I love car junkyards. Or dismantlers, or used parts purveyors, or recycling centers, ad neauseum. For me, they were junkyards back in the Thirties, and they are junkyards in the new millenium. To be precise, however, I must admit that a junkyard in l939 might be filled with as much corrugated sheet metal and wood trash as with old cars and trucks. However, then as now, it didn’t take long for a junkyard owner to figure out that an old car was worth heaps more than heaps of broken up 2 x 4s.
Still, it is a matter of perspective. Back then, a l932 Ford with a smashed front end (often the result of crappie out-of-adjustment mechanical brakes) might sell for no more than $25. A body only could be as low as $5. In fact, I was once looking through some old pre WWII SCTA club minutes and in reply to the question of letting closed cars run at the lakes, someone quipped, “Hell no! They can buy a roadster body for $5 at any junkyard.” That seemed to settle the question.
For me, an automotive junkyard is a kind of place for mechanical reverie, where I can just wander at will (hopefully) and muse about the abstractions of mechanical interchangeability (or malleability). There can be long stretches of time without distractions, when I can wander about using this or that device for any imaginable project. I am lost in my head in a land of infinite possibilities. In a way, a junkyard is a kind of assembled hardware parts department. Those of you blessed with truly remarkable female companions understand the bliss of marriage to a woman who loves to cruise the aisle of the modern hardware emporium. They are absolutely keepers.
Wally Parks was the same way about good wrecking yards, and oft times he would cruise by my house of a weekend to see if I was free to go play. Which usually meant a trip north to the San Joquin Valley, which was festooned with old car graveyards up that Highway 99 life artery. In the late Fifties and well into the Seventies, it was still possible to stumble across a yard that dated to the Thirties, even back into the Nineteen Twenties. The old stuff we were interested in would be “out back”, with the front acreage reserved for the faster moving inventory of late model metal. Sometimes a yard easily accessible to the old main highway would be picked over, but get off into the myriad farm communities and treasures could be had. Goodguys head guy Gary will agree, since he comes from such environs. There was a time in the late Seventies when you could actually discover an old disheveled hot rod forlorn and dying in these yards. More often than not hosting a flat motor of doubtful condition.
When I moved into the mountain west communities of the Northern Rockies, it was like discovering a Lost Nation Of NonRust. By then, of course, I was long past any interest in early Ford engines and powertrains. I needed only bodies and chassis. Which I found behind practically every old shed and barn. Years later, I began to chronicle these treasure troves in magazine articles, most often heralded as Vintage Tin. Interestingly enough, when I retrace some obscure non-interstate in the American and Canadian west, I find much of this rust still around. And, in the arid west (which includes the snow country) the resultant rust is hardly even a skim coat. More destructive to western metal is the alkali pans.
Some of those original junkyards still exist, but most have been picked clean. Then, there are some “new” yards full of old cars, yards that have been created specifically to cater for the modern car crowds. Gallatin Gateway, which is west of Bozeman, Montana has such a yard, and it is way fun to wander through. Used to be one in Salmon, Idaho and several over in the Dakotas. There are a dozen or so in Arizona and New Mexico, but only a couple of them advertise their wares in hobby publications . You wanna find ‘em, you gotta get off your ass and go looking! The modern “Hobby” yards are in plain view alongside major highways, but if you are willing to bounce over old and decaying roads throughout the west, you will still find interesting original. Sometimes with original owners.
During the heyday of restored Model T and A Fords, some of these old yards got an extra decade or so of life from the restorers. But, with the demise of the early Ford restorers (yeah, I know there are still some out there, but let’s face facts here, Bucko. The early Ford rebuilding era is on the wan.), along with the advent of a good New Steel industry, vintage tin ain’t so in.
So, I now find myself wandering aimlessly through the modern car boneyard just looking to see what late model parts might be redirected to live on in contemporary hot rodding. Mostly brackets and wiring and fluid tubing, etc., but it matters little because I am still caught up in the unyielding dream of what “Might work”.
I especially like to tape measure engines, musing just how a little four banger might be used in a T roadster (some of ‘em are putting out huge chunks of horsepower you know), or what about a modern V6? And some of the modern independent front suspensions (there are still plenty of offshore rear wheel drive designs) look interesting. As well as a whole spate of independent rears.
Far and away the most tantalizing are all the electronic engine controls now dime a dozen in boneyards.
That, in reality, is the magic of junkyards.
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