Would anyone buy a truck of any sort with just 60 horsepower today? Nissan was proud of that power level back in 1965! This truck is remarkably complete and includes some no-doubt-impossible-to-find bits, such as a nice steering wheel and all the dash switches. Let's hope some vintage Datsun lover grabs these parts before the Crusher gobbles them up!

I think this is one of the coolest emblems ever made. In fact, I like it so much that I took it home!

A parts car, destined to be picked clean and then discarded as scrap, or a project that just became too overwhelming and/or pissed off the landlord and/or wife to the point where the junkyard seemed like the only way out? Impossible to say. In any case, it appears that a few bits and pieces- including the engine and transmission- remain on this Olds.

That means that plenty of fairly solid 1970s Civics go straight to the boneyard as soon as a $300 problem crops up. I think it's a shame, because most of the Civic's competition back in the day (e.g., Corolla, Pinto, Colt) tended to be several notches below the Civic in the "fun to drive" category, and even Toyota felt a bit threatened by the Honda's reliability. I still recall feeling humiliated, 20 years ago, that my girlfriend's '73 Civic could eat up my '73 MGB-GT in every category from acceleration to braking to electrical-system quality (yeah, the last one is a fish-in-a-barrel deal). Here's one I spotted in a nearby self-service yard a few weeks back.

Is that 97,000 miles... or 397,000 miles? The interior was pretty decent, so I'm guessing the lower number is more likely.

There's the "dump 'em in a big bucket, let God sort 'em out" method, which saves time up front but means you'll spend hours digging through 100 pounds of greasy junk every time you need a certain bolt. Then there's the "sort 'em obsessively by size/type and put them in eensy, well-labeled drawers for later use" method, which takes for-freakin'-ever but pays dividends when you're working on your Hell Project at 2:00 AM and all the hardware stores are closed.

My method is half-assed organized; I have drawers for broad categories of fasteners (Long Bolts, Lock Washers, Machine Screws, etc.) and mix all the metric and SAE stuff higgledy-piggledy. A few Whitworth bolts have found their way into the mix, just to add to the fun. Hose clamps, weird pressure fittings, gauge senders, and other oddball crap gets quasi-sorted as well. The upshot: after a quarter-century of junkyard scrounging, I've got a big enough collection of hardware to find what I need… if I'm really motivated. How about you?

Speaking of not coming back, I've considered axing the entire Down On The Junkyard series. Why? Because dudes will find an 18-month-old DOTJ post with a car they're looking for via Google (for example, a search for "Renault 16" will show a DOTJ post as the 3rd result), and then start pestering me to sell them the parts from "my" car. When I tell them that the junkyards I frequent turn over their entire inventory every few months and that the car was crushed long ago (not to mention the fact that I'm not in the parts-selling business), they refuse to believe me. Look, the pictures are right there! Sell me parts! It was tolerable the first few hundred times, but now I'm getting so damn many of these demands for parts from long-ago-crushed cars that I'm approaching Clueless Internet Incomprehension Burnout. So, let's say it's 2012 and you're looking for parts for your Squareback and you've found this post: THIS CAR IS GONE! CRUSHED! RENDERED INTO CHEAP WASHING MACHINES IN GUANGZHOU!


Where were we? Oh yes, this '71 Squareback. Look, it's the carbureted engine, and the twin Solexes are still there! In fact, everything is still there. Fresh junkyard finds are fun!

The interior is pretty well thrashed, but a few usable bits remain.

I was scoping the junkyard for interesting stuff when I spotted this '87 Nissan Maxima. I figured I'd check for a Voice Annunciator Phonograph Unit within.

It appears that Nissan had gone solid-state for their "talking car" feature by 1987, so no tiny phonograph. Disappointing. But then a row of dash controls caught my eye.

You can tell that engineers came up with this arrangement, not a bunch of Apple-worshiping designers and their focus-group-wrangling marketing overlords. No doubt the Japanese version of the "SECU- RITY" light (which I assume has something to do with a primitive mid-80s alarm system) sports a graceful kanji character, and when the engineers got their English translation it just made sense to hyphenate the word to make it fit. What the hell, right? You can still understand it! We gotta move these Maximas out the door, ASAP!

It all started about two years ago, when I caught the 24 Hours Of LeMons jones, bad. How bad? Bad enough to put a team together, drop a Ford 302 in a Volvo 244, and enter the notorious Altamont "Demolition Derby" LeMons race back in early '08. With a Scandinavian Black Metal theme, the car needed to look evil! And thus began the saga of the Screaming Skulls...

Nowadays, my beater '92 Civic sports a pair of clattery, chattery "talking" skulls that use up pretty much all of the hatch area's storage capacity. When I hit the brakes, the jaws open and close (with enough force to bite through a celery stalk; yes, I've tested the bite power) and the eyes gleam a menacing- yet safe- red.

They're loud and annoying, but totally worth it. All it took was a few bucks in parts and hundreds of hours of time.

