Owners of Ford Panther platform-based vehicles can tell you exactly what that nasty popping/clattering sound inside your door means: you've busted another window regulator mechanism. Normally, you just push up on the glass until the window closes and then just live with a nonfunctional window (a pain in the ass when you have to deal with toll booths, but tolerable for a while) until you get the motivation to deal with the regulator.

Unfortunately, the last time I'd replaced the regulator I'd gone with a cheapo Chinese-made aftermarket unit (which made even Ford's corner-cutting/low-bidder parts quality seem top-shelf) and the tangle of busted pulleys and tangled cables ensured that window was locked in the down position like it'd been epoxied into place.

Normally, that wouldn't matter so much, since the P71 Police Interceptor Crown Vic came with drunken-arrestee-friendly, piss-proof rubber "carpeting," so no problemo if the car got rained in overnight at the motel parking lot. Unfortunately, I had a trunk and back seat full of bribe booze, in addition to a really cool Khyber Pass Copy of a Martini-Henry rifle given as a bribe by a Crown-Vic-racing Afghanistan War vet. If I wanted to leave that stuff in the car back in notoriously meth-addled Willows (in order to avoid schlepping it all to our upstairs room after being pummeled by the whines of racers for 18 exhausting hours at the race), I'd need to find some way to get the window to roll up. Sure, the tweekers can always break your window, but I believe in making it slightly harder for them.

The problem that I needed to get the window closed in the time between packing up all the Penalty Box gear and the food hitting the table for the Annual Saturday Night Arse Freeze-A-Palooza Pasta Feast at the Team California Mille Compound in the paddock, because those Alfa Romeo dudes can really cook up an outstanding meal (when they're not frantically wrenching on their fleet of Alfettas). The food may not be quite as good as the sublime Cajun Shrimp Boil-stravaganza we get courtesy of Piranha Racing in Louisiana and Texas, but it's so damn good that I didn't want to miss a single minute of it.

So, I borrowed some tools from the Evil Genius trailer and removed the door panel… which promptly fell apart into shards of plastic, because I'd already had the thing off at least five times in the past. You see, (if I may plagiarize from ex-automotive journalist and general automotive cynic Jay Lamm here) the difference between finicky European cars and Detroit cars goes like this: with a British or Italian car, different stuff breaks all the time, and you'll need to fix something new within a few days of fixing the last failed part. With a Detroit car, you'll fix the same thing over and fucking over. With my Crown Victoria, it's the window mechanisms, power locks, and hood latch that fail; during five years of ownership I've replaced or repaired the regulators and/or motors in all four of the windows (numerous times on the driver's window), fixed the lock mechanisms in two of the doors, and replaced the hood latch twice. Other than those things, the car has been quite reliable.

Anyway, I was able to cut the cable on the old regulator, pry the window into the closed position, ziptie the armrest with the window/lock/mirror controls into place (thanks to the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys Peugeot team for the zipties!) and get some pasta, though I was in a pretty sour mood by the time I'd finished cursing those cheapskate bastids in Dearborn, because the reason the door panel fell apart was that Detroit makes such items to be easy to install… the first time. After the warranty expires, who gives a damn that all those fragile plastic hooks and snaps will break off the second time you pry them open?

The Ford Panther uses a cable-and-pulley arrangement to pull the window up and down; the heart of the regulator is this spiral-wound pulley, which bolts to the motor and operates in much the same manner as the "endless loop" mechanism of an 8-track audio tape. The problem with this setup is that the cable has at least four points at which a minor failure in a plastic component will cause it to jam, which will make the considerable torque of the motor start to break stuff. Sometimes the cable just pops off one of the pulleys in the regulator, which means you just have to rethread it, but usually everything gets shattered all to hell and you need to replace the entire unit.

The previous time the driver's window regulator had broken, I ordered a $25 aftermarket replacement, figuring it couldn't possibly be more crappy than the factory Ford unit. Oh, was I wrong! It looked like a bomb had gone off inside my door, with busted regulator parts rattling around like 10-fen coins in the pocket of an underpaid Shenzhen factory worker.

I didn't feel like handing big bucks to a Ford dealer for a factory replacement, since I knew it would break within a couple of years anyway, so I headed to the junkyard to find a car with an original regulator assembly. You have to figure that a regulator that stayed functional for a decade has beaten the odds and was built on a good day at the factory. Here's a '99 Police Interceptor that already has the door panel off!

How can you tell when a Crown Vic still has the original window regulator? Easy! Look for the rivets holding it in place. Yes, rivets, because an assembly-line worker can apply a rivet in 0.8 fewer seconds than he or she could fasten a nut and bolt, and seconds mean money! Sure sure, the regulator will fail in the not-to-distant future, but leave that problem to some future slack-jawed grease monkey to fix, because we got to move these widgets out the door!

