“Neither snow, nor sleet, nor dark of night…” – even with all three sending holiday travelers into the ditches en masse as I write this, the Junkyard Outtake rolls on! Let’s see how many gems we can spot in these stacks.
Since our family celebrated Christmas on the 24th this year, that left the 25th open for other things – such as finishing projects. The Suburban engine swap that I started two weeks ago had been taken to about 80% completion within the first three days, but was left to lay as other, more pressing things demanded my attention.
With a day finally available, there was no time like the present (ha ha). So I spent my Christmas with wrenches in hand. Despite the replacement motor being newer and slightly different from the old one, the swap brought only the usual sorts of semi-minor frustrations, and was ultimately successful.
Once again I am properly equipped to hit the road in all kinds of weather – even for purposes so insignificant as junkyard browsing and picture-taking. Hurrah!
Really trivial trivia: There are at least three future Junkyard Outtake feature cars behind this Suburban… can you spot them?
Enough with the updates – let’s get back to the stacks of cars!
In this particular week, not many cars were slated to meet the crusher. Most of this stack was newer FWD vehicles. (I should really come back around mid-winter, when even retail scrap goes north of $200/ton, and the stacks get HUGE. That would make for some interesting pictures!)
That car hogging the foreground is worth a closer look. It’s an H-body Olds 88 coupe… and a rough one at that (years of sitting in some farmer’s hay field with no wheels tends to have such an effect). Too bad; these two-doors seem to be rather uncommon.
Nearby another stack is forming – and this one has some older iron in it. At least one more coupe awaits its final chapter here. (Wish I’d known whose backyard it was sitting in 15 years ago; it might have been savable then!)
They say desperation is the mother of creativity, and the maroon LeSabre on top is living proof. Who’d have thought that Rallye II on back would have fit?
What’s that you say? You want more? Okay. Here, have a Javelin!
Next week the Junkyard Outtake breaks new ground by presenting the first-ever Junkyard CC Clue. Don’t miss it!
The Pontiac looks like it might be relatively complete and saveable and it’s a 2 door also, but the full sizers have always been overshadowed by GTOs. Since it is big, black, and American someone could fix it up mechanically, sell it for export and market it as a pilsnerbil (look it up), although those tend to generally be 4 doors or wagons.
Good thing you’re there and I’m here, and I don’t have room for hobbies. Otherwise, I’d attack that Javelin with wrenches and not stop until only a rusted out body shell remains. A lot of AMC parts are hard to come by because Chrysler sold most of the AMC parts inventory for scrap years ago. The vast majority of AMC parts I see are culled from wrecks.
When the local AMC club meets, fully half of the cars that show are Javelins, so many that they have a seperate judging class for the Javelin and AMX.
More Javelins please,especially the lovely early ones.A massively ignored car back then and today.
More Javelins! This is the one directly behind the red one in the first pic. The owner added the spoiler and a hood with scoops. I would have left that stuff off as I think the first generation is one of the cleanest designs ever. This 70 also has a different instrument planel than the earlier Gen 1 cars, which I prefer.
My favorite of the half dozen or so AMXs that were at the show this year.
They even had a broughamated Matador there.
The 70 again. The guy in the green tee shirt is the lucky owner.
Thanks Steve,I had a dark green 69 6 cylinder for 2 years in 1981,my big brother and little sister got another 5 years out of it and it was still going strong at nearly 20.
The yard I’ve been featuring has a small AMC department which contains a few Javelins (one which was perhaps an AMX or a clone at one time), a Matador or two, and an Eagle that may or may not be an SX/4. Sometime before the spring thaw, I’ll dedicate a Friday to covering them all.
There’ll also be a day for the similarly small 60s/70s Chrysler section, and a couple of days for the Ford department.
All this AMC talk reminded me of a yard up north that I haven’t been to in years. It was almost exclusively AMC – more Javelins than you could shake a stick at. Was last there maybe 4 years ago to look for a 4bbl intake for a 360 I was considering building. Now THAT would be one to hit with the camera this spring!
All this AMC talk reminded me of a yard up north that I haven’t been to in years. It was almost exclusively AMC – more Javelins than you could shake a stick at.
If the yard is still there, and the cars haven’t already been stripped, let us know where it is. I’ll start the word around in the AMC community here, maybe get some of those parts into appreciative hands.
One more pic from last summer: with custom interior and a 401 with dual 4 bbls. The guy said he just moved the radiator forward a bit, and the firewall back a bit, and it dropped right in. The red 62 behind it was for sale. Fortunately, my lack of garage space prevents my bringing strays home.
That maroon Le Sabre really makes me feel old. Back in 1989 I attended a class (completely unrelated to GM or autos) being held at the General Motors Training Center in San Leandro (near Oakland). In the parking lot as we left, there was a truck with 2 heavily disguised prototypes; a Le Sabre and a Bonneville. These were the kind of disguised cars that you’d usually see in magazine photos taken in Michigan, with added panels on the body and partially masked lights. At the time I didn’t really know what exactly I was looking at but how often do we get to see prototypes in the flesh? Every time I see one of these cars ready for the crusher, I’m reminded that it’s the only design that I’ve watched go through virtually it’s entire life cycle.