First, I needed a couple of plastic skulls. It turns out that "factory fourth" med-student skulls are dirt cheap on eBay. They're cheap because they tend to have different colors for the cap and face, or maybe some missing teeth, or just ill-fitting parts. None of that mattered for this project, so I ordered two right away.

My initial plan was to use vacuum motors, or "suck power," to actuate the jaws. I grabbed a couple of heater-vent vacuum actuators from a Chevy Astro Van and started cutting holes in the skulls. They're made of very dense, heavy plastic that's quite easy to drill, cut, and grind. I started the project by drilling out the eye sockets and cutting another hole at the base of the skull for the steel pipe that will form the "neck."

The illuminated red "eyeballs" were made from a pair of steel-and-glass Alfa Romeo warning lights, pulled from junked Alfa Spiders. Junkyard tip: always grab these lights when you see them; the quality is excellent and they're easy to mount on your homemade instrument panel projects.

The jaws on the cheapo plastic skulls don't include a reliable hinge mechanism for the jaw, so I went with a homemade rod-and-tube arrangement. Drill some holes, push the pipe through the jaw holes and a piece of tubing, then JB weld the ends in place.

Here you can see the pipe T fitting epoxied into place at the base of the skull, as well as the installation and wiring for the eyeball lights.

The Astro Van vacuum actuator goes into an aluminum spacer plate that mounts between the skull and its lid. There's a rod going down to the jaw. During high vacuum (engine deceleration), the actuator will suck the jaw closed; mash the gas pedal and the resulting low vacuum will let the springs pull the jaw open. Now repeat these steps with a second skull!

We mounted the skulls on the car's roof, hooked them up to a vacuum port on the intake manifold, and went racing. The skulls worked, but the jaws only opened at WFO throttle and it was a chore to get the springs adjusted for the correct tension. Clearly, I'd need to go to electrically-operated skulls next time!

I didn't have to look far to find electric actuators for the upgrade; most Volvo 240s came standard with power door locks. I sold the actuators that came with our car to meet LeMons budgetary requirements, so I had to hit the junkyard to get some more for the skulls. Here's a promising candidate!

Here's a mugshot of a typical Volvo 240, to make your junkyard shopping trip go faster.

First step is to remove the window crank, armrest, and door panel.

There's the actuator! A few turns of the wrench and a snip of the cutters and it shall be mine.

Voila! One more and I'm done.

My junkyard shopping isn't through yet, though; I'll need some relays and a turn signal flasher to create the "brain" that will control the skulls. Next stop is a 1980s BMW for some Bosch relays. This E30 looks promising.

There we go! This project requires three SPDT relays per skull, for a total of six. No problem finding Bosch SPDTs on an E30- just look for the ones with five terminals, including two labeled "87a" and "87b." As for the turn signal flasher, I like the old-fashioned cylindrical ones from pre-1990s Detroit cars; these skulls will use Chrysler K-car flashers.

The control circuitry is pretty simple: the power to the eyes and the coil of Relay #1 goes through the turn signal flasher (I added a taillight bulb, labeled "Load Bulb" in the diagram, inside the skull to provide enough current draw to make the flash rate a bit faster). When the coil on Relay #1 activates, it causes the coils of Relay #2 and Relay #2 to activate, which reverses the polarity of the power leads going to the lock actuators in the skulls. This causes the actuators to deploy down ("lock") as well as up ("unlock"), which means springs won't be necessary to close the jaws.

Speaking of jaws, I decided to improve the linkage with a double-jointed arrangement.

Some modification to the lock actuators was necessary to attach the jaws.

Now it's time to start playing with wires.

Here's a quick bench test of the circuitry. Hey, it works!

And it works when installed in the skull, too!

There's just enough room in the skull for the relays, flasher, lock actuator, wiring, and load bulb.

It's going to be a tight fit to get the lid installed, but it should work.

And remember, everything has to be done twice!

For Black Metal V8olvo Mark II, I decided to get some anatomically correct plastic skeletal arms (also cheap on eBay) and rig up the skulls so they appear to be backseat passengers. Add a T-shirt and it looks pretty good.

I hooked up the wiring to what became known as "The Metal Switch" on the race car's instrument panel. Pulling the Metal Switch activated the skulls and caused Opeth to crank from the in-car PA system. Oh, they'll love this at the track!

Some cheap blond costume wigs gave our skulls more of a "dead Swede" look. Add some evil black robes and spiked Hammer Of Thor V8olvo medallions and we were in business!

It looked great on the race track!

I'd be going on to a new theme for the race car, so the skulls were retired. What to do with them? I know- brake lights for my Civic! First step was to find an unused circuit in the fusebox to get some power. There's no sunroof on my car, so the sunroof fuse it shall be!

It would probably be more sanitary to tap into the brake light switch at the pedal, but that would mean running more wires to the back of the car. Instead, I'll just splice into the taillight wiring harness.

