Hooniverse Asks- What's Been Your Most Memorable Junkyard Find?

July 26, 2010

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If you’re anything like me, you take great pleasure in roaming the aisles of your friendly, neighborhood U-Pull-Em junkyard. As a matter of fact, I know that some of your are just like me in that aspect, because you and I’ve done the junkyard jig together. Usually the experience is an anticlimactic review of twenty year old Japanese and Korean iron, oxidizing in the sun. Every once in a while however, you strike pay dirt. Those are the trips we’re interested in today.

As you may or may not know, I have an Austin Healey Sprite. Years ago, I was prowling a local lot – one of the foreign-only ones that forgo the endless rows of A-bodies, Tauruses and New Yorkers with their peeling landau roofs. Instead it’s a sea of Tercels, mouldering Jag sedans, corpulent Volvos and derelict Mercedes barges. I was negotiating a shimmering pools of coolant mixed with lazy man pee. while keeping an eye on the jugular-cutting and tetanus-baring splayed fender of a old accident victim, as I passed a recognizable shape. I nearly missed the little MG Midget that was sitting canted over on only three welded wheel supports, I was concentrating so on avoiding Lake Toxima.
Lucky for me my peripheral vision kicked in, forcing me to stop. Standing before me was rough but fairly complete MKI Midget. The body was rusted through in too many places for it to be anything other than a well find, but a twist of the trunk handle revealed a treasure trove of parts, including a rare tachometer reduction drive and a full set of top bows. I gathered together everything I could, using the cloudy side curtains as a base, and hurried my finds up to the payment window.
If you’re not familiar with how Pick A Part works, then let me explain. You pay a couple of bucks to get in and wander around, banging your tool box or bag against the fenders of the most wretched vehicles you could ever imagine. Every once in a while you come across something special, something magical, and you pull that part, or parts off it and go to a window where they look it over and charge you whatever the going rate for that particular piece on the price board. Wiper motors may go for a fiver, transmissions (whether TH300 or Getrag G1) are maybe a C-note, you get the picture. After you’ve paid, you make your way past the guy who checks to see if you’re smuggling anything out in your kit, and then it’s off to the parking lot and a well-earned burrito from Los Burpos taco truck. Inca Cola FTW!
In my case, many of the parts weren’t listed on the price board, and the guy in booth asked me what this and that was. I finally leveled with him that I had $10 in my pocket, and what could I get for that Hamilton? He thought for a moment and then asked if I could cover the then seventy three cent tax on the ten, and when I said I could, he let me have everything for that piddling amount. Needless to say, I was stoked, although that day I went home hungry.
That’s my best story, and I have others – ask me sometime about the TR2s full of boxes OEM Triumph parts – but of course, you all have probably done even better. So, while you have been leaping pools of who knows what, and dodging razor sharp body panels, whilst plying the junkyards, what’s been your best find?
Image sources: [Sellbooksandvideosclub, Boicey.com]

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Robert Emslie