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Moving your race car's battery to the rear of the car helps reduce the nose-heaviness problem inherent in most front-engined designs, but heavy-gauge battery cable is mighty expensive stuff when you're on a tight budget. When you're trying to squeeze under that $500 limit at the 24 Hours Of LeMons, you won't be buying any new cables… but your friendly wrecking yard has the solution! BMW E30s are easy to find in the self-service yards, and they came right from the factory with a very nice trunk-mounted battery setup. The big self-service junkyard chains generally have a single price for all battery cables, which means that the 15-footer that runs from the trunk to the engine compartment will cost the same as a skinny 18" job from a Sentra. When the Half Price Sale is on, we're talking about $7 for both cables and terminals; not a bad deal for 20 pounds of copper! For its trunk-mounted battery setup, the Black Metal V8olvo used some 1-gauge welding cable I'd hoarded...
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Just finishing a single 24 Hours of LeMons race can mean a one-way trip to The Crusher after the race is over, as was the case with the Team Come From Behind Probe . After all, a couple days of metal-crunching, rod-throwin' action tend to be rough on a sub-$500 car. That's what makes the glorious career of the Eyesore Racing CRX so great; Soichiro's little 2-seater not only finished three races, it placed 7th at the October '07 Altamont race, 7th again at the December '07 Thunderhill event, and took the coveted People's Choice award (along with a respectable 18th-place ranking) at the May '08 Altamont race. However, even a Honda can't live forever, and team member Wrappedinbacon sends us this photo of Eyesore Pimpin's dearly departed race car. Jump to read his description and see the entire Eyesore CRX Greatest Hits gallery. galleryPost('DOTSJEyesorePimp', 3, 'Rise And Fall Of The Eyesore Racing Honda CRX'); I saw the post about the rotting...
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Normally I don't pry off many emblems during visits to my local wrecking yard; I'm there frequently and my house would get overwhelmed by clutter if I pocketed every somewhat cool emblem I encountered (though I do make an exception for early 1970s Chevy Impala emblems ). However, every so often some emblem catches my eye and I must have it; in this case it's the emblem representing Cadillac's infamous V8-6-4 engine of 1981, which combined with the Cimarron to give Cadillac's image a couple of big black eyes that lingered for years (cylinder deactivation works great these days, delivering excellent mileage from large-displacement engines, but not all the bugs had been worked out back then). Best of all, it's a Malaise-style "stick-on" emblem without difficult-to-mount studs, so it's getting JB Welded to my laptop as a theft deterrent. I mean, would you steal a V8-6-4?
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With Maximum El Camino Day beginning to draw to a close, it makes sense to answer the uestion of where these beautiful beasts go to meet their final end. No matter how useful that car's truck bed might be, at some point an El Camino owner often decides that it's no longer worth fixing the ol' Chevy. Or perhaps- in fact, more likely- parking tickets pile up like Saskatchewan snowdrifts and even a plaintive note can't ward off the Tow Truck Man. Either way, many El Caminos end up as parts donors as they await their final journey to the cold steel jaws of The Crusher. In honor of Maximum El Camino Day, I stopped by an East Bay wrecking yard over the weekend and photographed these five examples: three 70s examples and two from the 80s (and, yes, I know the one with the shell is a GMC Sprint). Make the jump for many, many more photos. galleryPost('JunkedElCaminosTop', 9, 'El Caminos Down On The Junkyard Part 1'); galleryPost('JunkedElCaminosJump', 55,...
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Sometimes you need to secure your Cadillac 80s GM heap from break-ins , and sometimes you just need to make your Cadillac 80s GM heap shorter . The junkyard is a wonderful place to see all manner of last-ditch backyard repairs... repairs that were ultimately unsuccessful. For example, this car, which was apparently involved in a wreck that mashed in the nose. Someone took quite a while working with sheetmetal and Bondo on the fenders, did a good straight cut across the hood's remains... but then seems to have had about 45 seconds to rope a truck radiator into place. No cooling fan, y'all- just keep moving! galleryPost('JunkyardShorty', 5, 'Short Nosed Cutlass Down On The Junkyard');
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Berkeley and its nearby East Bay cities (including Alameda) have long been inhabited by legions of folks who swear the Volvo 200 series was the Best Car Ever Made. You'd have to pry their cold, dead fingers from the ignition key of that beloved mustard-yellow 245 or brick-red DL before they'd give up driving their lefty-bumper-sticker-bedecked Swedish bricks (at 49MPH in the fast lane)... that is, until the Prius arrived. Once a bulletproof hybrid Toyota enters the stable, paying Sven the Volvo Mechanic $1,800 every six months to fix a car that gets 18 MPG no longer seems like the bargain it once was... and thus begins the long tow-truck ride to the junkyards of Oakland and Hayward. galleryPost('Volvo200ValhallaTop', 6, 'Volvo 240 Carcasses Part 1'); As a result, you'll find that a huge percentage of the import-car sections at East Bay wrecking yards is comprised of Volvo 200s. This reality was a huge factor in the decision to go with a Volvo 240 as a 24 Hours...
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When scavenging the local self-service junkyard for parts to put on our 24 Hours of LeMons car , I spotted this '84 Peugeot 505. Because you always see entertainingly weird stuff in French cars, I took a look inside this one... and, sure enough, there it was: the Econoscope! At first I figured it was just a clever name for the tachometer, but then I saw the three lights below the "Econoscope" lettering. I assume the Econoscope is just a vacuum sensor that indicates low vacuum or high vacuum, but it can't be so simple; this is a French car, after all! I was tempted to pull out the Econoscope apparatus and add it to Wanky the Safety Cat , in order to enhance my driving safety.
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During my last visit to a local self-service junkyard, I noticed far more than the usual number of expensive German cars from the 80s, mostly in non-wrecked condition. Has some threshold been reached, where such cars are no longer worth maintaining? Here's a handful of photos of an '80 633CSi ($32,825 new, $83,232 in 2007 dollars), an '84 633CSi ($40,705 new, $81,855 in 2007 dollars), and an '89 Mercedes-Benz 560SEL ($72,280 new, $121,789 in 2007 dollars). I must admit that I wondered- briefly- if that big Mercedes V8 would fit in a Crown Victoria's engine compartment. galleryPost('JunkFlashGermansTop', 3, 'High-End German Iron Awaits The Crusher, Part 1'); galleryPost('JunkExpensiveGermansJump', 6, 'High-End German Iron Awaits The Crusher, Part 2');
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