Since I've got junkyard relays all over the place, it's no problem to find one to actuate with the signal from the taillights. This will go in the spare tire well in the hatch.

A little carpentry work will be needed to mount the neck-pipes in a way that will be visible in the car's back window.

Because safety is so important, I'll use these long bolts through the spare tire (which is clamped to the floor) to hold the Skull Shelf in place.

A couple of wingnuts and it's fixed pretty firmly. As long as I don't wreck at a speed above, say, 15 MPH I shouldn't get bashed in the back of the head by 30 pounds of plastic skulls. Don't try this at home unless you find some way to mount the skulls more solidly.

I don't want the wigs coming off the skulls when I open the hatch, so a few hairstylist-approved sheet-metal screws will ensure that they stay in place.

Because following drivers at night won't be able to see anything of the skulls but four glowing eyes when I hit the brakes, I'll need to illuminate their faces. The rear side marker lights from a mid-80s BMW 7 series are just the right size, so it's off to the junkyard for some more shopping.

Some coat-hanger wire and an easy wiring job and the face lights are in place. I'll bend the wires so that the lights will be hidden below the edge of the window, out of view of drivers behind the Civic.

Here's the shelf installed in the car. I've cut holes in the hatch floor and carpeting for the mounting screws, and the wiring harness connects to the skulls via a 2-pin connector, making it easy to remove the whole unit when I get tired of the lack of cargo space.

The skulls look good installed, although the noise they make when I hit the brakes is a bit maddening. Sort of a "Ka-CLACK! Ka-CLACK! Ka-CLACK!" racket, which irritates nearby drivers nearly as much as it irritates me. The slightly different cycle rate for each skull's turn signal flasher means that they rarely sync up.

The whole rig looks quite snazzy. Amazingly, I rarely get pulled over by Johnny Law while driving this fine automobile.

My long-suffering neighbors have given up any hope of me ever driving a nice car. I like to get their hopes up by bringing home the occasional brand-new press car... which then leaves a few days later.

One skull has a ponytail, so you can tell them apart.

Here's what it looks like at night. Success! The puzzled looks I get from tailgaters are worth the effort... maybe.

And then right next to the great big '69 Mercury coupe is a great big Chrysler coupe. Both cars came from the factory with monstrous big-block V8s- a 360-horse 429 for the Marauder and a 350-horse 440 for the 300. What's wrong with the world, when a pair of over-the-top, single-digit-gas-mileage, two-ton two-doors can survive through all the oil crises and recessions and only now land in the Crusher's waiting room? It gets worse; this is one of the now-defunct NorCal Pick Your Part yards, which means we can assume both these cars have now been rendered into China-bound scrap metal by now.

My local self-service yard, already jammed with customers thanks to the departure of Pick Your Part from the region, now has so many 5-to-10-year-old SUVs, pickups, and minivans that they've been forced to line them up in the paths between rows, door handles touching. How about a spotless '05 Jeep Liberty? Seen it. Early-2000s Explorers? Stack 'em like cordwood! All this value being squandered, much like the long-gone profits Detroit raked in on these behemoths… but soon the clunkers will pass through the system and we'll be back to normal recession-style junkyard inventory.

Yes, they were still putting on that 60s-style SimuWood™ plastic siding on Jeeps as late as Reagan's second term; note the plastic "dowels" and decal inserts. Enough time has passed that this stuff is now cool! This truck is also notable for its AMC 360 V8, an engine that Chrysler kept in production all the way until 1991.

I found this truck at one of the now-defunct East Bay Pick Your Part yards, so we can assume that any parts that you see here have now been digested and dumped into a Guangzhou-bound container ship.

You'd think that customers would love free admission, but it turns out that PYP's $2 speed bump was the only thing keeping hordes of tool thieves and generally scurrilous individuals out of the yard. Meanwhile, the employees had that "final days" look about them. Turns out the rumors were correct: Pick Your Part in Northern California is no more. The company website makes no mention of the closings, but only Southern California locations are now listed. Do any of you know the whole story? If so, please enlighten the rest of us.

That's hard for me to take, because I'd been a regular customer at the Hayward Pick Your Part since the mid-1980s, and hard for all the NorCal-based 24 Hours Of LeMons teams who relied on PYP's fast inventory turnover and low prices (generally lower than those at yards owned by powerful national wrecking-yard chain Pick-N-Pull, which is owned by Schnitzer Steel) to keep their heaps running.

The first-ever LeMons Scavenger Hunt took place at the Hayward yard. The Milpitas yard? Well, that's home to the junked Fiberfab Avenger GT-15 you saw earlier today. What will happen to that fine automobile? Straight to The Crusher, or will some lucky Project Car Hell Poster Child take it home?

Well, that sounded like a member of the Fiberfab family to me, and I figured the "Porsche engine" would turn out to be a VW Type I with funky carburetors and/or strange-o cooling ducts. Nope! That's a Corvair engine underneath that battered fiberglass body.

