We can thank LeMons Perpetrator and hyphy Oakland native Nick "Deuce Deuce" Pon, aka TheEastBayKid, for the idea.

We had a decent speaker/amp setup, a 400-watt amplifier and four 6x9 speakers stuffed into an old thrift-store particle-board speaker cabinet. It's visible on the roof of the Cursed VW Transporter in the photo above.


Just attach the jumper-cable clips to the vehicle's battery, hook up the iPod to the amplifier input, and crank up the Mistah F.A.B. It worked well, as you can see in the video from the Buttonwillow Histrionics LeMons last summer. At that race, we used the Department Of Highway De-Beautification Safety Truck as the Ghost Ride vehicle. Unfortunately, Mistah F.A.B. coupled with the "Bass Boost" equalizer setting on the iPod blew out most of the speakers on our GRTW Box, and in any case we needed something sturdy enough to withstand shipping to non-West Coast races. Junkyard time!

First, we'd need a bunch of tie-downs/speaker protectors. I headed over to my local self-service boneyard, figuring I'd find an old truck with a bunch of rusty-ass tie downs. But wait! Car door striker latches are made to withstand high-speed wrecks, every car has at least two of them, and they're held on with just two screws. No need to fight nasty, corroded carriage bolts on some junked '74 F-250 with a bed full of ossified dog poop. Problem solved!

I grabbed quite a few latches, all from Hondas and Toyotas; my design called for four, but there's no harm in a bit of junkyard overkill.

I figured I'd get some junkyard 6x9s and just build a plywood box with enough room for them, but it turns out that Bunny With A Pancake On Its Head VW Rabbit team captain and 1976 Audi Fox driver Casadelshawn holds a degree in Intergalactic Badasstical Speaker Design (note: I've forgotten all the technical terms Casadelshawn so patiently explained to me, including the name of his college degree, so I'll be making up every audio-engineering term from this point on), and he offered to help apply some, like, science to the design of Ghost Ride The Whip Box V2.0.

A little cutting and pasting of some scrap plywood went pretty easily, thanks to the miracle of drywall screws and Elmer's Glue. I was forced to buy longer countersunk machine screws to mount the door latches on 3/4" plywood, because the Toyota screws were too short. It hurts, paying for new stuff on a junkyard project!

Here's a top view of the super-scientific cabinet design, as suggested by 33rd Degree Master Speakerman Casadelshawn. The layout was limited by the requirement that the box be readily shippable to distant race tracks without incurring oversize fees from FedEx, so there was no avoiding right angles (which, according to Heisenberg's Fourth Theorem Of Boombox Design, should be shunned). Note the Intradimensional Thumpin' Doob Tubes™ (PVC pipe), which apparently enhance the rubber-mallet-on-skull effect of the bass. The idea here is to run one channel per pair of speakers, then place the GWTB Box V2.0 at an angle on the roof of the vehicle, so that spectators to the front and rear will get both left and right sides of the stereo.

The latches flank the side speakers, in order to protect them when the inevitible drop to the asphalt occurs. LeMons gear takes a serious beating. Cabinet pulls go on the ends, providing speaker protection as well as carrying handles.

The Total Mobile Audio T4404 amplifier goes into a protected-from-upside-down-droppage compartment on the top of the box.

Here's the high-tech power connection. Don't slam the hood all the way closed!

A few random car emblems give it that Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™ look. Spitfire, Buick, Jaguar, and a nice diamond-studded 22" emblem add class.

Some scavenged ropes and bungee cords keep it semi-anchored to the roof of my Crown Victoria, which edges closer to being sold to a LeMons team with every week that goes by.

And here we go! The Judges' Choice-winning 1Up SE-R team looks enthusiastic as they pay for their sins. Yes, I know I'm supposed to get out of the car and let it drive itself, but the Chief Perp nixed that idea for- get this!- safety reasons!

The guys from the Starsky and the Bandit Capri team also looked good during their Ghost Ride penalty. Let's watch some video!

These dudes proved to be the lamest Ghost Riders in LeMons history, trudging along like they'd been in the Bataan Death March for the last couple of days, but they said they'd form a mosh pit if we cranked up some Metallica. "Master Of Puppets" perked them right up! Later, we did the German Car Parade Of Shame, with several E30s, a Porsche 914, and a VW Golf doing a very slow lap of the paddock behind the Crown Vic and Rammstein cranking on the GRTW Box.

Here's what we used for inspiration when determining the appropriate level of LeMons Ghost Ride enthusiasm:

Just in case you're too young to get the "Tigra and Bunny" reference:

Here's what happens when you write a note asking for just a little more time and slap it on your parked-where-it-don't-belong car. Welcome to the boneyard!

"Car is broke. Will pick it up tomorrow." No, you won't!

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.