That means that you pack some special hardware in your junkyard toolbox: a punch and hammer to drive the mandrel through the rivet, and a battery-powered drill to drill it out.

To make things more fun, the glass itself is riveted to the regulator's slide, and Ford didn't bother to provide handy access holes to reach the rivets like those goddamn Japanese do in their cars. Try not to break the glass!

At least the top of the regulator is held in with good ol' nuts. This is the only part of the regulator-removal process that doesn't give you a headache.

You've got two rivets holding the bottom of the regulator in place and two more on the glass. Punch and drill!

The old rivet backs clank to the bottom of the door's innards, where they'll rattle around if you don't feel like slicing up your fingers fishing them out.

Oh yeah, don't forget to bring your Torx bits to the junkyard, because that's what you use to separate the motor from the regulator.

I thought about buying the motor as well (since I've had a couple fail in my P71), but the ones in the car seem to be working well, so I cheaped out and left it in the car.

Success! $18 later, I'm on my way home.

When you replace an original Crown Vic window regulator, you need to substitute screws or bolts and locknuts for the old rivets. This makes for some around-the-corner work with a wrench to get to the nuts, but it's not too difficult. Here's the busted Shenzhen Special regulator coming off.

It's much easier to deal with maneuvering the regulator out of the door if you remove the glass completely.

The aftermarket regulator is now out. I feel like an idiot for installing this crappy component in my car, knowing at the time that it would be sure to fail within a year or so. Lesson learned!

Attach the regulator slide onto the glass, guide the motor shaft into the main pulley, reinstall the Torx screws, and it's looking good. Powering up the ignition and cycling the window indicates that it's functioning correctly.

Now I need to find a junkyard door panel that matches my interior, because this one is pretty rough from all the removal/installation cycles and the additional sheet-metal screws I've had to install to hold it in place. It does the job, though!

So, I got on the horn with these guys and ordered me up some new front and rear hoses (plus new wheel cylinders). Because Project House Hell has been so all-consuming in recent months, PCH Car Numero Uno has been sitting untouched for quite a while, silently lowering property values. Meanwhile, the Civic is due for a new timing belt and I need to figure out what's causing that "Lean Condition Bank 1" error code in the Crown Vic.

It starts and moves under its own power, so all it needs to get on the street is the brakes and a few dozen nickel-dime fixes. And hey, it turns out it's not really a '67 after all! Actually, it's sort of a FrankenSprite, patched together from the corpses of at least three other cars; I discovered that the brake plumbing in the chassis comes from an early-to-mid-60s car, and I'd been wondering how a '67 managed to get a single-reservoir master cylinder in a year that the meddling federal government mandated the Communist-inspired dual system. Stay tuned for news of the PCH 20R Sprite's first drive… one of these weeks.

Unfortunately, "Chrysler New Yorker" only exists on four-track cassette tape, and my ol' Tascam Porta 01 died years ago. That means you don't get to hear that fine song, which thrilled dozens of Japanese college radio fans during the late 1980s. What you do get is the "music video" for the Murilee Arraiac song "Hajoi Hotai," which features the circa-1990 replacement of a 2-speed Powerglide with a junkyard Turbo Hydramatic 350 3-speed in a 1965 Impala. That's me with the Plumber Butt on the right left, and my friend ChunkyDeath on the right. Note ChunkyDeath's innovative "floor jack leg pump" maneuver.

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?

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.

Click on the photo of any engine below to jump to the original post honoring that engine.

Toyota R	Ford Flathead V8	BMW M30
Nissan L	Small-Block Chevrolet V8	Volkswagen Air-Cooled
BMC B Series	Chrysler Slant Six	Rolls-Royce V8
Honda B	GMC Twin Six	Jaguar XK
Pontiac V8	Mazda B	Fiat Twin-Cam
Porsche Flat Six	Offenhauser	Willys Go-Devil
Chrysler LA	Packard Inline 8	Mazda 13B
Crosley COBRA	Volvo Red Block	Subaru EJ
AMC Straight Six	Citroën Type A	Toyota A
Ford Windsor V8	Mercedes-Benz OM617	Nissan SR
Chrysler Trans Four	Chevrolet D V8	Ford Modular
Chrysler A57 Multibank	Ford OHC	Honda D
Buick Nailhead	Buick 215/Rover V8	BMW M10
Volkswagen W	Chrysler IV2220 V16	MEMZ-968
Lotus 900 Series	Ford 385	Mercedes-Benz M100 V8
Chrysler B V8	Toyota M	General Motors LS
Honda F20C	Alfa Romeo Twin Cam	Yamaha SHO V6
BMW M70 V12	Mitsubishi Sirius	Saab H
GM Iron Duke	Coventry Climax FW/FP	Ferrari Dino V6/V8/V12
Ford FE V8	BMC A	Audi 4.2 V8
Big-Block Chevrolet V8	BMW M20	Fiat SOHC
Chrysler Flathead Six	Saab 2-Stroke	Oldsmobile Gen 2 V8
Suzuki G	PRV V6	Cadillac OHV V8
Hudson Six	Nissan VH	Ford Model T
Buick V6	Nissan VG