In case you were in any doubt about the decade of this car's origin, here's a clue. Four-time DOTS honoree WhatWouldJesseDo was seriously considering buying this car and making it into a totally sensible daily driver, but the battered old GT-15 is now off limits. More on that sad story later today.

Back in those days, aftermarket sunroofs were serious- and leaky- status symbols.

Last week, we saw this junked Mercury LN7, and one of its competitors from back in the day was located just a few rows away: this '84 Nissan Pulsar NX.

The Pulsar NX (sold in Europe as the Pulsar EXA) was a two-seater with a great deal of Sentra ancestry. This one managed to survive with just two seats and no cup holders through just about the entire rise and fall of the SUV, yet now it will be joining all those Clunkerized Explorers in the cold steel jaws of The Crusher.

Check out that snazzy steering wheel and two-tone interior!

I stopped by a couple of my local self-service wrecking yards yesterday, just to see what new and interesting clunkerization victims I might find. Not long ago, we saw a glut of clunkicided Japanese luxury machines, and now it's Mercedes-Benz's turn. This is just a small sampling of the dozens of big Benzes with the telltale pink paint on the engines. You want really nice body and interior parts for your spared-from-clunkdown Mercedes? Come on down!

Just for fun, let's price a few more of the cars we see here (2009 dollars in parentheses).
1990 560SEL: $73,800 ($121,871)
1988 260E: $37,250 ($64,837)
1988 300TE: $46,980 ($85,713)

Oh, there were also plenty of Infinitis and Acuras to be picked over for nice non-engine parts, but for every Q45 there must have been five LS400s. Some of them were very clean, too. I sure hope some of these cars survived to become LeMons racers!

As beautifully engineered as Lexus vehicles are, the sight of your typical ES300 or GS430 in The Crusher's waiting room doesn't really bring a flood of tears to my eyes. But an extremely straight '87 Cressida? Nooooooo! Imagine destroying your Cressida so you can buy a Focus!

That's right, many mid-to-late-80s Cressidas and Maximas were caught up in the Clunkpocalypse, joining all those high-end BMWs, Jags, and Benzes.

Now, your serious Cougar zealot is most likely going to favor the sleeker '67-70 models, but I've always thought the '71-73 cars were pretty cool-looking. Only in America could you get a grille like that. This example seems pretty much solid and rust-free, and the interior is reasonably intact.
Sure, it's just the 351 Windsor two-barrel, not the big 429, but it's still a shame to see this car get crushed. As always, we hope its pieces live on in other Mercuries.

Somehow, this big Chrysler made it through a pair of Energy Crises, the Malaise Era, and the Rise Of The SUV- 41 years of survival before being brought down by the Financiapocalypse. Or maybe it had been sitting in a back yard since 1974 prior to being hauled off to The Crusher's waiting room. Either way, plenty of good parts left on this wagon, so let's hope they get pulled prior to being melted down to make brand-new Cherys.

These two classic Ford cartrucks have been picked over pretty well, so at least we know that other Rancheros (and probably Falcons and Comets) will benefit from the resulting organ transplants.

I find quite a few old Volvos in my local self-service wrecking yards; for example: this 144E, this Amazon coupe, this Amazon wagon, this 145 wagon, this Amazon coupe, and dozens of 240s. Please, those of you considering putting together an E30 for the 24 Hours Of LeMons- try racing an Amazon instead!

I was visiting the self-service wrecking yard that brought us such Field Expedient Engineering gems as the hasp-and-padlock Cadillac Security System, the Renault Alliance Urine Sample Shift Knob, and the Lord Humungus Body Kit Oldsmobile when I came across this early-80s Toyota Corolla Tercel (how's that for confusing branding?) with a really innovative driver's-side window. It appears that the Toyota's previous owner got tired of the lack of side glass in his or her ride, and (not willing and/or able to come up with $15 for a junkyard replacement window) did a pretty fair fabrication job on a piece of clear acrylic. So far so good…
Rather than enabling the old up-down by rigging the window up to the regulator mechanism in the door, the creator of this window decided to rig up some brackets to affix the window in place, then drilled hundreds of holes to provide incessant, maddening whistling ventilation at speed. Note how each hole is angled to point at the driver. Brilliant!

Don't tell El Presidente, but many of those engine parts may not be completely destroyed; the bearings definitely get creamed by the clunkerizing process, but a standard engine rebuild ought to be able to get a clunkerized engine back in working order. Of course, in most cases it's not worth doing so, but junkyard scavengers are already grabbing cylinder heads and other goodies off clunkerated powerplants.

I made a trip to several East Bay self-service wrecking yards in search of Cash For Clunkers victims, and I found plenty! I suspect that most of the Explorers, F150s, Cherokees, and the like are bypassing wrecking yards and heading straight to The Crusher, but those searching for nice body/interior components, suspensions, transmissions, and the like for 1990s high-end European machinery are in for some happy hunting (mixed with a healthy dose of tears for all the perfectly good BMW 7 series sedans, 10-year-old Jaguars, and other cool machinery that got caught up in the Clunkpocalypse).

