The Truth About Cars » 1972

Junkyard Find: 1972 Dodge Tradesman Custom Van

Murilee Martin — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 13:00:10 +0000

Once the Detroit Big Three went to front-engined/snout-equipped cargo vans in the late 1960s and early 1970s, replacing the dangerous yet highly-maneuverable-in-alleyways forward-control/flat-nose vans that came before, those vans became much more practical for freeway driving (and family transportation). I still see plenty of 40-year-old Econolines, Beauvilles, and Tradesmen in junkyards these days, since these vans are so useful that most of them get flogged until they drop dead, but it (usually) takes one with some mid-70s-style customizing touches to make me break out the camera.
The Tradesman was the windowless “molester van” cargo hauler, much better suited than the passenger-van Sportsman for airbrush murals depicting jousting knights battling Aztec kings in a zebra herd at the Mars Base.
The most basic customization job on these vans, back when The Sweet was big and groovy chicks in tube tops alternated bongloads of Panama Red with swigs of Boone’s Farm, involved the application of circular bubble windows and some upholstery in the cargo area. If you wanted to increase the odds of enticing those groovy chicks into your van, you needed the airbrush mural, a quadrophonic 8-track sound system, and maybe a wood-burning stove.
I was in grade school back when the custom-van craze reached its zenith, and even then most people thought they were pretty goofy. I wanted a Porsche 914, not a custom van, when I was 8. And yet… I’m slaving away on my own custom van project now.

Junkyard Find: 1972 Datsun 521 Pickup

Murilee Martin — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 13:00:15 +0000

We saw a Datsun 620 Junkyard Find recently, and now I’ve found an example of the 620′s predecessor: the 520.
I’ve always admired the small Japanese pickups of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but I still wasn’t prepared for the beauty of this instrument cluster. The speedometer has real depth that’s not readily apparent in this photograph. Such simplicity, yet there’s genuine style as well. I may have to go back and buy it.
The good old L engine, the same family that went into 510s, Z cars, and countless other Nissan products from the 1960s through the 1980s. This is the four-cylinder L16.
At some point, this truck’s former owner added skull-themed window film and dice switch knobs.
I’m not sure where this aftermarket fuel tank, seen sitting under the camper shell, came from. Perhaps it was pulled from this truck, or maybe it came from another vehicle in this self-service yard.
These pickups weren’t as prized as their Toyota counterparts, so you don’t see as many of them still chugging along in daily service. Perhaps the L engine wasn’t quite as bulletproof as the Toyota R, but it came close.

Junkyard Find: 1972 Mercury Marquis Brougham

Murilee Martin — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:00:07 +0000

Brougham. To (increasingly elderly) car shoppers nearly to the dawn of the 21st century, that word meant class. Luxury. Success. A brougham was a type of horse-drawn carriage… or it was an option package applied to a car made by GM, Chrysler, or Ford; even Nissan jumped aboard the Brougham bandwagon. Mercury might have been the most broughamic marques of them all, which makes today’s Junkyard Find the zenith of broughamhood!
You really can’t experience the joys of broughamism without a big chrome-plated heraldic crest on the C pillar, and the ’72 Marquis delivers in a big way.
There’s the silhouette head of the Roman god Mercury in the shield; the Mercury Division had been moving away from images of the Messenger of the Gods for a decade or two, so it’s interesting to see one in vestigial form here. The really disturbing part of this emblem, however, is the crown-wearing lions— or are those hyenas?— with tormented monkey skulls for faces. LSD in Dearborn’s water supply?
Up front, we’ve got a 208-horsepower 429 engine (due to Communist infiltration of American institutions in the early 1970s, Detroit was forced to list horsepower ratings using net horsepower figures instead of ludicrously inflated —except when they were ludicrously deflated to fool insurance companies— gross figures; also under notorious nanny-state liberal Richard M. Nixon’s watch, compression ratios dropped in ’72), down from the 320 horses the same engine made in ’71. The intake manifold on this engine weighs more than your Commie vehicle of choice, by the way.
Right. So there’s no point in calling it a Brougham if you don’t have the kind of interior that, say, Superfly would feel comfortable with.
The interior of this car is still in pretty good shape, but scrap-metal prices mean that most less-than-perfect 5,000-pound Detroit barges are worth more in steel than they are as cars.
These maddening separate shoulder belts appeared in a lot of cars during the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the manufacturers figured out a way to make three-point belts that retracted as one unit with the lap belt. Blame Nixon!

