The Best Junkyard Finds of 2015
We saw 104 Junkyard Find vehicles here in 2015 (I did a few dozen Junkyard Treasures posts for Autoweek as well) and among them were some great examples of automotive history and culture.
The oldest Junkyard Find we saw here during 2015 was this ’51 Ford, and the newest was this ’09 Kia Rondo. As for the most interesting ones, I’ve selected my 15 favorite Junkyard Finds from the past year. Here we go, in model-year order.
Click on a vehicle’s photo to jump to that Junkyard Find’s post.
I spotted this classic Chrysler at one of the bigger Southern California self-service yards while I was looking for Cheech & Chong filming locations last January. Any vehicle with a Chrysler flathead six engine is special in my book.
Speaking of Chrysler flathead sixes, you could still buy new Dodge pickups equipped with that engine all the way through the 1968 model year. I found this well-worn ’60 in San Jose, California.
There may be more great songs about Oldsmobiles than for any other automotive make. That, plus the Chappaquiddick Incident provenance for the ’67 full-sized Olds, made this Denver Junkyard Find an important one.
It turns out that three-quarters of TTAC readers polled say they approve of Ralph Nader, and so it seemed appropriate to include one of the last Corvairs ever built— a second-to-last-year-of-production Monza spotted in Denver last fall— on this list.
Just a few rows away from the Corvair at the same yard, this four-stroke Swede didn’t have any serious rust but wasn’t deemed valuable enough by its final owner to keep alive.
Volvo fanatics say that every 140 is worth huge sums, but they show up in these yards frequently enough to indicate that many Volvo fanatics may have a less-than-firm grip on car-value reality. This car came with maps, registration information, and other ephemera indicating that it was well-loved for decades by its last owner.
In fact, I was able to use the address on the registration to find a satellite photo of this Volvo at its former San Francisco Bay Area address, thanks to Google Earth.
The Colt Carousel was a slightly sporty version of Chrysler’s rebadged Mitsubishi, complete with denim seat inserts and red-white-and-blue tape stripes. This example, spotted in Northern California, got thoroughly nuked by decades of Golden State sunshine.
The LTD II was a midsize car based on the Torino, while the LTD was a completely different car on the full-size Ford platform. This San Francisco Bay Area first-year LTD II wagon had suffered from a bit of an engine fire but still had plenty of green-on-green-on-yet-more-green vinyl interior to show off.
The name of this Detroit classic, photographed in Oakland, tells the whole story.
The VW Dasher — also known as the Passat, Audi 80, and Audi Fox — didn’t sell well in the United States (Japanese competitors were cheaper and fell apart more slowly) and it’s an exceedingly rare sight in self-serve wrecking yards these days. Here’s a lichen-encrusted California example with just 87,377 miles on the clock.
With San Francisco neighborhood parking permits stretching back to 1994 plastering the hatch and plenty of hopeless attempts to fix ocean-spray-induced rust with body filler, I felt compelled to shoot about three times the usual number of photos for this Junkyard Find.
Ah, the Allanté. When new, it cost about the same as a Mercedes-Benz 300SEL, and GM had to fly the bodies from the Pininfarina shop in Italy to Hamtramck, Michigan, in custom-fitted 747s. I spotted this one in Denver, and TTAC’s own Aaron Cole pulled the cool-looking tubular intake for use as garage art, when we shopped at the All You Can Carry For $59.99 Sale at our local self-service yard.
Every junkyard car has a story to tell, and the narrative offered by this star-spangled Olds offers more than the normal quantity of plot twists and turns. Was it a Fred Thompson campaign vehicle? Driven by Border Patrol activists? The American-flag paint-and-decal job looked both professional and around the same age as the car, so this car offered much fuel for speculation.
Complete with sad wind-up toy crab creeping through the Denver slush.
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
Junkyard Finds is my FAVE part of TTAC. It gives me a chance to reflect on the past...both good and bad. Thank you for having it!
I think I need to look back at some previous posts, I didn't know so many older cars were found. This is my favorite one that I found http://phxjunkyarding.blogspot.com/2015/06/1961-chevrolet-corvair-van.html