Likewise, builders of street rods are no doubt rejoicing over all those MN12 Fords that got Clunk-O-Lated™, because they'll find a bonanza of swap-ready IRS rear suspension setups in those Cougars, Thunderbirds, and Continentals. I found three beclunked MN12s, all in near-showroom condition, side-by-side in one yard. Meanwhile, there's a certain clunkxecuted RX-7 GSL rear end I've got earmarked for my 20R Sprite project.

1994 BMW 740.


I don't feel too bad about all those Explorers getting destroyed, but first-gen RX-7s are getting really rare these days. Looks like some gratuitous forklift damage on this one.


MN12s galore!





There are many fewer XJ6s and XJ-Ss on the streets today, thanks to Cash For Clunkers.





Let's hope some of these MN12 suspensions live on in other cars.













Many, many BMW Big Six engines have met their doom via Cash For Clunkers.

How about a 1992 BMW 318iS? No going out in a blaze of LeMons glory for this E30!









The interior in this '90 Eldorado was just about perfect.


1990 Cadillac Eldorado

We provided wallpaper images for your phone, but there was a troubling lack of junkyardness in those choices. So, I've picked out some of my favorite rusty, crusty junkyard shots and resized them to fit the most common monitor resolutions (you guys running OS/2 on CGA monochrome screens are SOL, sorry to say).

1974 Toyota Corolla wagon
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1965 Mercedes-Benz 190c
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1967 Volvo Amazon
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1966 Dodge Monaco
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1966 Dodge Dart
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1978 Dodge Magnum
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1982 Volvo 244
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1949 Ford
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1972 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser
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1968 Mercury Monterey
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Junkyard Monks
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1967 Mercury Cougar
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1969 Renault 16
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BMW 2002, Toyota Corolla GT-S, Triumph Spitfire
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1970 Triumph Spitfire
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1965 Dodge Custom 880
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1974 BMW 2002
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1974 BMW 2002
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1968 Jeep Gladiator J-3000
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1968 Oldsmobile Delmont 88
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1961 Citroën ID19
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1975 Triumph Spitfire
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1976 Peugeot 504
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1990 Jaguar XJ-S
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1968 Peugeot 404
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1973 Dodge Coronet
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1972 Ford Country Squire
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1972 Volvo 145
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1971 Cadillac Eldorado
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1988 BMW 750iL
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1963 Volvo 1800S
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1973 Plymouth Satellite
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1974 Ford Gran Torino
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1966 Ford Galaxie
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1963 Dodge 880
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1978 Peugeot 504
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1971 Honda 600
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1964 Rambler American
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1963 Rambler Classic
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1978 AMC Concord
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1959 Ford Thunderbird
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1959 Ford Thunderbird
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1974 Datsun 610 wagon
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1969 Saab 99
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1978 Pontiac Firebird
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1976 Ford Capri
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1975 MG Midget
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1979 Jeep Cherokee
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1998 Chrysler Sebring
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1980 Datsun 280ZX
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Believe it or not, the Pinto was once as common on American streets as, say, the Sentra is today. The rep for exploding in rear-end collisions was relatively undeserved (plenty of Detroit cars with the gas tank mounted between the rear axle and the bumper had explosion problems), but Ford didn't win itself many friends with those memos showing that Dearborn's bean counters preferred to pay wrongful-death settlements than redesign the car.
The last Pinto was sold in 1980, and by 1990 you hardly saw them in junkyards; only the wretched first-gen Hyundai Excel passed through the junkyard phase of its lifecycle more quickly. That's why it's a memorable occasion when I find a Pinto in the junkyard these days; someone kept this thing running- or at least stored- for decades after most of them had long since been rendered into cubes of China-bound scrap steel.

I can go either way, depending on what I'm looking for on any particular junkyard trip. My default junkyard toolbox, the one you've seen photographed next to so many Junkyard Finds, is the small S-K box on the right. I keep it stocked with the absolute bare minimum set of tools necessary to pull 95% of junkyard prizes, from trim pieces to complete engines, and I cull its contents with an obsessive backpacker-grade eye for weight and bulk reduction (my back starts to ache whenever I see guys trudging along like pack mules under the burden of a 5-gallon bucket full of 1" drive sockets and Archimedes' Choice™ prybars). Lately I've been going back and forth on the small hacksaw I sometimes bring, because there's really no substitute when you need to get that goddamn exhaust pipe out of the way… but it's a pain to have to remove the hacksaw to get at the tools beneath. Then there's the reality that just about everything in the yard is metric now, so do I really need more than just 7/16", 1/2", and 9/16" wrenches? In fact, do I really need any non-metric stuff?

When it comes time for a heavy-duty, all-day junkyard frenzy, I'll load up one or two of the big steel boxes, maybe put on a backpack for hauling small parts, and bungee everything onto a dolly. Cordless impact wrench? Mondo breaker bars? Hell, yes! But most of the time, I'm a junkyard toolbox minimalist. How about you?