The nice folks at MSR Houston allowed me to suit up and strap into the passenger seat of the Pike's Peak-winning Rally Ready Evo, enabling me to get some great on-track shots of the Yeehaw It's Texas '08 24 Hours Of LeMons. Unfortunately, I won't always have access to a 600-horsepower race car with a pro driver who's willing to risk his high-buck machine on a track full of $500 heaps. What I needed was a cheap digital camera with a timelapse feature- just bolt it onto some sucker's volunteer's LeMons racer and let it capture action shots at regular intervals!
A bit of online research led me to the Kodak DC290 Zoom, a late-1990s-vintage 2-megapixel camera that bears about as much resemblance to current cameras as the Dynatac "brick" cellphone does to modern-day phones. It's a real antique, but you can get one for dirt cheap and it has a timelapse feature that will make it take a photograph every minute.
Once my new camera arrived, I spent several minutes making a crude bracket out of a slab of 2x4, some drywall screws, and a handful of zipties. At the track, I convinced the guys on the Mustard Yellow V8olvo to let me bolt this contraption onto their car's rear bumper. A couple of 3/8" bolts held the bracket to the bumper; the zipties around the bumper were just insurance. When the race got going, I started the camera and hoped for the best. Would the batteries last long enough to fill up the camera's 256MB CompactFlash card with usable action shots? Would the camera refuse to function after a few minutes of bumps and vibration?
LeMons races have been quite clean in the post-Altamont era, so I wasn't too worried about the camera getting bashed by another car… but that's just what happened, just a couple of hours into the race. Some driver whacked his crapcan's snout into the V8olvo's bumper, and the camera disappeared somewhere near the section of track they call the "Bus Stop." When the V8olvo rolled into the Penalty Box after the incident with the camera bracket empty, I was almost too distraught to dish out appropriate justice to the miscreants.
With 7 hours left to go in the race, I wouldn't be able to hit the track and search for the camera for quite a while. I didn't care about the camera, which I assumed would be run over several thousand times as it baked on the hot tarmac all day, but I figured that the CF card might survive such abuse. Once the day's race session was over and the track was empty (save the usual mini-junkyard of bumpers, fenders, connecting rods, etc. you always find dumped on the asphalt during a LeMons race), the LeMons Supreme Court hopped into the LeMons Highway De-Beautification Department's F250 and headed for the Bus Stop. Would we find the camera?
Yes! Obviously, the fact that you're seeing these photos indicates that our search was successful. LeMons Supreme Court Justice Lieberman spotted the Kodak in the weeds about 50 feet from the track. The camera hadn't been run over, still powered up (though the LCD display was broken), and had some decent photos on the card!
What's next for LeMons BumperCam technology? For LeMons South next month, I've picked up a cheap Canon A460, and I'll be installing the free CHDK software created by some firmware hackers for Canon Powershots. CHDK uses simple scripts written with a version of the BASIC programming language, and it's pretty easy to get an intervalometer feature going on the A460. This time I'll put a little more time into camera mount construction (no 2x4s this time), too. We'll see how well my new setup works in the real world!

LeMons BumperCam Images, Part 1:


LeMons BumperCam Images, Part 2:

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!

At the time, HEI distributors were pretty rare in the self-service yards; inventory in high-turnover wrecking yards tends to be comprised mostly of cars in the 15- to 20-year-old age range, so the mid-70s machines with electronic ignitions were still uncommon. I had just put an HEI in my Chevy's 350 when I saw Slacker for the first, so I was still bathed in the warm glow that comes with the knowledge that I would never have to deal with ignition points again. These days, vehicles from the 1985-1995 period make up a good 75% of junked cars (you see a distressing number of 21st-century GM and Ford vehicles as well, I'm sorry to report), which means that most engines from the modern era have some sort of bolt-in electronic-ignition option available. Chrysler small-blocks, Toyota Rs, whatever, you've probably got a cheap junkyard ignition option available, and you can get aftermarket electronic conversion kits for damn near everything else. In spite of that, you'll still find plenty of otherwise sane individuals who not only think points are better, they believe that points are morally superior.