The training center bit the dust too, being torn down in the mid to late 1990’s.
The Olds Delta 88 2-dr. was not very common. There were a few in Rhode Island, and usually they were either really stripped or totally loaded. I think a lot of these may have been special ordered, and that made them have some strange options. There was an older gentleman that had a burgundy one, it was a 1988 Royale Brougham 2-dr., with leather and practically every option Oldsmobile offered. He lived in my neighborhood and drove that car right into the 2000’s until he died. It always looked like new and I remember thinking how unusual that car was since most of them were sedans. After he died his son took the car to North Carolina and I never saw it again.
A friend of mine’s aunt had a white 1986 Delta 88 Royale 2-dr. with a red cloth bench seat, equipped the opposite of my neighbor’s Royale Brougham. It had the base hubcaps and crank windows. I don’t even think it had a/c! She used to go to the market near my house and I would see that car all the time. I know it had very low mileage as she hardly drove it anywhere but to the market and maybe an occasional doctors appointment. In 1996 she got rear-ended and it was totaled. It was 10 years old and I think it had at most 20,000 miles!
It hurts to see that 2-door vinyl-top-less ’69 Executive there…it looked straight and it was a nice color at that. the ’70 Chevrolet looked used-up but still…darn.
The Pontiac, along with about a dozen other GM products of similar vintage, all supposedly were dragged out of the same property. The majority of them were immediately marked for death upon arriving at the yard.
I was speechless, until I looked closer. All had been sitting in black dirt for decades, and many folded in half as soon as they were picked up for lack of a frame. What little trim, etc. was unharmed got pulled and sold before the crusher arrived.
Surprisingly, the better half of the cars involved in that transaction were 1970 full-size sedans (Impala/Caprice/Bel-Air/Biscayne). Guess somebody had a thing for them… too bad all they did was hoard them.
That Supra looks nice and I will always have a soft spot for pre-1996 Chrysler Minivans especially 94-95 Voyagers.
One problem with living in Portland, OR is all these snobby and sensible hippies mainly ignored domestic vehicles of the last few decades except for Explorers, Escalades, real pick up trucks, vans, and Crown Vics. So, that means 90s General Motors cars like Grand Prix and LeSabres are not terribly common and many seem to be transplants to the area.
By the way, the above quip is meant to be a serious joke.
I never thought that the 69 Pontiac looked that good as a 2 door. Likewise, the rear of that final Javelin with the squarish lights seemed a comedown from the prior tail end with the full width lens.
Necer knew until I read it here that Chrysler scrapped all of those AMC parts. What a shame. Someone could have made a nice little business out of that. There is a guy a county over from me who is The Guy for Studebaker parts, which evidently remain fairly plentiful.
Necer knew until I read it here that Chrysler scrapped all of those AMC parts. What a shame. Someone could have made a nice little business out of that. There is a guy a county over from me who is The Guy for Studebaker parts, which evidently remain fairly plentiful.
AMC’s engineering and HQ were in metro Detroit. Three of the former styling department guys show up at the local AMC meet each year. I had heard of the parts being scrapped third hand, so asked one of the styling guys and he confirmed. A few AMC parts are available as reproductions, like the textured vinyl upholstry. Vendors at the meet usually have a few NOS parts, but most are culled from junkyards. There was a guy there one year with a trailer full of late 60s Ambassador parts. The fenders had 5 in wide holes rusted in them, but he figured they were still worth salvaging.
The Studebaker parts situation is different. When Chrysler bought AMC, most of the “real” AMCs were 10+ years old, so there was less demand. Studebaker sold off the parts inventory as soon as they shut down South Bend, when there were still large numbers of Studies running around, hence potential for significant, immediate, cash flow. I talked with a guy who owns a 64 Daytona convert a few years ago, and had a display of photos of his restoration process. The entire front clip of his car is NOS parts.
When Nate Altman bought the tooling and rights for the Avanti, he also bought the parts, tooling and rights for Studebaker’s truck line. Parts sales kept him in business while he was getting the Avanti back into production. He could have put the trucks back into production, but he never did.
Local legend has it that when our area’s AMC dealer went under, all the parts on hand were offered free to whoever could remove them all within the short window of time given. The owners expected a scrapper, so the story goes, but what ended up appearing was a group of enthusiasts with a rented 53′ dry van.
Supposedly that trailerload is still out there somewhere, divided up amongst the recipients’ garages and basements. The person who told me the story mentioned some of their names at the time, but that was at least a decade ago – I suspect that even if I could remember the names, many would be dead now. I doubt if I could even find the guy who told me the tale!
I suppose most parts of the country have at least one such story. (Look how many years the “Lambrecht lot” was passed around as an urban legend before making front-page news just a few months ago!)