Click on the sequential picture-story thingies below to get the whole story of downward spiral and redemption for this Wolfsburg classic.

This car, equipped with a rare automatic transmission, lived in my neighborhood for a couple years. Clearly a work in progress, I never saw it leave its parking spot. Sadly, parking vigilantes on the block- a real problem in garage-short Alameda, where parking can be a challenge- grew enraged, and eventually the Squareback was red-tagged (which means the owner has 72 hours to move the offending vehicle) and towed away.

The first I heard about this tragedy was via an email from a tipster who lives near the towing company tasked with extracting such cars from city streets in Alameda and Oakland. He sent a photo of the cool old Volks imprisoned behind a chainlink fence, and I recognized it immediately.

Auctions are held weekly, and any car that doesn't get the minimum bid ($100 to $200) heads straight to the junkyard down the street. You know, the yard where totally restorable old cars go to be stripped, then fed to The Crusher. I decided to stop by, and if nobody was willing to pay 100 bucks to rescue the Squareback… well, I'd buy it, even though I don't have a place to park it at my house.

The auction takes place in an industrial area of East Oakland, and between the elderly, soft-spoken auctioneer and the screaming BART trains going by, it was pretty tough to follow the bidding. There were some steals to be had. How about a running, late-model Toyota Tacoma for $1,800? Or a somewhat battered but still serviceable Infiniti Q45 for $275?

This gentleman, who once owned a VW shop, was there just for the Squareback. That meant that I wasn't going to have to buy it, and I breathed a sigh of relief about that. The final and only bid? One hundred dollars! That's right, he bought a solid, rust-free Squareback with Panasport-esque wheels for a single C-note.

And that wasn't the end of the cool machinery. Here's a late-80s Ford EXP, which was to the Escort what the CRX was to the Civic. Runs fine, registration is current, ugly paint but otherwise intact. Final bid? 200 bucks.

Imagine what a great 24 Hours Of LeMons car an EXP would make! Escorts do very well in LeMons, so a two-seater lightweight version should be a real contender.

At a typical high-turnover self-service junkyard, you might see a 928 every couple years. This one has been thoroughly ransacked for interior electrical system components, but all the drivetrain and suspension components are still there. Sadly, it doesn't have a 5-speed transmission.

Gaze upon this relay/fuse panel and tremble, mere mortals! This is one of the many reasons that 928s get honored by Project Car Hell more often than any other car.
From all the leaves and dirt, it appears that this car was someone's long-abandoned Hell Project for a decade or two before finally getting junked. But hey, the last owner was an optimist- check out the condoms, no doubt stockpiled for the glorious day when the car got back on the street. Yes, the ladies can't resist a man in a 928!

The upcoming Concours d'Lemons features a class called Most Eleganté, open to "Vintage neoclassics, Shaft-worthy pimpmobiles, Excaliburs, Zimmers." Contemplating the Eleganté concept made me realize how cheezily cool is Detroit's heavy hand with heraldic crests, emblems featuring names of royal horse-drawn coaches, and the like- only in America, suckaz! With that in mind, I spotted this Mark Cross emblem on a 1988 Chrysler New Yorker Landau at my local self-serve junkyard, and I had to have it.

A landau was a "social carriage" meant to haul four rich folks in bouncy, horse-poop-scented comfort back in the 18th century, but Malaise Era marketers in the Motor City made the name their own. This emblem now adorns my desktop computer.

Respected fashion names can often be persuaded to put their names on Detroit's special-edition cars. Oleg Cassini, Bill Blass, Cartier, and many others have cashed in on this deal.

Buick went with the "knighthood" theme for much of the Malaise Era.

While we're talking class, how about this piece of commemorative wedding glassware that I found on the trash-strewn floor of the Mark Cross Edition Chrysler New Yorker Landau? Yes, Cassandra and Bernard had such true love at their wedding last year that they gave out shot glasses… which then ended up in a car destined to be ticketed, towed away, and junked. Eleganté!

The one that caught my eye first was the very clean, automatic-equipped 1976 BMW 2002. The odometer reads just over 4,000 miles, which means it's either a very well-maintained 104,000-mile car or a 4,000-mile car that spent several decades moldering in a driveway somewhere. When I mentioned this car to 24 Hours Of LeMons Assistant Perpetrator Nick Pon, he had to rush right over to the yard to pull some pieces for his '76 2002.

Right next to the 2002 sits a fairly complete 1970 Triumph Spitfire. The engine and front suspension look pretty nice; a Spitfire Hell Project owner could definitely feast on this junkyard find!

That's not enough? Hey, there's something for you lovers of vintage Japanese machinery as well: a California-built 1988 Toyota Corolla GT-S. It's an automatic car, and the underhood sticker identifies the engine as a 4A-LC… but that sure looks like a 16-valve 4A to me.

