Picked Clean: If You Want 240Z Parts, You Need To Work Fast!
When an ordinary car— say, a ’94 Camry— shows up in a high-turnover self-service junkyard, most of its parts will still be present when it goes to the scrapper. However, when a seldom-seen-in-junkyards vehicle with an avid following— say, a ’71 Toyota Land Cruiser— appears on the yard, it gets eaten like a roadkill raccoon in vulture country. When I saw this complete and rust-free 1973 Datsun 240Z at my local self-serve yard a few weeks ago, I knew it hadn’t been exposed to parts shoppers for long. Sure enough, look at it now!
It’s good to see that many of the parts from this car will live on in other Zs.
Poor flat-top Hitachi SU carburetors. Nobody wants them. Likewise, L24 engines of unknown condition.
Nearly all the glass and most of the removable-without-metal-cutting bodywork got yanked. A bonus with shooting photos in this junkyard is that the Rocky Mountains appear in the background in many of my shots.
Still a few things left, but this car will be a totally bare shell when it gets eaten by The Crusher, a month from now.
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, Hagerty and The Truth About Cars.
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I saw a nice one of these on the road yesterday. I was struck by how tiny it was. In my regular height sedan its roof height was even with my eyes.
Marilee , disregard my previous inquiry.....I just saw the 'After' pics.......I wonder who got the seats?.....