Junkyard Find: 1951 Ford 2-Door Sedan

Murilee Martin
by Murilee Martin

We’ve been seeing a lot of 21st century Junkyard Finds lately, so today we’ll change up and go to one of the older cars I’ve seen in a self-service yard lately. This ’51 Ford showed up at a Colorado yard last month.

It has the look of a long-abandoned project: interior gutted, bodywork, etc. You’d think that a non-rusty two-door shoebox Ford would be worth enough to keep it safe from the clutches of the wrecking yard, but such was not the case here.

Someone put some work into the body and paint and then forgot about the car, but it’s impossible to say whether that happened in 1968 (with indoor storage since) or 2008 (with outdoor storage).

You could get the ’51 Ford with the famous flathead V8 or the 254-cubic-inch flathead straight-six engine. This car has the six.

A Denver friend owns this ’49 sedan project, so he was all over the junkyard ’51 within hours of learning of its existence, grabbing bits and pieces for low prices. When you have an elderly project vehicle and one like it shows up at U-Wrench-It, you drop everything and pull what you can!

This generation of Ford was the first true postwar design from the Detroit Big Three, and the first Ford to be mostly free of the late Henry’s erratic leadership and limitations as an engineer. Other than the Type 1 Volkswagen Beetle, few cars you’d find in this sort of junkyard will have this level of historical significance.





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.

More by Murilee Martin

Comments
Join the conversation
2 of 72 comments
  • Sgeffe Sgeffe on Sep 05, 2015

    Note the 1991 Accord floormat in the back. Oh the humanity!

  • Jeff S Jeff S on Sep 06, 2015

    Isn't that blue car next to this car a last generation Corvair? This car has since been crushed up and sent to China to become a Haier appliance to be sent back to the US and sold at H H Gregg.

  • Bkojote @Lou_BC I don't know how broad of a difference in capability there is between 2 door and 4 door broncos or even Wranglers as I can't speak to that from experience. Generally the consensus is while a Tacoma/4Runner is ~10% less capable on 'difficult' trails they're significantly more pleasant to drive on the way to the trails and actually pleasant the other 90% of the time. I'm guessing the Trailhunter narrows that gap even more and is probably almost as capable as a 4 Door Bronco Sasquatch but significantly more pleasant/fuel efficient on the road. To wit, just about everyone in our group with a 4Runner bought a second set of wheels/tires for when it sees road duty. Everyone in our group with a Bronco bought a second vehicle...
  • Aja8888 No.
  • 2manyvettes Since all of my cars have V8 gas engines (with one exception, a V6) guess what my opinion is about a cheap EV. And there is even a Tesla supercharger all of a mile from my house.
  • Cla65691460 April 24 (Reuters) - A made-in-China electric vehicle will hit U.S. dealers this summer offering power and efficiency similar to the Tesla Model Y, the world's best-selling EV, but for about $8,000 less.
  • FreedMike It certainly wouldn't hurt. But let's think about the demographic here. We're talking people with less money to spend, so it follows that many of them won't have a dedicated place to charge up. Lots of them may be urban dwellers. That means they'll be depending on the current charging infrastructure, which is improving, but isn't "there" yet. So...what would help EV adoption for less-well-heeled buyers, in my opinion, is improved charging options. We also have to think about the 900-pound gorilla in the room, namely: how do automakers make this category more profitable? The answer is clear: you go after margin, which means more expensive vehicles. That goes a long way to explaining why no one's making cheap EVS for our market. So...maybe cheaper EVs aren't all that necessary in the short term.
Next