Now let's see what the Server Hamsters do when I present them with these photos in our new gallery style. Fasten your seatbelts!

There's just something extra cool about a full-sized fastback Ford from this era; all the NASCAR-inspired style of the Torino/Cyclone fastbacks, but with the added presence of the big machines. An up-and-coming young mobster might have chosen a fastback Galaxie, but the really hip ones would have gone with the slightly snazzier Monterey coupe- slick, but not trying to outshine the high rankers' Continentals and Fleetwoods.

How about one of these cars with a 428, four-speed, and fat rubber on big steel spoked wheels, maybe with a few inches taken out of the springs? Not for this one, though… next stop, Crusher!

It's pretty rough, and plenty of parts have been picked from it by now, but the all-important roof glass remains. There's an example of today's Engine Of The Day honoree under the hood, too- looks like a 2-barrel 350. Nice Bondo-y patina on the tailgate!

The usual crowds of grimly determined men were plucking engines from minivans, of course, but I wasn't interested in minivans.

Now that I'm applying the lessons learned during Race Car Wiring Hell to my Personal Hell Project, I figured I could just rig up any old 4-cylinder junkyard tachometer in the scrap-aluminum dash I'm fabricating. I had this perfectly serviceable late-70s Volvo 240 unit that came with one of the free parts cars we obtained for the Black Metal V8olvo, but it's only about 3" in diameter and- well, let's face it, that Volvo emblem wasn't quite sporty enough for my sports car.

As you can see from my under-construction wiring harness and fusebox, this project is all about image, because I am truly an image consultant at heart. So when I spotted a Fiat 124 Spider with a nice Veglia tach still in place, I grabbed it.

On Half Price Day, you can score any tach in the yard for $3.01 out the door, including all the Rip-U-Off™ fees and taxes that magically appear during the transaction. When I saw the long line, I hesitated, but an Italian tachometer in a Japanese-engine-powered British car would be just so right that I decided to wait it out.

I haven't tested my new find yet, but there's no way such a passionate, soulful gauge could refuse to function!

Would you believe that a '49 Ford sedan, in seriously rough shape but fairly complete, showed up at an East Bay self-service junkyard? So many questions! How did the rat-rodders overlook this car? How did it get through the pre-junkyard auction without getting snapped up for $150? So, when I got back from my road trip, I hit the junkyard to get some photos of my own.

The original flathead was still there, but someone had grabbed the grille, the hood, and most of the worthwhile dash and interior components. Good to know that at least some parts of this car will live again.

Now, don't go sending me a bunch of those "ZOMG where is this junkyard? I need them parts for my Rambler project!" emails, because I shot these photos a year ago and this proto-AMC long ago served as a tasty snack for the steel jaws of The Crusher, an appetizer for the main course of Tradesman vans and W126 Benzes. Instead, contemplate the temporary nature of life as you peruse this Server Hamster-Approved™ new-style gallery, which I'm hoping won't cause a blackout to descend upon the Eastern Seaboard the very first time a reader clicks on one of its images:

Holy crap! A Weather Eye!

Looks like a rust-free car with a straight body, and the original 2T-C is still reasonably complete.

It appears that Malaise Era Corolla coupes mostly avoid the fate of this car nowadays, but I suspect it will be a few more years before Japanese wagons start to get much attention from restorers and/or racers.

It presents quite the dilemma, because even the crappiest cassette deck serves as an irresistible lure, tempting some crackhead to smash your side window with a spark plug and then gouge the hell out of your dash with a prybar while removing his $2 prize. Fortunately, Jalopnik Cheapskate Tips™ have the solution! These days, all you really need is a means of connecting an MP3 player- or even a cellphone with music-playback functionality- into an amplifier driving a couple of speakers.

4-time DOTS honoree WhatWouldJesseDo leaves his super-clean '83 Toyota 4x4 in the parking lot of a local train station each day, and the truck has had its stereo torn out by thieves three times in as many months. Each time, Jesse installed a cheaper, less appealing stereo, and each time he returned to his truck to find the window smashed and a hole in the dash. All he wanted was a way to plug in his iPhone and have music while behind the wheel, yet the truck had to appear completely bereft of anything that might be readily converted into hubba rocks, 40-ouncers, black tar, DMT, or Ibogaine.

I found the solution when rigging up 2-way radio communication for the Black Metal V8olvo race car; we didn't have the money to buy fancy radios with in-helmet headsets, so I rigged a cheapo GMRS walkie-talkie with a modified CB radio microphone and fed the audio to this no-frills audio amplifier, which drove a couple of door-mounted junkyard speakers. When the spotter called out a yellow flag into his walkie-talkie, the driver- as well as drivers of other cars and, occasionally, spectators in the bleachers- heard him loud and clear!

