The Truth About Cars » Denver

Junkyard Find: 1984 Chrysler New Yorker

Murilee Martin — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 13:00:12 +0000

The New Yorker provides us with a nice history of Chrysler’s postwar luxury ambitions, and examples demonstrating various facets of this history are plentiful in self-service wrecking yards. We’ve seen this ’53, this ’64, this ’82, this ’85, this ’89, this ’90, and this ’92 so far, and today were adding another K-car-based New Yorker to the collection.
Sure, it’s a K-car (actually, it’s an E-car, which was an extended-wheelbase K), but that doesn’t mean that Lee Iacocca scrimped on the glitz!
Check it out, genuine Wire-Like™ wheels!
Cushy leather seats, naturally.
Futuristic “Message Center.”
Even more futuristic computer.
Opera lights.
Padded landau roof.
Detailed by a garbage truck.

You’ll sit in the lap of luxury.
Power in this one came courtesy of the Mitsubishi Astron 2.6 liter four-cylinder engine, the same family of engines that powered the Starion and Raider.

Junkyard Find: 1987 Ford LTD Country Squire

Murilee Martin — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 13:00:16 +0000

Will the faux-woodgrain Country Squire Junkyard Finds never stop? Not if I can keep finding them! We started this sequence with this ’76, then followed up with this ’77 and this ’86. Today’s Squire is another Panther platform “woodie” wagon, Detroit’s traditional rear-drive family hauler for the late 1980s.
This car couldn’t carry the staggering volume of cargo that its gigantic 1970s predecessors did, but it still made the Taurus wagon seem cramped.
With an EFI-equipped 302-cubic-inch V8 and overdrive automatic transmission, these cars got pretty good fuel economy for the time. Yes, the Taurus was a lot more frugal.
This example, which I spotted in Denver a couple of weeks ago, seems pretty solid except for the bashed-up left front corner.
It drove to the accident, but nobody wants to spend $1500 to fix a car that’s worth— at best— a grand. Next stop, Crusher!
Such class!

Junkyard Find: 1977 Ford LTD Country Squire

Murilee Martin — Thu, 30 May 2013 13:00:19 +0000

We saw a 1976 Country Squire Junkyard Find yesterday, after going seven months since seeing this ’75 Country Squire, but this Denver yard has given us back-to-back (actually, tailgate-to-tailgate) Malaise Era Country Squires. Today’s find is in far better shape than yesterday’s (which is both cool and saddening), so let’s check it out!
1977 was the second-to-last year of the extra-huge LTD Country Squire, and the factory shipping weight of this machine was a mighty 4,674 pounds. That’s 554 pounds more than the 2013 ZL1 Camaro, so you know we’re talking about a pretty hefty car here.
The 400M V8 in this car didn’t make a lot of power by 21st-century standards (if I look up the horsepower number for the ’77 400, we’ll all get depressed), but the torque was sufficient to haul a family of nine in comfort. Note the high-altitude spec on this sticker.
Looks like this car was sold in Denver, and— 36 years later— it will die in Denver.
It’s in pretty decent shape overall; no rust, most of the upholstery looks pretty good.
Manual windows, Ford Aeronutronic AM radio, and hideaway headlights. Not exactly luxurious by current standards, but these cars were very comfy on long road trips. Anyway, Blondie sounds best on AM.
With scrap cars going for $240/ton, this car was worth more as parts and steel than as a street-driven vehicle. How many remain?

Junkyard Find: 1976 Ford LTD Country Squire

Murilee Martin — Wed, 29 May 2013 13:00:10 +0000

The perceived usefulness of full-sized station wagons of the Malaise Era dropped down to about zero when minivans and SUVs became mainstream family-hauler options in the late 1980s. You see a few wagon freaks restoring these things nowadays, but for every Country Squire that gets restored (or even preserved), a hundred others get sent to the knackers. Here’s a well-worn ’76 that I spotted in Denver a couple weeks back.
We saw a ’75 Country Squire in this series last fall, but big Detroit wagons have become very rare sights in junkyards during the last half-decade or so.
Growing up a Malaise Era kid, just about every family had a Country Squire or its GM or Chrysler counterpart; these cars were the Voyager and Explorer of their time. My family had a Chevy Beauville van instead (bought new for a Minnesota-to-California move), but the idea was the same: rear-wheel-drive, body-on-frame construction, big V8, kid-barf-proof cloth or vinyl interior.
This is the 460-cubic-inch big-block, good for 202 horsepower and 352 foot-pounds of torque… and about 9 MPG on the highway. Yes, the horsepower number is depressingly low, but torque was what mattered with these cars.
The faux-wood trim succumbed to the Colorado sun decades ago.
After 37 years, this car has been used up.

