New 'toy' turns cars to scrap in minutes

With a smile, and against a background noise of tearing metal and shattering plastic, Nigel Brown described his latest dismantling "toy" as like a mechanical crayfish.
"A couple of claws to hold on to something and a couple to tear it apart," the Napier Auto Supplies manager said as the country's only Japanese-built Kobelco multi-dismantling machine completely took a car apart in just 20 minutes.
"There's four of these in Australia but this is the first one in New Zealand," Mr Brown said, explaining that while they had been operating in Japan for several years they had never been exported for use in other countries until recently.
The global economic crisis and need for new markets changed that and the company made them available for export.
Always looking to streamline and find cost-effective ways of dismantling and wrecking cars for scrap, Mr Brown contacted the company and put in an order.
They don't go cheap - you'll need about $430,000 if you want one to play with.
"They flew me up there to meet with them as I was buying one," he said.
The Japanese company also sent three of its representatives to "unveil" the great machine at the Pandora wrecking yard as it was the first to operate in this country.
What would previously have been a two or three-person operation, with some occasional risk attached, was now a one-person operation with that operator doing it all from the comfortable seat of a glass encased cab.
"It has a rotating claw. You can just grab an engine mount, twist it and tear it right off."
When the machine is in action it not only tears steel apart ... it also delivers flashbacks to those futuristic science fiction movies where great destructive robots battle each other.
It took about three seconds to pull an entire engine out after its mounts had been fractured with a simple twist of the claw.
Yet the claw is sensitive enough to pull a small clump of wiring, or a wiperblade, free.
Mr Brown said he had about 200 hours' experience on the 27-tonne monster since it first fired up about three months ago and could happily tear apart a van in 15 minutes.
"It used to take two guys half a day."
He said the machine was a vital part of the growing wrecking business, with up to a dozen cars being dropped off for dismantling, and crushing into steel and aluminium blocks, every day.
"Last Friday though we had 21 arrive. The yard's full ... we're struggling to keep up."
Which was why he had to excuse himself and head back to the cab to tear another chassis to shreds.
And, as he said with a laugh, "because it really is pretty cool fun".