[Benzworld] Image credit: McAllister Bryant

The ID19 was a less expensive version of the luxurious DS, developed as a replacement for the Traction-Avant. This one's been picked over pretty thoroughly (I suspect that Henry Hanzel, who can smell a Citroën from the next county, got here first), but the emblem was still on the tailgate.


And now it's on my Civic! My poor Honda had all its emblems pried off (no doubt by roving bands of Honda hoodlums) while living in San Francisco, so it needed some new ones. I contemplated swapping the Citroën one-spoke steering wheel onto the Civic as well, but the factory airbag seemed worth keeping.


Now all the car needs is a huge portrait of Soichiro on the hood and maybe a rotating radar antenna on the roof. Hey, you have freedom to hack up your car when you know you'll be its last owner!


I also grabbed this beautiful instrument cluster, for use in a really stupid project I'm working on. Best $9.95 I've spent in a while. And, hey, the clock even works (after disassembly and oiling)!

This all started out when the Sarah Palin punishment at the 24 Hours Of LeMons Toledo race raised the bar for innovative ways to penalize lousy drivers on the race track. I'll be judging at the Houston race this weekend, so a special Texas-themed penalty would be needed. But what? Then I remembered: In 1982, Ozzy Osbourne was arrested for pissing on the Alamo, drunk and wearing a dress, and his albums were burned by enraged mobs throughout the Lone Star State.


And what was Ozzy's day job in Birmingham, before Black Sabbath hit it big? He worked on a British Leyland assembly line, testing horns! Naturally, the Ozzy Osbourne Inertial Penalty Horn would require horns from a BL product. While you might find the occasional MG or Triumph in self-service junkyards, 70s Jaguars are always plentiful. Mount the pair of genuine Lucas Electric horns (high- and low-pitch units) on a crude bracket screwed together from scrap plywood, then add a Bosch-type relay pocketed at the junkyard (you can skip the relay, but the high draw of the horns will fry the switch contacts after a few applications, due to arc-welding-style sparking). Mount the bracket close to the driver, but not so close that he can reach it while strapped in!


The inertia switch- which is two-dimensional version of a pinball-machine tilt switch- can be made from junk just lying around; in this case, a piece of plywood (notched for easy zip-tie attachment to a roll cage bar), some coat hanger wire, plumber's tape, and a plastic windshield-washer tubing tee. Like all serious projects, the whole mess is held together with JB Weld.



The switch contacts are the plumber's tape on one side and a big Honda steering-wheel nut pocketed at the junkyard. Depending on how the switch is oriented, the contacts will close when the car accelerates, or turns, or decelerates… or when it hits a big bump, or gets a big gust of wind inside.


To get power, the alligator connector from a dead timing light clamps onto the car's battery. I added a 20-amp fuse inline and covered it with lots of electrical tape.


How to get the power from battery to relay? Cut a hole in the hood with this step drill and run the cord through the side window opening! Ram a sheetmetal screw into the car's floor near the horns and you've got your ground. Hey, they're $500 cars, right?

That's right, we're talking about a gallon gas can zip-tied somewhere under the hood, with a junkyard electric fuel pump hooked directly to the battery (or, if you're doing a really sanitary job, off a jumper wire plugged into a switched circuit on the fusebox) and feeding the carburetor, which you might even disassemble on the car's hood and hose off some off the more egregious crap deposits with carb cleaner spray (and, much like one of my other Really Dumb Ideas, we suggest very strongly that you don't try this at home). Thing is, it's not easy to find a fuel pump suitable for carburetor use; most carbureted cars have mechanical fuel pumps, and a fuel-injected car's pump cranks out too much pressure for a carburetor to handle- we're talking 60 PSI instead of the 5 or so you want. Adding to the fun, those junkyard vehicles that do have carb-friendly electric pumps generally keep them buried beneath many layers of inaccessible parts or- worse- in the gas tank, ensuring a knuckle-shredding, gas-stinking three-hour adventure to pull one. However, back in those days you could count on being able to find two vehicles with easy-access, reliable electric fuel pumps that would work just fine with your Q-jet or Solex or whatever: the Chevy Luv pickup truck and the mid-70s Honda Civic. The Luv- actually an Isuzu TF- had an easy-to-reach cylindrical pump located on the frame rail, while the Civic's was behind a panel under the rear seat. I preferred the Civic pump, even though it was slightly harder to extract from the donor vehicle, because it was easier to mount on a crude homemade bracket (see above) and attach under the hood of your Buick Apollo with a couple of sheetmetal screws. These days, sadly, you usually can't find either one of these vehicles in the self-service junkyards, mid-70s machinery now having mostly been crushed. I try to not to get burdened beneath a big load of old car parts, but I'm going to keep this Civic pump!