Junkyard Find: 1985 Toyota Camry LE Liftback

Murilee Martin — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:00:35 +0000

I thought I’d seen the rarest member of the Camry species in North America when I spotted this 1990 Camry All-Trac on the coldest day I’ve ever experienced in a junkyard. Perhaps I was wrong. Here’s one of the very few first-gen Camry liftbacks sold in this country, now Crusher-bound.
331,120 miles on the clock, or an average of 11,825 miles per year.
The cavernous hatch makes this into something like a very large Corolla, and maybe that’s what made nearly all the Camry shoppers go for sedans.
It’s got some rust and the interior is pretty grimy, but this car is in good shape for something that has racked up twice the miles of most 80s Japanese cars you see in wrecking yards.
Toyota made the S engine until just a few years ago. While we’ve seen plenty of S engines fail dramatically in the 24 Hours of LeMons, they hold together very well on the street.
Will these cars ever have any collector value? It’s too early to tell.

Tailgate Mural Fails To Spare This Expedition From Crusher’s Jaws

Murilee Martin — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:00:42 +0000

You see a fair amount of customization among the inmates of a high-turnover, self-service wrecking yard; sometimes it’s a full-on time-capsule RX-7 and sometimes it’s the kind of thing Manny, Moe, and Jack would build after a week-long ether-and-DMT binge. Here’s a fairly well-executed, if puzzling, airbrush mural I spotted at a Denver yard a few months back.
Even with the swastika vandalization— which may have hastened the depreciation of this truck’s value and helped lead to its junkyardization— you can make out some weird details on the subject’s face. There’s a certain air of Juggaloism in the semi-clownlike makeup, but what does the “Under Oath” caption mean?
If only junkyard vehicles could talk!

Junkyard Find: 1983 Honda Civic Wagon

Murilee Martin — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:00:53 +0000

The 1973-79 Civic was a very good car for its time (mostly because just about all the other subcompacts of the era were so bad and/or boring), but the second-generation Civic was the one that gave Honda its reputation for bang-for-buck performance and miraculous-for-the-price build quality that seemed unbeatable for nearly 15 years. The value of the 1980-83 Civics became so low by the late 1990s that it wasn’t worth fixing any problem that cost more than a couple hundred bucks to fix, and so nearly all of them were gone by the time the 21st century rolled around. Here’s a Civic wagon, painted in very Malaise-y beige, that managed to hang on for thirty years. More than a year has passed since the last second-gen Civic in this series.
Only 139,302 miles! The interior and body are in nice shape, which suggests an indoor parking space and very sparing use. Maybe the head gasket blew back in ’94 and it sat in a garage, or maybe it was an extra car that was well cared for but didn’t get driven much.
How late into the 5-speed era did bragging rights last? I’ve seen early-90s Sentras and Tercels with 4-speeds, but 5-speeds weren’t particularly exotic in subcompacts by 1983.
This car’s early years were spent in Northern California.
The first-gen Civics were just tiny, even by the standards of the time, so the added room in the second-gen cars was most welcome.
Believe it or not, this vacuum diagram was simple compared to what CVCC-equipped Hondas with computer carburetors had by 1985. Good luck getting this setup through a California smog check!
64 horsepower seemed adequate in these cars, amazingly enough.
Will these things ever be considered collectible? Hard to say— 20 years ago, very few thought that Country Squire wagons would be worth saving, and now we have legions of Malaise Era wagon fanciers.

