Visiting your local self-service wrecking yard on an ordinary day, you might find an interesting piece of automotive history or a car you wish you could save. But if you go on New Year's Day, when some yards have a 50 percent-off-everything sale, you can stockpile all those parts for projects you've been planning. Engines, transmissions, complete interiors -- the big stuff. I braved the snow and the 10-degree Colorado temperatures to score some parts deals with my friends, and here's how our morning went.
You don't bring your nice car to a snowy Half Price Day
My plans involved getting some icky, greasy, fuel-leaky parts, plus a bunch of fresh snow had fallen the night before, so I took my beater 1992 Honda Civic hatchback. A Detroit V8 engine will fit in the cargo area, but I wasn't engine shopping… this time.
We walked the rows of vehicles first, scouting out the stuff we wanted to pull.
Between the four of us, we were looking for Jeep Cherokee interior bits, a Ford Explorer rear end with highway gears, a 1960s steering column from a floor-shift-equipped truck, stuff for junkyard-parts boomboxes, and anything interesting. Twenty years ago, some yards would have "all you can carry" sales, which had a set price for as many items as you could carry down a 10-foot path using only muscle power (presumably, personal-injury lawsuits put the kibosh on that idea), which meant that bench seats piled high with taillights and radios were your best shopping strategy and you yanked everything in a frenzy without paying much attention to quality. These days, though, your savvy Half Price Day junkyard shopper scouts out the yard before picking the choicest stuff to pull.
Looks like these guys are using an engine lift to remove a truck bumper. Don't try this at home.
If you're hoping to get an engine at Half Price Day, you might have to wait a while for one of the yard's hoists. Getting there early is a good move for engine shoppers, though it was about 0 degrees F when this yard opened.
In an unusual stroke of luck, the steering column I wanted had already been pulled.
I needed a steering column for my 1941 Plymouth race-car project, and I wanted one with no ignition switch (meaning, most likely, something no newer than the late 1960s) and no shifter (meaning, most likely, a truck), preferably with an intact turn-signal switch. Soon after we arrived at the yard, here's this old Ford with exactly the right steering column… removed and sitting in the bed. A previous customer must have pulled it and then changed his mind about the purchase. It was nice to avoid freezing my fingers for an hour in order to get this thing out of the truck.
Better stock up on carburetors while you're here!
After grabbing a half-dozen side marker lights for my next boombox project, I picked up a '76 Toyota Corolla carburetor for a future project. At 15 bucks, you can't go wrong.
Look at all that treasure!
A '74 IHC Scout grille to hang on the living room wall, a Fiat 124 Spider instrument cluster for a race-car project, a CB radio, and plenty of little bits and pieces. Of course, a couple of us went back later that day for even more stuff.