The California sun tends to be hard on bumper stickers, especially those from the Desert Storm era slapped on the chalky tailgate of a junked 70s Jeep Cherokee.

Pics taken at C.I.A. Salvage, Limerick Maine- May 5, 2008. I'll leave it to you to wax poetic about the cars if you so choose and/or make jokes at rural Maine's expense, etc.
1) 1946-48 Dodge sedan
2) hood mascot of same
3) 1952 Kaiser Manhattan
4) same
5) 1955 Kaiser Manhattan
6) 1957 Ford firetruck, January 08
7) same, May 08
8) 1960s Falcon Clubwagon
9) 1964 Imperial Crown Coupe- one of 5233
10) tailpanel mascot of same
11) rear side view
12) 1966 Plymouth Belvedere II- 273 V8/auto, For Sale sign on windshield
asking $2K
13) nose of same
14) rear 3/4 of same
15) 1967 Chevy Bel Air
16) 1968 Olds F85
17) nose of same
18) 1968 Mercury Monterey
19) 1968 Plymouth Valiant Signet
20) 1969 Dodge Dart Swinger
21) nose of same
22) 1969 Plymouth Barracuda Formula S
23) badge
24) 1970 Dart Swinger
25) rear view of same
26) 1970-71 Dodge pickup
27) 1970s Opel- I don't know anything about these, maybe you can fill in
the year etc.
28) 1972 Plymouth Scamp
29) rear view of same
30) 1974 Dart Swinger
31) 1974 Buick Estate
32) same

I was walking through the Long Beach ecology looking for an engine for my AE86, and came across this Ford Probe with a rollcage sitting at the edge of the import section. Noticing the rollcage and weight reduction through hatch removal, my roomate says "Hey, doesn't this look like it could be a LeMons car? We looked closer at it, and saw numerous clues that it may possibly be one... including being driven by the Stig?

But it was happening across the patriotic Little Tree hanging off the cage that removed any doubt as to this car's history........


Alt080

These pics date back a year or two, but this yard in Phoenix is a car nut's dream (Desert Valley Auto Parts). With the absolute lack of rust (except on obviously Midwestern cars), the parts are nearly pristine. The crown jewel, in my book, is the 1957 Dodge Sweptside pickup. Yes, that's the limited production version with DeSoto wagon panels stuck to the bed. For $3500 I almost bit, but we all tell the same story with a different make/model. Here's info on the super-rare Sweptsides, which were stepside pickups with DeSoto station wagon fenders stuck on intended for the Lincoln Blackwood/Mark LT/Chevy Cameo crowd.

with a member of Belvedere Adrian's LeMons team, to help them pull some B-body suspension parts for their bent Belvedere race car (yes, I'm helping a competing Thunderhill team... or- heh, heh- so they believe), and spotted this engine block sitting on the ground with the pistons stuck upside-down into the cylinders. The question is: why? It looks like the person who pulled the engine just wanted the crank and head, so why take such care to keep the pistons all together if you're not going to buy them? Bonus points to anyone who can identify the engine; it came from the car next to it. Hint: American car.

