The Crusher Hungers For Italian Food!
As a newcomer to Denver, I had my worries that the junkyards here would be wall-to-wall Sables and Sephias. Would my junkyard trips be a slog through a miasma of late-model boredom? As J. Frank Parnell said about the hazards of lobotomies: Not at all!
There’s a special place in my heart for the Fiat 128; Fiat’s quasi-revolutionary little front-driver helped put my early-childhood wheels on the road leading to my current state of car-freakdom. You see, my parents bought a pair of ’73 128s when I was seven years old— the 128 being just about the cheapest car you could buy in California that year, even cheaper than the Beetle— and the sound of those Fiat SOHCs yowling through the gears was just about the best thing I’d ever heard in my life. Of course, the multiple shift levers of my dad’s ’67 Ford Custom with 289, three-on-the-floor, and an overdrive unit also had a profound effect on my impressionable young mind, but the 128 really made me a car guy! Seeing a rusty-but-mostly-complete Fiat 128 at a Denver self-service wrecking yard… well, sort of a bittersweet experience for me. Yes, it’s even the not-all-that-sought-after Rally model, with 62 mighty Italian horses a-buckin’ and a-snortin’ under the hood!
Did I say a Fiat 128? This yard boasts two of them! In addition to the ’78 Rally, there’s this ’76 wearing a straight-outta-Malaise-Era-Central-Casting aqua paint job. Sharp-eyed readers might note the Peugeot 505 and Subaru XT lurking in the background in some of the shots, in addition to the air-cooled Beetles; Denver turns out to be a great junkyard town!
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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I think you also have to factor in the fact most American mechanics wouldn't even touch one (literally) and so a lot of your mechanics for them were 'self-taught' to put it politely and for the first several years they learned at your expense. By that time the tie was cast for Fiat. Then there's the fact that American cars were pretty maintenance free. Their engines weren't stressed at all loafing along a 1500 rpm at highway speeds. There was many an old V8 that ran just fine (or good enough) on 7, 6, or 5 cylinders. Valve adjustments? What's that? We had self adjusting lifters.... No shims, no timing chains. Drum brakes that would do almost as good a job without shoes in them. Finally there's the small matter of the salt that was used on the roads here to melt the ice in the winter. The cheap Russian steel used in those Fiats never had a chance. I don't think you had anything like that in South America.... It corrodes other components too like poorly located electrical grounds.
I'm so glad that Murilee is back! I own a '74 128 SL that he profiled on Jalopnik. Since then I've added a ported, big valve head, faza cam, dual webers and an ansa exhaust. The thing just puts a smile on my face every time. I think I may even prefer it to my fuel injected 124 spider. Very reliable once all the kinks were worked out, even drove it to Oregon (from the bay area) last summer.