For those of you too young to remember when points ignitions ruled the roads, just imagine broken-down cars with their hoods up every few hundred yards on the highway. Imagine parking lots echoing with the sound of engines farting, sputtering, and ultimately failing to start, and the associated screamfests among the stressed-out victims. Imagine getting 4 MPG a few thousand miles after your last tuneup; in fact, imagine having to do tuneups every few months. For all these nightmares and more, what was the culprit damn near every time? Ignition points!
We're talking about a simple little device here, basically just a spring-loaded switch inside the distributor that opens and closes to fire the spark plugs, via a little cam on the distributor shaft. It's a low-grade pain in the ass to get a new set adjusted right, involving feeler gauges and a bit of back pain, but anyone can learn how to install and adjust ignition points… and therein lies the deadly allure of the cursed things: when a car with a points ignition system is running like crap, most of the time you know right where to look for the problem, and you can fix it for cheap with a couple of hand tools and 15 minutes. You are a hero! A problem solver!

Meanwhile, electronic ignitions, which generally operate on a magnetic-sensor principle, just keep working forever (yeah, yeah, all you points lovers have harrowing tales of electronic ignitions that failed, and such stories always end up with the victims being dismembered and eaten by Sendoro Luminoso guerillas in Philadelphia, their final cries for mercy mixed with self-recriminations over their foolish spurning of good ol' ignition points in favor of them newfangledy eee-lectronic whatsits).

Basically, the logic of the points lovers boils down to this: electronic ignition systems are mysterious black boxes, fit only for the foolish and the weak, while a real man can always coax some more life out of garbooned points. Not only that, mechanical points are invulnerable to the the EMP from an airburst nuclear weapon. What if the North Koreans start raining Taepodong-2s down on your subdivision, and you've gathered up the family into the Econoline (along with a crate of SKS rifles, a sack of Krugerrands, and some not-very-expired MREs)? Do you want to trust the lives of your family to a black box? Actually, chances are good that your ignition coil will be fried by the EMP anyway, but you'll have a spare stashed in a Faraday-shielded box buried in the back yard… right?

For those of you driving vehicles made in the last decade or so (or much earlier, if you've got a high-end German or Japanese car), this is all moot; you've got some flavor of crank-sensor-triggered ignition and don't even have a points option, and thus the Trilateral Commission will simply haul you off to a labor camp in the Utah desert when The Clampdown happens. For those of us that do our shopping in the junkyard, a choice must be made!

Unfortunately, I'm not quite sure exactly what he did, since all the info I can find on this car is in French (my knowledge of which pretty much starts and ends with "force de frappe"), but the photos tell enough of the story to make it clear that we're dealing with a junkyard god here. According to tipster and Project Car Hell Poster Child Franzouse: "ok, so the guy didn't have to pose in his speedos, but what an awesome nut job! (if you scroll around the site you'll see he's also built a boat... )
[Chameu d'acier, Foutraquegarage]

When I started the rewiring project, my plan was to remove every single component that ever transported electrons for the POD. However, I got lazy when it came to the taillights and front turn signal lights. Here's the "before" shot of the taillight wiring (cue spooky haunted-house music).

And here's the "after" shot. You can see how I totally, utterly failed here; rather than gut the light assemblies and transplant nice reliable sockets and wiring from a junkyard-donor Infiniti (my car of choice for light-bulb-related hardware), I kept the Lucas sockets and spliced my harness into the few inches of Lucas wire heading into them. Note the cut wire in this image; that's from the early stages of my "why ain't this working?" testing.

But that wasn't the real bonehead move. Oh no, that was the way I totally spaced on testing the lights for continuity and/or inadvertent grounding. Sure enough, when I had the wiring all done and started flipping switches, I popped a fuse every time I activated the brake lights, right turn, or taillights. Turns out that one brake light socket, one taillight socket, the license plate light socket, plus front and rear right turn signal sockets were dead shorts. That's five out of nine possible for the Prince Of Darkness!

Now, it's not entirely fair to single out British cars for electrical problems, because Detroit really doesn't get the recognition it deserves for maddening electrical problems, but Lucas Electrics got their fame for the combination of unreliability and symptom-masking undiagnosability. I should know better, too, because- in addition to having had MGs as daily drivers- I used some Lucas components in the Turbo II, Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox and had all of them fail. I thought it would be fun to use some Jaguar marker lights, both of which required total rebuilds in order to get juice to the bulbs, and the Lucas switch I tried to use? Ha ha ha! Smell the melting plastic! So, now I'll be completely excorcising the sulfur-scented works of the Prince from my project before I proceed.

