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Every once in a while, you see funny things written on junked cars, presumably by waggish junkyard employees. There was the Bee Careful Cressida, for example. On a recent trip to a Colorado self-serve yard, I spotted this very charred pickup with some more examples of the Funny Junkyard Guy genre.
You have to wonder if it’s even worth putting burned vehicles out on the yard. Maybe the rear axle is still good.
Get it?
Ho, ho!
11 Comments on “Junkyard Find: Oh, Those Clever Tow Truck Drivers!...”
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Saw one on the side of a completely side-swiped, rear-ended, front-ended and rolled Impala once with advertising spray-painted down one side that read “RALPH’S DRIVING SCHOOL. LEARN TO DRIVE LIKE THE PROS!”
“You have to wonder if it’s even worth putting burned vehicles out on the yard.”
I have wondered about that often. It’s not uncommon to see a vehicle burned so badly that no usable parts appear anywhere, bumper to bumper. Is there some prerequisite that a burned vehicle has to have salvage yard exposure before being scrapped?
There are still some good parts on this truck. The fire does not seem to have completely destroyed the interior. The doors and the bed are still salvageable and all the suspension items and brake rotors are still good…
There must be. Browsing Copart I will sometimes see charred hulks and have nothing useable left.
There is still some utility left in this burnt up Square Body Pickup.
The front bumper still looks good.
I remember reading a long time ago that a vehicle that’s been in a fire outside will have a lot more salvageable parts than one that was involved in a fire inside a garage or other building where temperatures tend to be a lot higher.
My dad had a 3/4-ton 283-powered Chevy truck that had a bit of a fire under the hood – all the wiring burned. He rewired it and replaced the intake manifold and carb – it ran well for years afterward.
Though this one, the motor looks to be totally gone, as is much of the front clip. However, parts of the front suspension still look salvageable, as does most of the rest of the truck too.
Sometime last summer on my way home from Mom’s spotted a total car fire, that also got the hillside too on I-5 NB. I think it was a Japanese sedan of some sort, I forget now what I thought it might be but the fire trucks were at the scene and the car totally engulfed from stem to stern.
In this case, it looks like the fire literally stopped at the firewall, so most of the parts aft of that point should still be salvageable.
Still, you do see a lot of cars in yards that have no business being there – burned to a crisp with no recognizable sheet metal or plastic left and the mechanicals melted into a solid lump.
If the FD used chemical fire extinguishers on the engine the substance goes into the engine and ruins it. I tried to get a set of heads off a small block and found a mass of solid material from the carb on down to the engine block.
With the color that this truck was painted, I’m surprised that it didn’t put the fire out by istelf.
itself . . . lysdexia strikes again!