How can I get 4k steel lumps quickly?

[SmSkdm]

I’m planning on upgrading my death mobile to something entirely new. I have an idea of the design, and looking at the item browser, I’m going to need about 4 thousand lumps to make it, with an error margin of 200. How can I obtain lumps quickly? I’ve tried cutting up vehicles, but it takes the better part of a day for 20 or so.

[Fuscosco]

Smash one car into another.

[SmSkdm]

Also, this is my vehicle.

I have about 500 vol. of storage left.

[Mantar]

If you’re not worried about noise, you can smash the car to bits. Explosives can help, too, if you have some laying around going to waste.

[SmSkdm]

Got about 50 for three ingame minutes. Add repairs and i should be averaging 30 every half-hour. Thank you!

[SmSkdm]

I’m not worried about noise, I end up killing everything in a ten kilometer radius of me anyway. Almost forgot about my explosive stockpile(which would be bad if i had a smoke).

[Coolthulhu]

Avoid explosives - at the moment they will vaporize items.
Car smashing works by destroying frames, which is efficient if you want to save some non-frame parts, but can add some work if you want everything as steel and not parts.

A relatively expensive but non-work-intensive way is to burn cars with flamethrowers. Big fires smash vehicle parts. This will destroy plastic and electronics, but the steel will be fine.

[Mantar]

I haven’t had much trouble with explosives vaporizing steel lumps, but then explosives rarely seem to actually destroy vehicle parts on anything but the barest wrecks. It usually just pushes the parts down a couple steps towards red, then I usually finish it off by smashing it regular-like.
Explosives should probably have more effect on vehicles I think.

[SmSkdm]

I can just cut them up, so it shouldnt add too much work. I’ve got a mini-flamethrower, so it shouldnt be too expensive. Thank you!

[SmSkdm]

Also, if you put vehicle controls on a bed, can you drive it?

[Zanos]

What do you actually need the lumps for? It might be easier to just got the finished part. If you need a built part like steel frames or metal sheets, you can just get another piece of shit car working and drive it over to your workshop and yank stuff off that.

[SmSkdm]

I want to build a death machine of… death. I considered scavenging them, but the lumps weigh less than the parts i’m going to make with them. Also, i have about 3k right now. Wreckages are low on health, and high on steel, and I collected it in three in-game days. I was expecting it to take much longer, but now i just need 800-ish plastic chunks and 432 solar cells, and I’m good to go.

[Zanos]

Weight doesn’t really matter if you’re just slapping a trash engine into a trash vehicle, driving it next to the one you’re building, and pulling all the parts onto the ground and just installing them from the ground.

[SmSkdm]

I realize that now. My top safe speed is 135, but considering how (relatively) rare the assembled parts are, I decided to collect them. I’m about a third done right now.

[darktoes]

If you can find an abandoned tank with broken treads, take the treads off. They’ll fall apart and give you hundreds of steel lumps and a big pile of steel chains.