Junkyard Find: 1972 International Harvester Pickup

Murilee Martin — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:00:58 +0000

You know what’s wrong with this country nowadays? You can’t buy a light pickup truck made by a company so agricultural that a piece of farm equipment is in its very name! That all ended in 1980, when the last pickup rolled off the strike-ridden IHC assembly line. The outdoorsy Scout is still a common sight here in Colorado (on the street as well as in the junkyards), but quite a few of the Scout’s big brothers are still punching the clock as work trucks. Here’s one that made it to the second decade of the 21st century before getting used up.
You can’t see this emblem without thinking of silos and amber waves of grain.
I don’t have the IHC smarts to tell you whether this is a 304, a 345, or a 392. I can tell you that I’m pushing 24 Hours of LeMons teams to drop an IHC engine into a Camaro or Mustang.
Truck interiors have become so busy in the last couple of decades. Here’s what you need on the farm.

Junkyard Find: 1972 AM General DJ-5B “Mail Jeep”

Murilee Martin — Sun, 06 May 2012 13:00:21 +0000

US Postal Service-surplus right-hand-drive DJ-5s were once cheap and plentiful. Actually, they’re still cheap and plentiful. Some got converted to four-wheel-drive, some got used as farm vehicles, some ended up as urban hoopties… and many of them were bought cheap at auction and then sat for decades, awaiting a project that never got started. Here’s a 40-year-old mail carrier that looks like it went right from the post office to the junkyard. Quite a few rural routes in Wyoming and northern Colorado are handled by non-USPS-employee subcontractors who drive their own vehicles, so it’s possible that this Jeep stayed on the job well into the 21st century.
You get a steel box on wheels with a handy mail-sorting shelf next to the driver’s seat, which is located at just the right height for rural mailboxes.
AM General went through quite a few engines for the DJ series. This one has an AMC six, but DJs were also built with GM Iron Dukes, Willys Hurricanes, and even Audi-via-AMC 2-liter fours.
The instrumentation is elegant, but we must report that the DJ-5 suffers from understeer at the limit. In fact, it suffers from upside-down steer at the limit.

Junkyard Find: 1972 Plymouth Satellite Sedan

Murilee Martin — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:00:39 +0000

Back when I bought my very first car at age 15, the fastest cars on the island were three early-70s Plymouth Satellites. They had 440s, tunnel-ram intakes with great big carbs perched way over the hoods, wild lumpy cams, unruly glasspack mufflers, and absurd 70s-style “stinkbug stance” jacked-up rears. One of them even had a big “55″ with circle-and-slash emblem painted on the diff cover, complete with little spotlights to illuminate this statement at night. Rumor had it that these Satellites ran 10s at Baylands Raceway, but what they were really all about was street racing for cash. These cars were gloriously evil to the young driver of a ’69 Corona, and I’ve wanted a ’71-74 “fuselage” Satellite coupe ever since. Even though this one is a sedan, it still reminds me of the Fastest Cars In Alameda, 1981.
With a stock 318, this car was probably capable of running 17s at the dragstrip. Well, maybe not even that, if it was running at high-altitude Bandimere, where naturally-aspirated cars lose 20% of their horsepower due to lack of oxygen.
Back in the early 1970s, Detroit was very good at building big, cheap sedans with enough luxury to make drivers feel they’d hacked off a nice chunk of the American Dream. The Satellite and its competitors drank gas, but (prior to October, 1973) who cared?
The now-defunct Gates Rubber plant, where Neal Cassady toiled as a teenager, is just a few miles from this Denver self-service yard. Maybe this radiator hose was made there before the plant closed in ’96.
This car has been pretty well used up, but there are still many good parts left on it. I might go back and grab the transmission kickdown linkage for my A100 Hell Project.

