I thought I’d seen the rarest member of the Camry species in North America when I spotted this 1990 Camry All-Trac on the coldest day I’ve ever experienced in a junkyard. Perhaps I was wrong. Here’s one of the very few first-gen Camry liftbacks sold in this country, now Crusher-bound. (Read More…)

You see a fair amount of customization among the inmates of a high-turnover, self-service wrecking yard; sometimes it’s a full-on time-capsule RX-7 and sometimes it’s the kind of thing Manny, Moe, and Jack would build after a week-long ether-and-DMT binge. Here’s a fairly well-executed, if puzzling, airbrush mural I spotted at a Denver yard a few months back. (Read More…)

Nearly a year has passed since we took a tour of the Brain-Melting Colorado Yard, and since that time I’ve shared such diamond-in-the-rough gems as this ’57 Chrysler Windsor, this ’52 Kaiser, this ’48 Pontiac Hearse, this ’51 Nash Airflyte, and— of course— the ’41 Plymouth Special Deluxe sedan that is now in the process of getting a Lexus SC400 suspension. I need to go back to this yard (which is located in the high desert to the east of Pikes Peak) soon, because the DMV tells me I need a notarized bill of sale to get a title for the ’41, and at that point I’ll photograph some more of the thousands of 1940-70 cars awaiting new owners. For now, let’s admire this ’53 New Yorker I shot last fall. (Read More…)

The 1973-79 Civic was a very good car for its time (mostly because just about all the other subcompacts of the era were so bad and/or boring), but the second-generation Civic was the one that gave Honda its reputation for bang-for-buck performance and miraculous-for-the-price build quality that seemed unbeatable for nearly 15 years. The value of the 1980-83 Civics became so low by the late 1990s that it wasn’t worth fixing any problem that cost more than a couple hundred bucks to fix, and so nearly all of them were gone by the time the 21st century rolled around. Here’s a Civic wagon, painted in very Malaise-y beige, that managed to hang on for thirty years. More than a year has passed since the last second-gen Civic in this series. (Read More…)

If you have a half million dollars in your pocket, you can be the opening bidder on a lot of 550 classic cars located at a family owned towing and storage lot in Apache Junction, AZ and listed for sale on Ebay right now. According to the ad, the business has been in operation since the 1960s and the lot is filled with cars from the 1940s through the 1980s, approximately 97% of which are complete with motors, transmissions and body parts. You can even negotiate to leave the cars where they are – that way your wife will never know…

When I go to my local wrecking yards to photograph cars for this series, I’m looking for historical significance. Some might say that the Chrysler P-body (based on the ancient and venerable K platform, like so many Chrysler products of the 1980s and 1990s) lacks such significance, and that I should instead shoot the 60s Chevy pickups and VW Beetles I mostly ignore, but I disagree. Someday, wise old men will discuss the importance of the fourth Plymouth to bear the Duster name, but it’s the “America” series of stripper P-bodies that really get my attention. Jack Baruth explains why the Omni America and the cut-price P-bodies that followed it sold so poorly, and it’s the rarity of these things that gets my attention. So far in this series we’ve seen just two: this 1991 Sundance America and today’s ’92 Shadow America. (Read More…)

Unless there’s a super-rare find that requires immediate action or it’s half-price day, I usually avoid hitting Denver junkyards when it’s snowing and/or below freezing out. Thanks to the magic of high altitude, it feels more like December than late April here… but checking the online inventory at my local self-service yard revealed a potential engine-donor for my ’41 Plymouth project. Disregard the snow, pack up the tools! (Read More…)

A few months ago, we saw this Lebowski-grade ’75 Gran Torino in a Denver wrecking yard, and an early Chrysler A body could be seen in the background. Here’s that car! (Read More…)

The Tercel EZ sold about as well as the Plymouth Sundance America, Chevrolet Chevette Scooter, and the other zero-frills cars of the 1985-1995 period, i.e., very poorly. Jack Baruth does a fine job of explaining why this is so, but enough of these cars were moved off showroom floors that you still see the occasional example. Here’s a Tercel EZ that I spotted in my local self-serve wrecking yard. (Read More…)

After finding a couple of Mercedes-Benz W123 coupes for this series, I decided to shoot the next four-door version of this legendary machine that I spotted. Here’s one in solid, stolid brown. (Read More…)

When an ordinary car— say, a ’94 Camry— shows up in a high-turnover self-service junkyard, most of its parts will still be present when it goes to the scrapper. However, when a seldom-seen-in-junkyards vehicle with an avid following— say, a ’71 Toyota Land Cruiser— appears on the yard, it gets eaten like a roadkill raccoon in vulture country. When I saw this complete and rust-free 1973 Datsun 240Z at my local self-serve yard a few weeks ago, I knew it hadn’t been exposed to parts shoppers for long. Sure enough, look at it now! (Read More…)

It seems strange, but sufficient Chrysler Cordobas still exist to provide a sporadic flow of fresh examples to self-serve wrecking yards. In this series, we’ve seen this ’78, another ’78, this ’79, and now today’s personally luxurious blue ’80. (Read More…)

Not many cars appear and disappear while leaving as little trace as did the Suzuki Aerio, which was sold in the United States for the 2002-2007 model years. Normally, I ignore such new cars when I’m wandering around the wrecking yards of Denver, but I’ll break out the camera when I find something of historical significance— for example, an example of the final year of the GM J-body’s 24-year run— or when I see a car that doesn’t seem to exist on the street any more. This Aerio is such a car. (Read More…)

Here in Colorado, retired members of the Land Rover family are lined up in large numbers in every self-service wrecking yard. Range Rovers and Discoveries were (and are) extremely popular here, most likely as a form of rebellion against the Subaru Outback-driving hordes whose maintenance expenses (even with all the blown head gaskets and nuked center diffs) come to a boring 0.004% of the total per-vehicle annual cost of Range Rover ownership. I’ve been ignoring these trucks when I see them in junkyards, but today we’re going to look at a typical example, chosen at random. (Read More…)

For some reason, BMW 2002s are easier to find in self-service wrecking yards (in Colorado and California, anyway) than are 320is. Most of the Crusher-bound 2002s I see are pretty well picked over— probably before they ever got to the junkyard— and so I don’t photograph them. However, a round-taillight 2002 with automatic transmission is something you don’t see every day. (Read More…)