Picked Clean: 1971 Toyota Land Cruiser Skeletonized By Junkyard Vultures
Toyota Land Cruisers don’t last long in self-service wrecking yards, as we saw with this ’85 earlier in the summer. When I saw this ’71 FJ40 a few weeks later, I could see the scavengers circling overhead. Now look at it!
All the easy-and-valuable goodies had been grabbed during the several days between being placed on the yard and my first series of photographs, but I knew that some portable-Sawzall-armed customer would want the sheet metal.
Sure enough, that’s what happened.
The Chevy-based six in these trucks is pretty hard to kill and good-running examples are plentiful, so I’m guessing this engine will go to The Crusher with whatever fragments remain of the truck.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Why in the world would you just chop off 3/4 of the top half? Crazy...
Always thought it was a missed opportunity for Toyota that they brought out the current FJ as such a bloated vehicle with a mile-wide blind spot instead of bringing in something closer in size to this version , which would have helped fuel economy and handling , presumably .