Junkyard Find: 1992 Dodge Shadow America

Murilee Martin — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 13:00:32 +0000

When I go to my local wrecking yards to photograph cars for this series, I’m looking for historical significance. Some might say that the Chrysler P-body (based on the ancient and venerable K platform, like so many Chrysler products of the 1980s and 1990s) lacks such significance, and that I should instead shoot the 60s Chevy pickups and VW Beetles I mostly ignore, but I disagree. Someday, wise old men will discuss the importance of the fourth Plymouth to bear the Duster name, but it’s the “America” series of stripper P-bodies that really get my attention. Jack Baruth explains why the Omni America and the cut-price P-bodies that followed it sold so poorly, and it’s the rarity of these things that gets my attention. So far in this series we’ve seen just two: this 1991 Sundance America and today’s ’92 Shadow America.

The selling points of the Shadow/Sundance America were spelled out very plainly in this ad: cheaper than the Civic, cheapest car with a standard airbag, and cheaper (per day) than lunch. Did we mention cheap?

The non-America versions had an equally exciting commercial.
The base two-door 1992 Shadow America with manual transmission listed at $7,984; the four-door we have here would have listed at $8,384. You could get a ’92 Hyundai Excel for $6,595, a Subaru Justy for $6,445, or a complete stripper Honda Civic CX for $8,100.
This one didn’t rack up many miles, and the condition of the paint and interior suggest that it spent a decade or more parked in the Colorado sun.
If Allpar is to be believed, the 2.2 engine was still being built in China as of 2000. Its final year in an American-built car was 1994.
The optional automatic transmission would have added $585 to the cost of a new ’92 Shadow, and what would have been the point of such extravagance?

Junkyard Find: 1991 Dodge Colt Vista 4WD

Murilee Martin — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:00:55 +0000

Unless there’s a super-rare find that requires immediate action or it’s half-price day, I usually avoid hitting Denver junkyards when it’s snowing and/or below freezing out. Thanks to the magic of high altitude, it feels more like December than late April here… but checking the online inventory at my local self-service yard revealed a potential engine-donor for my ’41 Plymouth project. Disregard the snow, pack up the tools!
The ’41 Plymouth is a bare frame with Lexus SC400 subframes mocked up on it at the moment, and I’ve decided to go with the Vortec 4200 six as its powerplant. I’ll be buying a complete donor vehicle, preferably a 2006 or newer Trailblazer/Envoy/Rainier/97-X/Ascender, but having an engine that I can strip down to a bare block for chassis-fit purposes would be a big plus. Sadly, the ’02 Trailblazer I found in the online inventory turned out to be picked completely clean of anything I might want.
With so much snow on the cars, I didn’t see many photographic opportunities. However, a Mitsubishi Chariot aka Dodge Colt Vista 4WD looks best when covered with the white stuff.
Chrysler used the Colt name for quite a few members of the Mitsubishi family over the decades, and it will always be a disappointment that they didn’t call this car the name they used for the Chariot in Europe: Space Wagon. Space Wagon!
213,000 miles isn’t too bad for a Mitsubishi of this era.
Supposedly there’s a 98-horse 4G63 engine in there.

It appears that Japanese-market Chariots of this generation had some sort of weird marketing arrangement with Disney. C-H-A-R-I-O-T!

For added incomprehensibility, here’s the European Space Wagon Trance Remix.

Calling it the Colt Vista led to boring North American ads.

Junkyard Find: 1961 Plymouth Valiant

Murilee Martin — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:00:42 +0000

A few months ago, we saw this Lebowski-grade ’75 Gran Torino in a Denver wrecking yard, and an early Chrysler A body could be seen in the background. Here’s that car!
This car is a bit rusty and it’s a not-so-desirable four-door, so it’s a good thing that some Valiant (or Dart) owner has rescued most of the interior. It would be a shame to have useful 52-year-old parts go to The Crusher.
It’s possible that this is a ’60, but (as far as I know) the differences between the ’60 and the ’61 are mostly in the grille, which is missing. The junkyard thinks this is a ’62.
Still enough Slant Sixes left in the world that you see them frequently in junkyards.
Chrysler needs to bring back the “toilet seat” trunklid!