Here's my junkyard find from Big M auto recycling in Williams, CA. This past weekend I drove up to Thunderhill raceway for a CSRG vintage racing event. I've lived in the Bay Area my entire life, and my mother's family is from Redding, so I know Interstate 5 pretty well. Anyway, the halfway mark between my house and my grandfather's house is near the town of Williams, which means that I've been stopping at Granzella's Deli and Sports Bar for sandwiches and bathroom breaks since I was a baby. Driving up I-5 on my own this past weekend, I got lunch at Granzella's and took the opportunity to look around Williams a little bit. Now, if you had looked off to your left whileapproaching Williams from the south, you might have noticed a junkyard filled with old American iron. Well, I assume YOU would, as would any true Jalop, and I sure as hell did. So this weekend, after getting a sandwich at Granzella's, I headed a mile down old Highway 99W to get a closer look at the junkyard I had previously seen only from the Interstate. I won't catalog the awesomeness that fills this lot, but suffice it to say that if Detroit made it between the war and the Malaise era, you can find it here. Need a flathead Packard straight-eight? They have several. Looking for a motor for your hot rod? They can hook you up with an 8BA Flathead, or a Y-block, or a Nailhead, or an early Hemi, or a small-block Chevy (of course) and they can find you as many Stromberg 97s as you'll need to feed the beast. Looking for parts for your Edsel? They have several from all three years, from Pacer sedans to Citation convertibles to Ranger wagons, in all states of decay and disassembly. I found fifteen Edsels before I stopped counting. They even have an early '30s Franklin. A FRANKLIN, for Pete's sake, the air-cooled sedan that Charles Lindbergh drove.

But one car at Big M truly stopped me in my tracks. The bulbous fenders and P-38-style tailfins told me it was an early '50s Cadillac, but this one was different. It wasn't an everyday sedan or a nice fastback or even a hearse. It was, in fact, a Caddymino. > At first I thought it was a funeral home's old "flower car," the kind that travels behind the hearse with a bed full of flowers. Some of them even had movable bed floors so the funeral home could make it look like the bed was completely full of flowers even when few people had bothered to honor the deceased. But no, the welds were obviously not done by a professional. Moreover, what was left of the floor was from a regular passenger car, spare tire well and all. This was clearly a homemade Caddymino, made by some sort of Proto-Jalop from the mid-to-late twentieth century. As a wannabe motoring journalist, I considered it my duty to share this amazing archaeological find with the world, and here it is.

Picture 1: I don't know the year, and I couldn't get the hood open to see whether the V8 was of the flathead or overhead-valve variety. But even if it doesn't have a motor, the yard has plenty of 331- to 390-inch Caddy motors that should fit right in.

Picture 2: The welds along the top of the fenders were never ground down, but it still looks like someone put a lot of thought and time into this conversion.

Picture 3: The interior is shot, but a bench seat from an old pickup will do wonders for it. The Keystone Light can is a nice touch.

Picture 6: Not the Caddymino— this Ford F1 truck apparently belonged to an animal feed dealer in Berkeley. It comes complete with a "Swingin' A's" sticker from way back when.

Picture 7: Again, not related to the Caddymino— just a sample of the awesomeness that you'll find in this lot. Enjoy! -Armand4

I was scoping out local junkyards, when I found this Citroen. I didn't know there was a coupe model built, but it looks most like this was made by the coachbuilder Ricou. The short wheelbase proportions are just weird, but with the engine from a Maserati Biturbo, it'd make an interesting bastardized sibling to the SM. It's out in the west end of Toronto (Old Weston and St. Clair), although Google maps shows the location as auto body place (either way, the car's been there long enough that it shows up in the satellite view).

The company behind this model, Robot-Models.com, also has a smaller version of Optimus Prime currently available as well as Bumbelee. A descriptive paragraph also suggests that Jazz, Ironhide, Megatron, Barricade, Starscream, Blackout and Frenzy will also be available for purchase soon. [Robot-Models via Giz]

It's Half Price Day at the junkyard, so don't let 98-degree weather stop you from grabbing that Chevy 400 small-block out of a Kingswood Estate station wagon- 400s are hard to find! I shot this in the mid-90s, when early-70s Detroit iron was still plentiful in the big self-service junkyards and disposable 35mm panorama cameras were all the rage.