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?

I've been a junkyard regular for many years now, so my tool collection contains many junkyard finds. Here's a more or less random selection of some of my found tools; click on a thumbnail to get that tool's story.
K-D Tools Ratcheting Box Wrench
Since this type of wrench in the Detroit-centric 1/2" and 9/16" sizes is so useful for old American (and some British) cars, it ranks as one of my favorite junkyard tool finds. I found it in a late-60s Mercury Montego at Ecology Auto Wrecking in Santa Fe Springs, 20 years ago.
K-D Tools Ratcheting Box Wrench
Here's a detail of the ratcheting box wrench. Not sure of the era, but I'm guessing 1960s or older.
5" Vise-Grip Pliers
Genuine Vise-Grip™ locking pliers, not some generic substitute! I found this in use as a window crank on a mid-70s Nova and made it my own.
Diagonal Cutters
Here's a recent find; these diagonal cutters were sitting on top of a mess of wires in a Volvo 244's harness, which I was harvesting for connectors to use in 20R Sprite Wiring Hell. For some reason, this is the most commonly found tool in the junkyard (other than tire irons, of course); I have a half-dozen of these things, all scored at junkyards.
1903 Screwdriver
This one didn't come from a junkyard, but it's still my all-time favorite found tool. I found this half-buried in the dirt beneath a wooden floor I was replacing in the 1880s stable behind my parents' Victorian house.
1903 Screwdriver
This screwdriver has been a very useful tool. The steel is too soft for it to be any good for serious prying (you can practically bend it in your hands), but the metal frame is set up to enable serious hammer pounding, which makes it a great pseudo-chisel.
1903 Screwdriver
The manufacturer's name is obscured by rust, but you can make out the word "Handle" and an August 25, 1903 patent date stamped on the shaft
West German Screwdriver
I've had this for so long that I don't recall what kind of car it came from, but it has the look of a piece from a VW or Porsche tool kit. Remember when West Germany was a country? That's where the "W" at the beginning of the VINs of German cars comes from, trivia buffs!
Companion Adjustable Pliers
I had to look up the generic name for this type of pliers, because- like Xerox or Kleenex- the manufacturer's name has become the de facto title for this tool.
Companion Adjustable Pliers
I found this tool just last week, sitting on the front seat of a Jaguar XJ-6. It appeared that the former owner, Jim C, was using these pliers in a futile attempt to remove the steering wheel nut, then was too exhausted to pack all his tools after he gave up in despair. I always associate the words "Jaguar" and "despair."
Yankee No. 41 Push Drill
It's always worth digging through the crap in the back of a junked plumber's truck, because you might find something like this 1901 Yankee Push Drill. I must admit I haven't used it very often (having been spoiled by power drills), but it's still a pretty cool thing to have. Still works perfectly after more than a century!
Yankee No. 41 Push Drill
It came with a full set of bits, which store inside the handle. You can pick these things up pretty cheap on eBay nowadays.
Stanley Utility Knife
Here's another very common junkyard freebie, that favored accessory of the English football hooligan. Rather than using a Stanley knife to slice up the faces of my rivals, however, I'm more likely to put it to use slicing troublesome hoses and belts that block access to engine-compartment fasteners. I have several of these, all junkyard-obtained.
Matco 1/4" Drive Ratchet
For years, I used a junkyard-found Blue Point (aka "Snap-On Lite") quarter-drive ratchet, but the day came when I overtorqued it one too many times and made hash out of its delicate innards. Fortunately, I found this Matco ratchet in the glovebox of a mid-80s Tercel wagon before that happened, so I had a backup.
Ace Hardware Screwdriver
I find so many flat-tip screwdrivers in junkyards that I tend to give them away to my friends who can't scrape up Tool One when it comes time to replace a switch plate or something. Here's a cheapo that I grabbed off the ground at a junkyard last week, just sitting among the hoseclamps and weeds between the cars.
Sam's Club Screwdriver
This screwdriver, which I found in a gym bag full of spray-paint cans in a Sentra, has become my default JB Weld and Bondo mixer. It's just the right size to pry the lid off a Bondo can!

