Junkyard Find: 1971 International Harvester 1200D Pickup

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

I find quite a few International Harvesters in junkyards, mostly because I live in Colorado and the IHC Scout makes sense here. IHC pickups, though, aren’t as easy to find. We’ve seen this ’62 Travelette, this ’72, and this pickup-related ’71 Travelall in this series, and now I’ve found this well-used ’71 pickup in a San Francisco Bay Area yard.

I’m not sufficiently tuned in to the International Harvester world to be able to tell a 304 from a 345 V8 at a glance.

Looks like this truck made a trip to Garberville, hundreds of miles to the north of this yard, before something broke and it took that last tow-truck ride.

As long as a truck can still carry a load, it’s worth something. When it’s 44 years old and a type that doesn’t have a huge following, though… well, The Crusher awaits when it needs a major repair.

Apparently, IHC didn’t consider Dodge trucks as real competition back then.

No IHC ads here, but you can get a sense of just how long ago this truck rolled off the assembly line. 45 years of work for this machine.





Murilee Martin
Murilee Martin

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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  • Bd2 Would be sweet on a Telluride.
  • Luke42 When will they release a Gladiator 4xe?I don’t care what color it is, but I do care about being able to plug it in.
  • Bd2 As I have posited here numerous times; the Hyundai Pony Coupe of 1974 was the most influential sports and, later on, supercar template. This Toyota is a prime example of Hyundai's primal influence upon the design industry. Just look at the years, 1976 > 1974, so the numbers bear Hyundai out and this Toyota is the copy.
  • MaintenanceCosts Two of my four cars currently have tires that have remaining tread life but 2017 date codes. Time for a tire-stravaganza pretty soon.
  • Lorenzo I'd actually buy another Ford, if they'd bring back the butternut-squash color. Well, they actually called it sea foam green, but some cars had more green than others, and my 1968 Mercury Montego MX was one of the more-yellow, less-green models. The police always wrote 'yellow' on the ticket.
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