I used to love watching Junkyard Wars. Does anybody know of any more recent shows that are similar? It doesn’t have to be building things out of junk, although that was a major element I enjoyed of the show, I just like watching people build things through ingenuity.
Also, if anybody would like to discuss Junkyard Wars that would be fun too. 
I share your enthusiasm for this show but haven’t seen an episode for quite a few years. I’m not aware of Junkyard Wars being available on any channel in NZ.
Similarly I enjoyed Robot Wars but it disappeared 10 years ago only to reemerge recently on an obscure channel. I think it was good at a time when my young son also watched with enthusiasm. Sadly he has put away childish things…
Junkyard Wars was fun, although I suspected that the junkyard was “seeded” with things the teams would need for their build.
I think the show originated in the UK and later had a US version. I preferred the UK episodes. But I remember one episode in which a UK team competed against a US team. In the middle of the episode, the UK team took a tea break (i.e., meal break), while the US team just plowed through. I thought that was funny.
Yeah I don’t think there’s much doubt that they spoke the experts beforehand and made sure the the scrapheap had the critical components needed to implement it. But it seemed that even the critical components were scrap. That never diminished the show for me as it was clear that the spirit of premise was preserved.
And yes, the UK version were millions of times better than the US version in my view.
I loved that show, too. The fact that the parts they might need might have been scattered around the junkyard didn’t diminish the knowledge, skill, and teamwork required to accomplish the assigned task.
It’s not quite the same but if you turn on the Velocity station and check out any of the 800 different car building/rebuilding shows, they’re basically the same concept. That is, they push a heap of rust into the shop and at the end you have a work of art and the middle is 47 minutes of watching them weld, grind, work through problems and good around. From there, it’s just a matter of figuring out which one you like. I really like Bitchin’ Rides
As for it being seeded, I just assumed it was, they always found exactly the parts they needed way too fast. Of course, you also can’t have a bunch of people in a 200 acre junkyard for 6 hours. I understand it’s easier to say ‘here ya go, you should find critical parts within 100 feet and right on the surface of the pile’. They still have to look, they still have to know what they’re looking for (and be thinking along the same lines as the people that seeded the pile), but at it keeps things moving along.
I’m just tossing this out there in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, but what about Mythbusters? They did an awful lot of building on that show.
I think that they also tried to make it so that better parts were harder to scrounge (on average).
Scrapheap Challenge was the original UK version. I think it could probably be restarted with only minor changes, making it less about vehicles and more about engineering.
I also was a big fan and I would love to find something similar or a revival of the original.
This is what made Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard wars better than most of the car/motorcycle rebuilding shows mentioned upthread. Yes, they did build vehicles, but they also built lots of other things - water pumps, battering rams, stuff like that. It was as much about coming up with the idea for the device as it was the building of it. The greater variety made for a better show.