Cutting to the chase, the Sprite starts and runs now, so now I've just got to do some major minor to-do list items such as rebuilding the entire braking system, mounting those Miata seats I grabbed cheap, cooling and exhaust system assembly, and so on. Since the hardest part of any Hell Project (the registration paperwork) is taken care of, should be utter torture smooth sailing from this point forward! Continue with this sequential gallery thingy to hear my tale of Wiring Hell:

The reason I got the car so cheap in the first place- other than the fact that it's a beat-to-crap basket case with a ridiculously oversized engine installation- was that the original wiring was completely hosed. Hosed so badly, in fact, that even the brownout-inducing spirit of Joe Lucas, Prince Of Darkness felt uncomfortable hovering around the car. What little unburnt Lucas wiring was left in the car took a one-way trip straight to the garbage can… or into a decoy wiring harness in the thief-proof Toyota truck stereo project.

Best to start over from scratch, in this case. Fortunately, I've done a fair amount of car wiring over the years, not to mention building several instrument panels from scratch. Doing all the electricals in the Black Metal V8olvo made this project seem less daunting than it might have otherwise.

I've learned from extremely painful experience that it's a lot easier to wire a car if you sketch out some sort of diagram. It also makes it much easier when you have to repair or modify your wiring later on, because it's impossible to remember the super-redneck workarounds you rigged up after a few months go by.

The guy who engineered the engine swap also rigged up a nice powerful Delco internally-regulated three-wire alternator, so no maddening Toyota charging system mysteries to unravel here. Just put a charge light in the dash and it should work fine.

Using split loom and a bunch of leftover Painless Wiring harness wire from Black Metal V8olvo crew chief Hellhammer's shop, I wired up the car. Even in a no-frills machine like the Sprite, there's always more stuff to wire than one might expect. Gauges and idiot lights, turn signals, horn, et cetera- all of it requires wiring going through the firewall. Sadly, John Law mandates stuff like horns and headlights, and one look at the car tells me that I'll be having frequent conversations with members of the law enforcement community as soon as I take this thing on public roads. And they call this a free country!

99 million stripped wires later, I had the somewhat-modified factory instrument panel rigged up with all the stuff I needed

Also learned from painful car wiring experience was the reality that I will have to completely remove the instrument panel at some point. For this reason, all wires go through pairs of harness connectors, in this case scavenged from race-car parts Volvos. Tip: it's pretty easy to pop out the connector pins and concentrate all the ones hooked to heavy-gauge wires into the connectors you plan to use.

Tachometer, gas gauge, wiper switch, engine cooling fan switch, ignition switch, ignition lock, horn button, starter button, headlight switches (separate for low and high beams, because I couldn't find the right kind of switch in my stash), turn signal switch (I don't want to screw with crappy British Leyland steering column switches, so I put a 3-way switch on the dash), charge and oil pressure idiot lights, and turn signal indicator lights (a '63 Ford pickup hazard indicator light for left, Volvo 164 Fasten Seat Belt light for right).

Yeah, I love junkyard stuff and general beater-y wretchedness. The idea is to build this car on a 24 Hours Of LeMons budget, though I think it might be tough to find anyone willing to take this thing out on a race track with the likes of the Size Matters '67 Plymouth Fury. Here's a Pick-N-Pull battery mounted in the trunk, using the tried-and-true BMW E30 battery-cable hardware. I still haven't rigged any kind of battery tie-down or hydrogen venting system, but that's not so important in a car that has no brakes yet. Add it to the Hell Project to-do list!

The positive battery cable and the bundle of wires going back to the rear of the car (turn signals, taillights, brake lights, fuel pump, fuel gauge sender) come into the passenger compartment via these hardly-rusty-by-British-Leyland-standards channels. There's just barely room for the Miata seat to clear this stuff. In fact, there's just barely room for anything to clear anything else, given how tiny the Spridget is.

I picked up a 1970s Toyota truck speedometer to use- not wanting to deal with weird speedo cable adapters or fabrication, I figured it would be best to match the gauge to the Celica transmission I've got- but I decided not to use it in this dash. That's because it only goes to 85 MPH, which wouldn't be a big deal except for the 4.56:1 differential gear ratio and small-diameter tires; this speedo will be pegged before I'm even off surface streets! I'm going to pick up a later 120 MPH Celica unit and manually calibrate it (i.e., use the cop-grade speedometer in my Crown Victoria to clock it at various speeds, then print my own speedo faceplate label).

I figured that Italian gauges would add sportiness to my ride, and would you believe that this Alfa Romeo Spider Benzina gauge works perfectly with the Healey's fuel sender?

In fact, the only junkyard gauge that doesn't work right is the metric VDO temperature gauge I pulled from some sort of Audi. I have the right sender and it's wired correctly- I think- but it doesn't care. No problem, though, because rather than buy a new 2-1/16" gauge for, oh, $9.95, I've fabricated my own using a dead Volvo clock (obtained free from the V8olvo) with its innards replaced by a Celica temp gauge crudely busted out of a cluster unit at the junkyard and epoxied into place. It works fine using the Toyota gauge sender that came with the car, though I still need to rig up some kind of faceplate glass to protect the needle. You learn tricks like this trying to stay under that daunting $500 LeMons budget!

