Scraptastic!

“Can I pick those up tomorrow?” Frank Stone stands at the bottom of a thirty-foot mountain of stainless steel scrap metal and points to its peak—a bouquet of four-foot-long, auger-like spirals, salvaged from crop sprayers, flailing in the chilly wind. Employees at the American Iron scrapyard in North Minneapolis are well acquainted with Stone, who is perpetually on the hunt for metal that he can weld, bend, and hammer into furniture and decorative artworks, such as the fence surrounding the Surdyk’s parking lot in Northeast Minneapolis. After fifteen years of scavenging for scrap, he has accumulated enough brass and copper to fuel a small militia. (“My wife has more copper plant stands than any woman should be allowed to have,” he says.) These days, though, his taste for stainless steel frequently leads him to American Iron, which has a “nice nonferrous department.”

The American Iron warehouse is a surprisingly spic-and-span place, where Stone’s musings about ancient gears and punch-press skeletons echo across rows of bins of neatly organized alloy. “I’m workin’ on a table and I need some feet,” Stone tells Mark Christensen, American Iron’s manager. The two men wander among four-foot bins of bullet casings and fishing lure remnants. They scoop up handfuls of nispan (the curled remnants from drilling holes in stainless steel, if you didn’t know) and let it slip through their fingers like raw wheat or soybeans.

“This is probably from a cruise missile,” says Christensen, plucking an aluminum helix from his stash.

“It’d be better as a coffee table,” replies Stone.

He doesn’t find feet for his table on this trip, but Stone arranges to pick up the spirals later. Then it’s time to motor a few blocks north to Kirschbaum-Krupp. Whereas American Iron’s five-hundred-pound minimum limits it to corporate giants like Rosemount Aerospace and General Electric, Kirschbaum-Krupp is a more, shall we say, populist yard—a magnet, so to speak, for citizen scrappers with shopping carts filled with aluminum cans and other metals.

At Kirschbaum-Krupp, where the staff is blasting “American Woman” and tossing footballs, Stone scales heaps of discarded lampposts and dodges forklifts loaded with electrical cords or bales of crushed cans in the warehouse’s littered corridors. He gets excited when he spots a two-foot-diameter gear buried deep in a pile of junk. “I love round things, ’cause you can cut ’em in half.” But after climbing into the pile to investigate, Stone discovers that it’s missing a tooth. Rats! Wading out, he stumbles upon a consolation prize, a copper Washington, D.C., ashtray.

“Over the years, I’ve learned about shapes,” says Stone, whose playfully functional forms are easily recognized by collectors and copycats alike (he’s not the only artist/scrapyard scrounger). But those who admire his work might be surprised to learn that his artistic roots lie in stained-glass mosaics. “I started off making metal brackets to hold my stained glass,” he says.

“Then I started having more fun with metal than I was having with glass.”—Christy DeSmith