Junkyard Find: 1988 Toyota Tercel EZ

Murilee Martin — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:00:34 +0000

The Tercel EZ sold about as well as the Plymouth Sundance America, Chevrolet Chevette Scooter, and the other zero-frills cars of the 1985-1995 period, i.e., very poorly. Jack Baruth does a fine job of explaining why this is so, but enough of these cars were moved off showroom floors that you still see the occasional example. Here’s a Tercel EZ that I spotted in my local self-serve wrecking yard.
Yes, that’s 315,300 miles on the clock. Third-gen Tercels were never much fun to drive, but they were incredibly competent transportation appliances.
The interior of this one was just about completely used up by the time it got to The Crusher’s waiting room, and there’s no point in spending any real money to get new carpets and upholstery for a lowly Tercel EZ.
I’ve owned several third-gen Tercels, including an EZ, and their simplicity made the Corolla seem frivolous. Nobody ever really loved one of these cars, though, in contrast to the equally slow but personality-fortified second-gen Tercel.
A lot of LeMons fans couldn’t understand why a Tercel EZ finishing tenth out of 100 entries was such a spectacular accomplishment. Drive an EZ for ten minutes and you’ll get it.

Junkyard Find: 1978 Mercedes-Benz 300D

Murilee Martin — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:00:47 +0000

After finding a couple of Mercedes-Benz W123 coupes for this series, I decided to shoot the next four-door version of this legendary machine that I spotted. Here’s one in solid, stolid brown.
It’s pretty tough to beat the diesel W123 for sturdy construction and utter lack of corner-cutting in the build-quality department. These cars cost plenty, and their owners (usually) got their money’s worth. The price tag for a new 300D in 1978 was $20,911. That’s close to 75 grand in 2013 bucks, for a slow car that was reasonably luxurious but utterly bling-free.
This one made it to just 216,623 miles during its 35 years on the planet. Not bad, but a bit low for one of these cars.
Once it got a little battered and its interior was no longer so nice, this car’s days were numbered. Most likely, something broke that would cost more than a couple hundred bucks to fix, and the owner just gave up on the car.
Here it is, the legendary OM617 five-cylinder diesel. Not a lot of power, but ready for Armageddon!
Some junkyard shopper thought about getting the grille, but then left it behind.

Picked Clean: If You Want 240Z Parts, You Need To Work Fast!

Murilee Martin — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:00:03 +0000

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.

Junkyard Find: 1980 Chrysler Cordoba

Murilee Martin — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:00:43 +0000

It seems strange, but sufficient Chrysler Cordobas still exist to provide a sporadic flow of fresh examples to self-serve wrecking yards. In this series, we’ve seen this ’78, another ’78, this ’79, and now today’s personally luxurious blue ’80.
The downsized second-gen 1980-83 Cordobas, which were based on the Volare/Diplomat platform and didn’t differ much from their Dodge Mirada siblings, sold very poorly. You aren’t going to find many of these things today, either on the street or lined up before the Crusher’s jaws.
Soft Corinthian Leather was still an option— Ricardo Montalban would have quit in disgust otherwise— but this car has the more affordable soft Corinthian Velour.
With a smog-o-lated 318 under the hood, chopping a few hundred extra pounds out of the Cordoba for the ’80 model year made this car a much livelier performer.
The landau roof and touch-o-plastic-class grille treatment were properly Cordoba-ish, but where did the “gold” medallions go?

Not to worry, Ricardo liked what they did to his car!

Junkyard Find: 2004 Suzuki Aerio

Murilee Martin — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:00:32 +0000

Not many cars appear and disappear while leaving as little trace as did the Suzuki Aerio, which was sold in the United States for the 2002-2007 model years. Normally, I ignore such new cars when I’m wandering around the wrecking yards of Denver, but I’ll break out the camera when I find something of historical significance— for example, an example of the final year of the GM J-body’s 24-year run— or when I see a car that doesn’t seem to exist on the street any more. This Aerio is such a car.
The car used for the first seven years of Top Gear UK’s “Star In a Reasonably Priced Car” series was a 2002 Suzuki Aerio (called the Liana, which was supposedly an acronym for “Life In A New Age,” in Europe). This is the only Aerio most of us have ever seen.
American car shoppers ran out of reasons to buy Suzuki cars, though Chinese buyers can still get a new Liana.
Will anyone pull any pieces off this car before it gets eaten by The Crusher? Probably not.