So now I can climb into the driver's seat (which isn't actually, like, bolted down or anything) and fire up that 20R, much to the delight of my long-suffering neighbors. The car came with a pretty decent exhaust system, but I removed it to get access to the fuel pump wiring and haven't gotten around to reinstalling it. Open headers rule! Note the illuminated switches, courtesy of the too-awesome-to-describe-here HSC Electronic Supply surplus store in ultra-geeky Milpitas.

One major problem is the points ignition system (Toyota didn't go to electronic ignitions in US-spec R engines until '78 or so). It works fine for now, but points suck. Period. Don't even try to defend points ignitions here, because even the most rabid fan of non-electronic ignitions has only one leg to stand on, debate-wise: protection against the EMP pulse of a nuclear explosion... and I figure I'll have bigger problems than an engine stall if a nuke goes off in my line of sight, anyway. Fortunately, I picked up a nice 20R electronic ignition system while I was junkyard shopping for Japanese fuse boxes.

A few bits of wiring remain; I have yet to hook up the headlights, horn, and engine cooling fan, since I've been bashing away at the front of the car in an attempt to get the extremely, uh, innovative cooling system that came with the car to function properly. This should be wrapped up pretty soon, and I should have the brakes together any year day now. Check in later for more 20R Sprite adventures!

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!

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!

My friend had come out to the West Coast to check out the Maker Faire, and since he has the World's Coolest Engineering Job (fabricating and installing hidden surveillance gear in vehicles for an organization I'm not allowed to name) I figured I'd see what he could do with the Datsun Talkbox. After a few minutes with a multimeter and some wiring diagrams, he had some good news and some bad news for me. The bad news was that the device's control circuitry was pretty much fried; the good news was that the motor, stylus, and amplifier circuitry were all fine, and it's a pretty easy hack to control the whole mess manually. You know what's coming, right? Datsun Talkbox Scratching! Get ready for DJ Murilee Maxima, world!

We needed an audiovisual aid to warn a whiner when he or she had crossed the line!
So, I knocked together this World's Greatest Whiner Alarm and off it went to the races. Naturally, I insisted on using only the finest junkyard components! Since I'm off to the Maker Faire today, let's have a how-to; here's how it went together:

I scrounged this ancient klaxon, aka "Oogah Horn," many years ago, from a junked Econoline van. I love that submarine-movie "DIVE! DIVE! OOOGAH! OOOGAH!" sound, and this horn has lived in a few of my cars over the years. Still, I knew it was destined for something better. The Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox taught me that plywood + junkyard electrical parts = goodness.

For the circuitry, I'd be using a modified version of the control circuit that operated the talking skulls on the Black Metal V8olvo at the Arse Freeze-A-Palooza LeMons race last December. For that, I needed a couple of relays. This BMW 325e relay panel was my first stop.

A turn-signal flasher would provide the timing mechanism to flash the lights and honk the horn. I prefer Chrysler K Car flashers for this purpose, because they're exceptionally easy to find and remove from a junked car.

The next item on my shopping list: taillight sockets and bulbs. I like 90s Nissan units for this sort of application, because they're easily removed from the car and come with handy mounting holes. This Infiniti had all I needed.

So many modern cars have impossible-to-extract sockets, and the older ones tend to suffer from corrosion. Take a Murilee Junkyard Engineering Tip: head right for the Nissan products!

Back at home, I started knocking together a frame out of some scrap plywood and drywall screws. The whole mess was sized around a nice thick piece of obscure Plexiglas I'd scavenged from somewhere.

The klaxon had no mounting bracket, so a few minutes sawing and drilling on a chunk of sheet aluminum (left over from the gauge panels I made for the Black Metal V8olvo) solved that problem.

Once the case was built, I gave the inside a coat of white paint, in order to maximize brightness when the bulbs came on.

I hit the outside with some green spray paint, then got to work on the innards. One light bulb is used to provide sufficient load to operate the Chrysler turn-signal flasher, which then actuates two Bosch relays. One relay powers the klaxon and the other powers the remaining three lights.

Version 1.0 of the World's Greatest Whiner alarm was powered by a car lighter plug and a long cord, but this setup didn't work so well. Not only was the power supply insufficient for good klaxon volume, disaster struck when a LeMons Supreme Court justice drove the rental car away without disconnecting the alarm. Crash! Fortunately, the damage was easily fixed. Version 2.0 features a battery box on the back and a junkyard car battery connected via a pair of Camry battery terminals and cables.

