Junkyard Find: 1992 Ford Tempo GL
To gather the photographs for the Junkyard Find series, I do a lot of walking around self-service wrecking yards, and mostly I’m just tuning out the common cars as background noise. You know, the 15-to-20-year-old Detroit stuff that won’t have any collector value until almost all are gone (as happened with the Pinto and Vega). The chaff. Right now, the Taurus/Sable is king of the Ford sections of these yards (I counted 188 of them in a 300-car section in a California yard not long ago), but you also see large numbers of Tempos and Topazes. Once I decided to pay attention to the lowly Tempo, I was surprised by the number of not-particularly-trashed examples I found at my local yard. Today, and just today, let’s pay attention to one of the most common vehicles in American self-serve junkyards today: the Tempo.
Though I got some anguished comments from the Jalopnik reader “Ford_Tempo_Fanatic” when I demolished a free Tempo Judgemobile at a LeMons race, to most of us the Tempo remains invisible. They’re not terribly uncommon on the street, though the last few years have been rough on surviving Tempos.
The Tempo was built from the 1984 through 1994 model years, before being replaced by the Mondeo-based Contour. Yes, Contours are also common junkyard finds.
The era of screaming all-red car interiors seems to have peaked in the early 1990s. Detroit was a little late to the red interior party, but made up for the lateness with even redder reds than the Japanese used in the middle 1980s.
The Tempo got the job done and sold in large quantities, but was looking quite outdated by the time this one was built. Did it begin its career as a rental?
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.
More by Murilee Martin
Comments
Join the conversation
My beige 1992 Ford Tempo GL has less than 75k miles on it. It runs great and the body is in excellent condition; the only things I have had trouble with are the seat belt motor on the driver's side and both window motors on the passenger side. I replaced the front one but have let the back window remain shut. The seat belt release also does not work on either side, which can be a pain in the ass, but I deal with it. I have no idea what kind of work was done on the car before I became its owner. Yes, the car is boring, but I only need to get from A to B. I've been told these things are real p.o.s. so I'm trying to stay up to date on the car's maintenance. Really, I just worry about the transmission. I noticed as soon as I got it that it shifts hard, especially for an automatic. Some people have said "Oh, it could just be a hard shifter!" I can deal with that, so long as the transmission isn't stressed. Then, other people say I should have the "bands in my transmission tightened"? I honestly don't know anything about transmissions with bands. I guess the best thing I can do is research
I was just wondering if anyone has ever put in a new water pump on these Tempos. I have a Tempo and I hear the best way is to remove the passenger side mount and raise the engine a couple few inches. Any comments to this?