London, Aug. 29.
Urged on by the assurance that 5,000 aluminium pots and pans will make one fighter aircraft and that 25,000 will make one bomber, the housewives of Britain have fairly wamped the aircraft Production Ministry with their gifts of light metal kitchenware, It is stated that within 24 hours of Lord Beaverbrook's dramatic appeal en July 10, every one of the official dumps provided for these utensils throughout the country was filled to overflowing.
Actually there is no shortage of aluminium scrap in the country. In faci, there are several thousand tons of it virtually unsalable to the authorities. Lord Beaverbrook is calling for aluminium utensils because they are máde from 994 per cent. pure "rolled aluminium" which in the short space of two weeks can be made into "billets" from which strips can be extruded for airplane construction. Stocks in merchants' yard, on the other hand, consist largely of aluminium alloys which can mainly be used only for castings. These are not wanted in the present emergency.
Some trade authorities think that there is in this country, especially in War Office and Air Ministry circles, an over-insistence upon virgin metal and an unwarranted prejudice against the mixing of scrap metal This prejudice does not exist to the same extent in the United States where scrap aluminium moves rapidly and steadily into consumption—United Press,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.