Because much high-temperature unpleasantness would result from a short circuit inside the box, I installed a 30-amp fuse- which I believe came from a Mitsubishi Diamante- on the positive battery cable.

Some packaging tape and red plastic sheeting changes the clear Plexiglas into whiner-menacing red.

A trip to the thrift store netted this resin "World's Greatest" sign, no doubt intended for use as part of a "World's Greatest Parole Officer" or "World's Greatest Bassoon Player" craft project. Total expenditure so far: $1.

I had this little red spotlight in a box-o-crap™, so I installed it next to the klaxon.

The original switch was a pull-chain-style lamp switch, but it proved too fragile for LeMons Supreme Court use. This Frankensteinian knife switch is much more satisfying for the user; it allows a judge to place one hand on the switch and ask the miscreant "You sure you want to keep complaining?" Since the miscreant must eat a jar of super-nasty baby food once the World's Greatest Whiner Alarm is triggered, the hefty knife switch adds a useful air of menace. And there you have it- not much work, almost no money, and a battery that's about to be transferred to my Personal Hell Project.

Is it the fast track? The thin air? The mid-80s temperature? Theories abound in the pits, but there's no consensus. I must have seen at least 30 teams (out of 100 or so cars) frantically wrenching on their machines at one point Saturday afternoon. Blown head gaskets galore (the majority of Hondas are now suffering from this all-too-common malady). Thrown rods. Spun bearings. Fried clutches. Garboned transmissions. Cooked brakes. Electrical woes. Cracked blocks. Cracked heads. Burned valves. Dropped valves. Maddeningly undiagnosable ignition-system problems. Even the supposedly unfixable broken BMW M20 rocker arm.

Some cars are down for the count, while others might get back on the track tomorrow (after an all-night knuckle-shredding wrenchathon, in the howling and dusty "Washoe Zephyr" gales that seem to blast into life every evening in the Nevada high desert). The Unsafe At Any Speed Corvair: three obliterated pistons and cylinders, done for the weekend. The Metro Gnome Honda CBR900RR-powered Geo Metro: brake fire, probably knocked out of contention. The Hondarrari CRXstarossa: blown head gasket, should be back on the track tomorrow. The list just goes on and on.

Will the winner Sunday end up being the last car running? It appears that the field of serious lap-total contenders has been narrowed down to a dozen or so cars, so those among that group that can keep their heap in one piece (and away from the penalty box, where business has been quite brisk) should have a great shot at the checkered flag. Meanwhile, there's just no telling who will snare the Index Of Effluency award; the Mystery Machine Voyager Turbo minivan, all the Alfa Romeos, the Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys' Peugeot 505, and- of course - the Killer Bees' MGB all make strong cases. Come back later for LeMons updates, and don't miss LeMons Supreme Court Justice Lavrinc's Tweetisms, or whatever the kids call 'em when you're done here!

It's 768 pages of vintage gearhead goodness, for a five-spot: the 1970 Motor Service's Automotive Encyclopedia. Exploded and cutaway views galore, weird prototypes, everything you need! Here's bzr's take on it:

After reading your post about Chrysler's Tech guy (from a while ago), it reminded me of my latest find here: the Motor Service's Automotive Encyclopedia by William K. Toboldt and Larry Johnson, circa 1970! I found this gem in an old thrift store where I was buying a ridiculous shirt for a 70s-themed party (that later got busted by the cops, but that's a different story altogether).

I'm imagining that it was used in a dingy Automotive Fundamentals classroom at the SAE Mechanics Training program at Onondaga Community College, wrenching on AMXs and Jeep Tornado engines, and maybe even one of those oddball Sunbeam Rapier Vs (all of which are wonderfully mentioned in here).

It smells like a church basement and weighs about 20lbs and probably covered in asbestos, but it's a genuinely interesting look into motoring before it devolved into emissions equipment and required a doctorate in computer programming to work on cars. There's an entire chapter devoted to Corvair engines. Safety? In a late-model Charger? Hell yeah, this is 1970! There's even a few mentions of Datsuns and Saab engines, so it's not just America, Fuck Yeah the entire way through.

To think I only got it for $5. And at 768 pages, it's one of the most educational things I've bought.

I fully intend to read this book cover-to-cover, especially the section on carburetors. I figure it'll help me with my 70s motorcycle project, as well as the fact that every car I've ever been interested was built before George McGovern's presidential bid.

Here are some scans of pages I found interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a copy lying around somewhere too, actually...