Junkyard Find: 1995 Range Rover

Murilee Martin — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:00:10 +0000

Here in Colorado, retired members of the Land Rover family are lined up in large numbers in every self-service wrecking yard. Range Rovers and Discoveries were (and are) extremely popular here, most likely as a form of rebellion against the Subaru Outback-driving hordes whose maintenance expenses (even with all the blown head gaskets and nuked center diffs) come to a boring 0.004% of the total per-vehicle annual cost of Range Rover ownership. I’ve been ignoring these trucks when I see them in junkyards, but today we’re going to look at a typical example, chosen at random.
The most interesting thing about these trucks, from a junkyard-scavenger perspective, is the fact that most of them have the 4.2 liter Rover V8 engine, which means that a homemade MGB-GT V8, or even— shudder— a TR7-to-TR8 conversion— is an easy, low-budget proposition. You’ll want to ditch the Lucas fuel-injection system, of course, but that sort of goes without saying.
These things are very comfortable for those willing to keep them running; this one made it to a pretty respectable 164,774 miles during its 18 years of service.
Of course, there are some Land Rovers around here that are safe from the cold steel jaws of The Crusher!

Denver Alley Scavengers Scrap-Maddened By Torqueflite Visible In Yard, Camouflage Only Option

Murilee Martin — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:00:35 +0000

These days, with scrappers paying $240/ton (the going rate in Denver; I hear it’s similar elsewhere) for cars and steel car parts, we’ve seen an explosion in the numbers of guys cruising around in hooptied-out minivans, pickups and the occasional bicycle with trailer, looking for metal. The older parts of the Denver urban core, where I live, have alleys between streets, and so the scavengers (I call them Jawas) spend their days patrolling these alleys in search of stuff they can turn into cash at the scrapper. It turns out that these guys can smell a transmission as they pass by, even one that’s behind a gate and barely visible.
My ’66 Dodge A100 van has proven to be a useful car-parts-and-lumber hauler, though I still haven’t made much progress on my 70s-style customization project. It has only one major mechanical headache, and that’s a transmission that leaks from every possible location; the van sat for 15 years before I got it, and all the seals and gaskets are bad. Replacing the pan gasket solved about 50% of the problem, but that’s really not enough. Normally, I’d just go to the junkyard and pick up another Torqueflite 727 from one of any number of easy-to-find dead Chryslers, but the A100 used a funky van-and-RV-only top-of-the-tailshaft rear mount. My plan is to rebuild the leaky 727, but I don’t want to immobilize the van while I’m learning the black art of slushbox rejuvenation.
Then my friend Andy, owner of a big yard full of interesting vehicles picked up a rusted-to-hell A100 with a good transmission.
I traded him these catalytic converters (hacked from a Lexus SC400 that served as the suspension donor for my 1941 Plymouth project) for his A100′s transmission, and now I just need to get around to doing the swap.
In the meantime, I stashed the transmission next to my garage. Whoops, forgot to bend the cooling lines up high enough, so there’s a bit of a melted-snow-and-transmission-fluid stain beneath it now.
But then the Jawas started catching sight of the Torqueflite through the (locked) gate. It’s not worth busting a padlock to get $12 worth of scrap, so my doorbell started ringing. “I’ll help you dispose of that unwanted transmission!” Then the notes appeared in my mailbox.
An old sheet will keep the transmission invisible until I put it in the van.
You can tell something is there, but it doesn’t look quite so metallic. What happens, though, when scrap steel gets to $1000/ton?

Junkyard Find: 1973 BMW 2002

Murilee Martin — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 13:00:28 +0000

For some reason, BMW 2002s are easier to find in self-service wrecking yards (in Colorado and California, anyway) than are 320is. Most of the Crusher-bound 2002s I see are pretty well picked over— probably before they ever got to the junkyard— and so I don’t photograph them. However, a round-taillight 2002 ~~with automatic transmission~~ is something you don’t see every day.
I spotted another ’73 2002 with slushbox at this very same yard, about a year ago; that one was more complete than today’s junkyard find, but there’s a certain “abandoned project car” similarity to them.
It makes me sad when I see an old car with the instrument cluster totally destroyed by a junkyard customer, all the parts scattered around the car’s interior and nothing purchased.
Automatic transmission and air conditioning! This unit has an aftermarket or dealer-installed look about it.
Not much of this engine is left. Still, there are some usable parts remaining on this car.