The thing has "MP3 IN" printed right on the case, so that was all the inspiration I needed. This little amp, sporting an alleged 360 watts of power (ha ha ha!), is sold under countless brand names, but all are the same; I assume there's some town in southeast China that's made up entirely of huge factories churning out these little blue boxes. They're crap, but they get the job done and the sound quality doesn't suck as much as you'd expect; you get RCA and 3.5mm lines in, two speaker outputs, volume, bass, and treble controls (which feature a really cheezy multicolored flashing LED setup). They're all over eBay, and you can get yourself one for under $15 shipped.

Jesse opted for the prestigious Cheng Sheng version, which boasts an impressive 400 watt output (I'm guessing it's more like 25). He stopped by Chez Murilee yesterday, while I was working on wiring the 20R Sprite, so I just grabbed my implements of Wiring Hell and shifted operations to his Hilux.

Since the last car thief owned wire cutters, enough of the old stereo's wiring harness was still present to make hookup of the Cheng Sheng Amp a simple task. I had a stash of inline noise filters I'd picked up during junkyard expeditions, so I added one to the power circuit; without such a filter, ignition noise is liable to come through with such a cheapo amp.

Just to make sure everything worked, we rigged up a temporary wires-twisted-together installation and tested it out with an iPod. Sounds good!

If your car lacks speakers, no problemo! Just head over to the nearest self-service junkyard when it's having a Half Off sale and grab some factory speakers for $2 apiece. I prefer high-end Japanese cars for my junkyard speaker selection; why go with Nissan when you could have Infiniti for the same price?

Since portable music players all have volume and EQ controls, there's no need to install the Cheng Sheng where prying eyes might spot it- just wire it so it's powered up when the ignition is hot and leave the volume knob cranked, then adjust the sound on the music player. In Jesse's truck, the best out-of-view location was under the seat. Rather than drill holes to mount it, we just used self-adhesive Velcro.

A 3.5mm stereo plug to dual male RCA cable can be had for next to nothing, so the budget so far remained under 20 bucks. We ran the cable under the seat and to the center console. All systems go when plugged into Jesse's iPhone!

But the dash didn't quite look wretched enough. To convince would-be thieves that they'd be better off moving on to the next vehicle in the lot, the Toyota's dash had to look thoroughly de-stereoized, preferably with a tangle of sliced wires hanging out of a gaping hole where a stereo once lived. Here's a shot from the junkyard to provide inspiration.

By a stroke of good fortune, I'd just torn out the last vestiges of Prince Of Darkness wiring from my Austin-Healey; what could possibly look more disreputable a-dangling from a jagged dashboard hole? Quickly, I fished some of Lucas Electric's finest from the trash can. You know what they say about Lucas Electrics: Get home before dark!

Some work with the cutters and a few zipties, and it looks just horrible! The only concern here is that the Quantum Unreliability Field of the Prince Of Darkness wires might destabilize the Toyota wiring harness at the quark level, but we figure the Warlord Grade™ construction of the Hilux can handle it.

Now, some of you are probably saying to yourselves, "Well, that's all well and good for when I want to listen to Foghat's Fool For The City on my $12 iPod Shuffle knockoff, but what if I want to listen to the radio, eh? What then, smarty-pants?" Well, of course you want to listen to the radio, and you can totally do it with this setup. Just pick up a $6 portable AM/FM and plug the audio cable right into the headphone jack. Hell, you can even use a Walkman cassette player. Mission accomplished!

I've done my share of Amazon driving, and I can't honestly describe myself as a big fan of the staid old Swedes as daily drivers (I do, however, have a soft spot for the 140s), but the survivors certainly deserve a better fate that what this one is getting. Why didn't someone turn this one into a race car?

The drivetrain is there, much of the interior is still intact, and rust doesn't seem to be an issue. Let's hope its parts save the lives of Amazons still fortunate enough to be on the other side of the junkyard fence!

They end up at the self-service junkyard, which means they get a month or so to be picked over for parts before being fed into the cold jaws of The Crusher; the remains are then shipped out of the Port Of Oakland to China. This 190c still has lots of good stuff on it, including a fairly complete interior.

Most of the cars at this yard went through an auction and failed to get a minimum $150 bid. Would you have bought it for 150 bucks?

Yes, that's an image of a bound and gagged woman etched into the driver's side door glass. The driver of this van must have had many lengthy discussions with members of the law enforcement community; I picture him looking exactly like the criminal silhouette on those Neighborhood Watch signs. These photos come to us courtesy of 24 Hours Of LeMons Assistant Perpetrator and BMW 2002 driver TheEastBayKid, via a lengthy chain of emails that took so long to filter down to me that the van was gone from the junkyard (located a mere 30 miles from me) by the time I heard about it.

Had it not already been fed to The Crusher, that window would now be framed, backlit, and mounted on my wall… right next to the bronze bust of Lenin that once adorned an Estonian post office.

Sadly, the Midget had been picked clean by the time I got there, but I was able to get these photos of a fairly complete '66 Amazon wagon. The Crusher has already eaten this car by now, but we can hope that many of its parts lived on in surviving Amazons.