Junkyard Find: 1972 Lincoln Continental Mark IV

Murilee Martin — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:00:12 +0000

Ah, personal luxury! It’s hard to imagine anything more personally luxurious than a 4,906-pound two-door with 460 cubic inches under its 50-foot-long hood and an interior done up in classy brown-and-cream two-tone.
You don’t see many cars with the transmission gear ratios on a plaque in the engine compartment.
The Cartier Edition Mark IV came later, but this ’72 still got the Cartier clock. I tried to find a working Lincoln/Cartier clock in the junkyard for years, and finally gave up in despair. Cartier’s low-bidder clock supplier probably got $1.47 apiece for these.
This Mark IV had some rust issues involving the vinyl top. It appears that the car’s final owner removed the vinyl, saw the horror beneath, and sent the car straight to The Crusher.
In fact, The Crusher lives just a few hundred feet from this car’s final parking space. Here we see it in full, car-eating operation.
Let’s hope someone rescues these nice interior components before this car gets eaten.
The Mark IV came with an early type of ABS called “Sure-Track.” I’ve never experienced Sure-Track in operation, so I have no idea how well it worked.
At some point during its 40 years on the planet, this Lincoln got a name from a label-maker-equipped owner: Big Gulp!

Junkyard Find: 1972 Dodge Colt Wagon

Murilee Martin — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 14:00:48 +0000

Some cars that show up in junkyards were moving under their own power just days before their final tow-truck ride… and others spent decades in a field somewhere, waiting for the price of scrap steel to make hauling-away worthwhile. This Colt, which I found close to the ’83 Cordia in a California self-serve yard, is the latter type.
Lichens growing on the weatherstripping tell a story of long-term abandonment.
25-year-old newspapers in the back offer more clues.
There really isn’t much worth salvaging on this old Mitsubishi, but I can’t resist breaking out the camera when I find a car this weathered.

Junkyard Find: 1972 Ford Courier

Murilee Martin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 13:00:09 +0000

Until Ford started building Rangers in the early 1980s, their only small pickup was a rebadged Mazda B Series called the Courier. Like so many utilitarian Malaise Era vehicles, Couriers were everywhere… until one day in the early 1990s when just about all of them disappeared. Here’s one of the few that managed to hang on for another couple of decades.
The Courier wasn’t quite as cool as its Mazda-badged rotary-powered REPU sibling, but it was a good real-world value.
The early Courier’s 1.6 liter overhead-cam four was a fairly sophisticated powerplant by the standards of the time, and these trucks were able to compete head-to-head with Datsun and Toyota’s truck offerings. Now, of course, the Couriers are just about all gone. I found this battered example in a Los Angeles junkyard.

Could This Be The “Press Bronco” From Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas?

Murilee Martin — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:00:32 +0000

When Raoul Duke, protagonist of Hunter S. Thompson’s best-known work, goes to cover the story of the ’71 Mint 400 race, he attempts to observe the race from a Ford-owned truck. When I saw this ’72 at a Denver wrecking yard a few days ago, I figured I might be looking at that very same truck!

Of course, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is fiction, but Thompson really did attempt to cover the Mint 400 and he might well have caught a desert ride in a Bronco such as this one.

In Thompson’s words: The Ford Motor Company had come through, as promised, with a “press Bronco” and a driver, but after a few savage runs across the desert—looking for motorcycles and occasionally finding one—I abandoned this vehicle to the photographers and went back to the bar.

It looks like this truck has been sitting outdoors with the windows open for decades and the body is rusted to hell. Probably some decent parts left on it somewhere, though.

Maybe the good ol’ Windsor still runs. You never know, you know?