Junkyard Find: 1980 Datsun 720 King Cab 4WD Pickup

Murilee Martin — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:00:38 +0000

I see a lot of old, totally used-up Toyota and Datsun pickups in self-service wrecking yards (though any of these newer than about 1984 is a rare sight), so it takes a fairly special one to make me shoot some photos. This extremely Malaise-ated ’80 King Cab 720, with its brown paint, huge “4X4″ door decals, and excrement-inspired tan/yellow/brown tape stripes certainly got my attention last week.
It’s bashed up, the interior is toast, and the rust indicates an origin somewhere east and/or north of Colorado. Must be a million miles on this thing, eh?
Nope, just 155,221 miles on the clock. Either the odometer broke in 1992 or this truck drove a lot of very hard miles.
The full changeover to the Nissan marque was still a few years off at this point, but Nissan was laying the groundwork with these “Datsun By Nissan” badges.
Electronically protected! No doubt the alarm was a variation on the Taiwanese National Anthem theme.
The King Cab wasn’t very kingly. In fact, it would be considered utterly intolerable by present-day truck buyers. You could sort of squeeze a couple of passengers back there, if everyone involved was very motivated, but in practice the King Cab mostly served as a place to store stuff out of the rain.
Some good patina on this thing.
Even though this type of self-service yard charges about the same for a whole long block as for a wheelbarrow full of carefully selected engine innards, whoever pulled this L20 spent a lot of effort grabbing just the parts he wanted.
Here’s an option you don’t see very often on small pickups of this era: air conditioning!

The Datsun Value Phenomenon continues!

Junkyard Find: 1973 Datsun 240Z

Murilee Martin — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 14:00:41 +0000

I see endless Z31 300ZXs in junkyards, and I usually don’t pay much attention to them (unless we’re talking about a rare 50th Anniversary Edition with BodySonic butt-vibrating seat speakers with super-futuristic digital dash, of course). Even 280Zs and 280ZXs are plentiful in self-service wrecking yards, so I don’t photograph many of them. However, an optioned-to-the-hilt 240Z, complete with automatic transmission, sunroof, and Malaise Era brown paint is worth shooting, so here we go!
I think this is the first 240Z I’ve ever seen with an automatic transmission, though this became a fairly common option in the 280Z and especially in the 280ZX.
I considered grabbing these Hitachi SUs, just as I bought the Weber DGV I found on this 22R-powered MGB a few months ago, but these are the not-so-desirable “flat-top Hitachis” and in the end I figured they wouldn’t be worth selling or trading.
Speaking of nightmare Hitachi-ized British smog carbs, what was the last year for a factory manual choke in a US-market car? Or is this just a light that comes on when an electric choke is engaged?
I was also tempted to buy this ignition switch with vintage Nissan Z key, but then decided to leave it for a lucky Z-owning junkyard shopper.
This car is very solid and— at least when I saw it a few weeks ago— nearly complete. By this time, I’m sure it has been picked over thoroughly by now.
Such an optimistic speedometer!

Comparisons between fully race-modified cars and their street counterparts are always suspect, but this ad does a good job of selling the 240Z.

Junkyard Find: 1971 Volvo 142

Murilee Martin — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 14:00:46 +0000

A Volvo 140 doesn’t always jump right out at you, thanks to its similarity to its still-with-us-in-huge-numbers descendant, the Volvo 240 (especially when viewed from the rear), so I probably overlook a few of these in junkyards. The 140 isn’t an uncommon sight in Denver, and I’ve found this ’68 142 and this ’69 145 just in the last year. I’ve always liked these cars (though I’ve only owned one example, and it was quite troublesome), so it makes me a little sad to see another one about to get crushed.
SU carbs just aren’t worth pulling these days, looks like.
The rust wasn’t so bad by Midwestern standards (i.e., the car still exists), but it probably rendered this car not worth restoring.
The “thermometer” speedo in the 140 was a nice piece of design.
Adjustable lumbar support way back in 1969!

“Nine out of every ten Volvos registered in the last 11 years are still on the road.”

