stainless steel. "Where did you take it?" He took it to a scrap yard about 12 miles away, just off one of the larger highways. He said he remembered NOT getting extra money for the stainless because when he'd arrived at the yard, the dumpster was already loaded on the yard's truck and was ready to go. They hurriedly weighed his truck, had him park beside their truck and threw everything in the dumpster, then weighed their truck, logged it and away it went, then they weighed his truck to determine how much scrap he'd brought. All this commotion made him forget to mention the exotic material until it was a done deal. I bid him farewell and headed toward the scrapyard.

The scrapyard guy was real nice, he kept offering me coffee, which I've never acquired a taste for. "Do you have any idea where that load of scrap went?" He didn't remember Tink bringing the collector, but he said if I knew the exact date, he could look in his records to see where that dumpster ended up. He explained they deal with many scrap houses and go wherever the price for the day is highest, provided the mileage works out. Since it had been six years, unless someone recognized it for what it was and pulled it off the pile, it probably went to China, got melted down and is now back in the States as something you could buy cheap at Walmart. He said you'd be surprised at the amount of irreplaceable historical artifacts that get scrapped out of sheer historical ignorance. He blamed radio, TV, and now computers, for eliminating family story-telling to the point where people no longer know nor appreciate their family histories. If they did, Ancestry.com would be bigger than Facebook. So there's where the trail went cold, despite the pot of hot coffee.

Helping Cam find that collector is proving to be a much bigger adventure than I thought! I figured I'd see one on Ebay or Barnstormers.com and let him know about it...pretty naive of me, eh?