The only really important gauge in this kind of race car is the tachometer. Sure, we could clamp a big ol' aftermarket tach on the steering column (and, in fact, the team members were able to produce a couple of high-quality tachs from their personal stashes), but we'd get dinged for such an extravagance by the flinty-eyed LeMons judges, who will be looking to add up all the nickels and dimes in each car. No, it would have to be a junkyard tach, preferably from a V8-equipped Ford product. And looky here- an 80s Mustang GT, and it's Half Price Day today!



Sure enough, it's got the perfect tach for our 302, and the junkyard vultures have already torn the cluster halfway out.


A few brutal hacks with a big prybar carefully removed fasteners and the cluster is ready to yield up its treasure...


Look at those easy-to-wire connectors on the back of the tachometer. Perfect!


With tachs going for just $5 on Half Price Day, I thought about getting this Camaro tach as a backup, but decided to pass.


You can find plenty of high-quality toggle switches in the junkyard; just look for cars with aftermarket security systems or extra fog lights.


When we performed a wiring harness-ectomy on the Volvo, we saved all the wire and connectors. Hundreds of feet of high-quality Volvo-grade wiring just ready to be reused. Yeah, we're being cheap beyond belief, but that stuff costs money!


Next, out to the workbench for some cutting and drilling. I decided to make one panel with the tach and a pair of idiot lights (for added "You better pit RIGHT NOW!" urgency, we're using side marker lights as oil pressure and temperature idiot lights) and another panel with switches and the less important gauges.


The Mustang tach needed some slicing and grinding to go from the factory cluster to our aluminum panel, but it wasn't too difficult. Note the Volvo harness connectors; both panels need to be easily removable for troubleshooting and repairs during construction.


A little black spray paint (left over from making the last batch of PCH Tipster T-shirts) to reduce the glare problem, and it's ready to install! Not exactly show-car quality, but I think this tach/idiot-light panel captures the spirit of the 24 Hours of LeMons.


I found a nice pocket-sized reasonably priced VDO voltmeter in a junked Rabbit, and the clock and fuel gauge from our free 242T parts car (more on that über-score later) made a total of four gauges when added to the water temperature gauge. Six switches, a Fiat power-on light, and a starter button from an old Gillig Phantom bus round out the controls.


How to attach the panels to the rollbar behind the wheel? Muffler clamps! This way the panels are adjustable with a few turns of a wrench.


"That wiring is more complicated than the Space Shuttle!" grumbles a teammate, but compared to the Junkyard Boogaloo Boombox it's practically austere! Now that it's all zip-tied and protected by split looms, it looks pretty clean. However, I'm pretty sure my teammates will be pulling all my toenails out with rusty pliers (or, perhaps even worse, start calling me "Joe Lucas") if the car DNFs due to electrical problems.

Somewhat crude-looking, but effective... and built for next to nothing!

Thanks again for disclosing the location. I wasn't able to make the trip until Tuesday the 25th of March. I was taking a big risk making a 236 mile drive, but it paid off.
Luckily, it was there waiting for me. They were clearing out the 2 rows next to it. The forklift driver told me he was taking it to be crushed the next day. What luck, and it even had almost every part I needed.
I stuffed it all in and on my Jeep Cherokee and drove for almost 5 hours (nice rush hour traffic up there) until i finally made it home, tired but very happy.
I scored a fender, hood, header panel, bumper, crossmember, and a lower A-arm. All for $300 plus gas and a day of my life.
The donor was in pretty bad shape with rotted out rockers and such, but had been in a previous frontend collision with replaced/repainted body parts that were in good condition.
At least mine won't be crushed too...yet!

[Junkard Finds]

Image credit Murilee Martin