Junkyard Find: 1980 Toyota Corolla Tercel

Murilee Martin — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:00:29 +0000

Because the Corolla had become such a hit in the United States during the early part of the Malaise Era, Toyota decided to confuse car buyers and parts-counter guys for eternity by adding the Corolla name to the first-gen Toyota Tercel. This would have been like Volkswagen selling a “Rabbit Fox” or Chrysler selling a “Dart Colt,” but it seemed to work fine for Toyota. Here’s a first-year-for-the-US Tercel I spotted in a Denver self-service yard last week.
These things were noisy and tinny and cheap, but they were more reliable than the other crappy little econoboxes of the Middle Malaise Era.
They were also quite slow, thanks to the 60-horsepower 1A engine driving the front wheels. Yes, it looks like a rear-wheel-drive setup, but it’s really an engine-over-transaxle assembly that made a lot more sense once Toyota started making four-wheel-drive Tercels.
5-speed manual transmissions were still somewhat prestigious in 1980.
I’ve long thought that the vaguely finny-looking taillight treatment on this car resembled the setup on some BMC AD016 models.
Cloth seats, gas-sipping engine, no frills. These cars sold like crazy, but they weren’t worth fixing once they got to be 15 years old and now most of them are gone.

When ventriloquist dummies need to urinate, they must ride in Tercels.

“Has a longitudinal engine… unlike any Honda!”

It does pretty well in a crash test, considering its insubstantial construction.

Junkyard Find: Electric 1995 Geo Metro

Murilee Martin — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 14:00:45 +0000

Normally, I wouldn’t consider an 18-year-old Suzuki Cultus badged by a now-defunct GM marque to be worthy of inclusion in this series, but this particular example— which I found at my favorite Denver self-service wrecking yard— has been converted to electric power and is thus sort of interesting.
The valuable stuff that electric-car geeks like to keep (i.e., the electric motor, control circuitry, and batteries) is all gone, but you can see that this setup used the Suzuki front-drive transaxle more or less intact.
It looks like there was some sort of electrical fire or maybe a big acid spill in the rear of the car at some point, judging from the pried-open-in-a-hurry hatch and melted insulation.
You don’t see many 400-amp ammeters and 180-volt voltmeters in junked econoboxes!
Now that you can buy genuine factory-made electric cars, these homemade jobs don’t quite make the statement they once did. Still, the guy who built this car is probably driving a different electric machine. Let’s hope it’s an electron-driven Triumph Stag.

Junkyard Find: 1988 Volvo 780 Bertone Coupe

Murilee Martin — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:00:36 +0000

In the kind of Plate-O-Shrimp moment that happens all the time in the car-writing business, I ran across a genuine, one-of-8,515-build Volvo 780 Bertone Coupe in a Denver self-serve wrecking yard just days after writing about this fine Swedo-Italian machine.
Yes, in spite of being considered a high-value collector’s car by legions of Internet Car Experts, this rare 780 couldn’t manage to sell for better than scrap value at auction and thus ended up as a parts donor. By the way, if you’re restoring a 780 and you’re now looking at this post later than, say, April 2013, this car has been crushed by now. Sorry.
With the troublesome Peugeot-Renault-Volvo “PRV” V6 under the hood, 156,519 miles on the clock isn’t too shabby. This car reeked of old, bad gasoline, which means it sat for years or maybe decades before getting hauled off on its final tow-truck drive.
When Swedes and Italians join forces to design a car’s interior, you get something like this puzzling IKEA-meets-Armani scene. I might need to go back and get this seat for my van!
Speaking of weird design, where did Volvo find this more-80s-than-Flock-of-Seagulls font?

Junkyard Find: 1989 Toyota Corolla All-Trac Wagon

Murilee Martin — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:00:03 +0000

I now believe that at least half the Toyota All-Tracs ever sold ended up in Colorado, based on the quantities I see in junkyards around Denver. We saw the only Camry All-Trac I’ve ever found anywhere last month, and the Corolla All-Trac wagons are well-represented by this ’89, this ’89, and now today’s ’89.
Toyota didn’t go in for crazy-futuristic dashes like so many of their 1980s Japanese competitors (unlike, for example, Subaru and Mitsubishi), but the Corolla All-Trac still got this cool center-diff control panel. Yes, back in those days you had to make decisions about car four-wheel-drive while driving.
Bondo as rust repair?
213,269 miles on the clock, which is pretty good for a 1980s car.
The Toyota 4A engine family was the real workhorse of its era, going into everything from AE86s to MR2s. This one appears to be the not-particularly-hot 4A-FE.
The interior in this one is pretty nice, but the rust is bad by Colorado standards and it just wasn’t worth keeping. Next stop, crusher!