I’ve been mired a bit on my project car and while there are some updates to come for that soon over on Roadkill, I decided last weekend to take a trip up to the junkyard for some easily gotten 24 Hours of LeMons parts. I could have, I suppose, gone to the yard 15 minutes from me, but I opted instead to travel farther to one with a more interesting inventory, simply because I felt like taking an hour or two to wander among the rows. I’m glad I did and I’m even more glad I brought my beater of a point-and-shoot camera to catch a bit of what I found.

The first place I tend to go in this yard is the far back corner with the vintage machinery. On the end of the row was this picked-over Corvair Greenbrier in baby blue. I wish I knew what “WW DIS” meant.

Nearly everything had been yanked out of it and this poor old workhorse was probably headed to the Crusher before too long. Had I felt more industrious, I would have gotten a better picture of the 13 feet of shifter linkage going back from the driver to the rear-mounted engine.

Next to it was an early 1970s Pontiac Grand Prix. The shiny fan caught my eye, which then also noticed the new-ish and massive radiator. The rad was held in only by the transmission coolant lines and one hose clamp so I free it up after about 90 seconds of work and while I hadn’t intended to leave with a radiator, I had a huge, almost-new one for $40. Will it fit on my Dodge Magnum LeMons car? Probably not directly, but there’s always a way to make things work, right?

This poor El Camino would move mullets no more.

The Greenbrier wasn’t the only Corvair in the yard, though. This penny-covered early one has been in the yard for at least a year and I was tempted to try pulling off a door to mount in my office. I elected not to but grabbed a crank window handle that I intend to use as a replacement for the one on my increasingly hooptie Ford Focus daily driver.

There must be at least $30 in pennies epoxied to this Corvair. Take that, Colin Chapman!

For whatever reason, this yard was brimmed with old AMCs. There were at least three Hornets, a couple of Ramblers, and this old dented-up Ambassador. The passenger doors had both been hit hard enough that they wouldn’t open and, like all of the AMC products in the yard, it had the ubiquitous AMC straight-six of one displacement or another.

It may not have been fast, but the hubcaps had some cool gravitas.

I can’t say why, but I really like the radio and the clock in the center section. I didn’t want to spend a ton of pulling them out because of the half-dozen hornets buzzing around on that muggy, muddy morning, but I might go back for the clock at least.

I was fascinated by the Vibra-Tone Speaker knob under the dash, which was apparently either a vibrato or an echo effect that you could turn on to, I guess, add depth to what you were listening to on the old AM waves. It’s a weird concept, I suppose, to modern car buyers, but when bitchin’ Fender amps had the feature, why not add it to a car? I managed to pull this out from the under the dash without getting stung and while I’m not sure what I’ll do with it, it was worth the $3 I paid for it just even if I just re-use that knob somewhere.

This egg-crate-grille Nova sedan was also in the old car back section. Four-doors seem pretty rare these days, but the body looked pretty straight on this one.

The small block Chevy V8 was still in place, albeit a bit worse for the elements. I guess if I’d been more industrious, I’d have pulled off valve covers from other cars to resell. There’s always next time, I suppose.

What was really interesting about the Nova sedan was this: A full rollcage inside. The driver’s side doorbars suggest this was a circuit racing car, either circle-track or road racing.

The oldest car in the lot was this 1950 Buick Sedanette, which looked like it had been loved in a previous life. Some reader probably can recall seeing the “Bincoln”

The V8 under the hood is, I’m reliably informed, a big-block Ford and with the “Bincoln” paint on the rear, one supposes this is a 460 from a Lincoln. That’s a pretty bitchin’ hot rod that we’re sad to see in this state.

The second-oldest car sitting around was this ’53 Willys, which had rotted away almost completely. There was still some door handles and glass that was good, but it was sitting in its last inglorious moments.

The original flathead straight six still sat under the Willys’ crumbling hood.

Out in the parking lot sat this august duo and while I’m all for V12 Jaguars, the surf green Rambler might be the exact car I need to own. I’ve always found the American “compacts” of the early 1960’s—Falcons, Comets, Darts, Valiants, Chevy IIs, Studebaker Larks, and Ramblers—fit my tastes in classic cars.

This one, though, had just the right aesthetic for me. A little rough around the edges with some patina but wearing an absolute perfect color.

The interior, though, was everything amazing about mid-century design.

The layout and appearance of everything is absolutely elegant but simple. It’s a glimpse of retrofuturism without all the hipsters and steampunks co-opting to their own weird ends.

Just look at this. It’s beautiful. I want this car.

Anyway, I eventually realized I needed to get some of the things I came for and a length of thick battery cable was next on the list. BMWs famously have rear-mounted batteries and long cables, so I thought this cut-apart E46 should suit my needs.

Of course, the side being open meant that everything was sitting in three inches of water. By the time I had freed the cable up, my hands were soaked in water that probably contained cholera, dysentery, and god knows what else.

But hey, I could have been having a worse day like this Mercedes CLK owner must have.

Probably won’t buff out. I sure hope everybody escaped this unharmed.

This old Mercedes 230, however, was in pretty decent condition, all things considered.

The big straight six’s valve cover would also have made a nice wall decoration, but I didn’t feel like lugging it around with me. Note to self: Get a junkyard wagon to pull around. Anybody have a recommendation for something to look for on CraigsList?

Back in the day, this must have been quite the luxurious cruiser and with body-matched white steering wheel, it still looks rather dapper even in a dilapidated state. There should be a word for that condition. Dilapidapper? Dapperdated?

The 1970’s Alfa Romeo GTV is one of my absolute favorite cars, although the missing hood “bump” indicates this is a lowly four-cylinder GTV instead of the shrieking GTV6 with the 2.5-liter V6. Still, it’s one of the last attractive Alfa Romeos that was sold in the U.S. and my god do these engines sound incredible at full song.

Unfortunately, this is a very Alfa Romeo-like example of an Alfa Romeo, meaning that it’s making an earnest effort to return to the dust from whence it came.

If these are the original seats the Alfa had, though, they’re actually pretty modern for a 1977 car. I dig them and if they weren’t ripped up, I’d also consider borrowing them.

Next door was a primered-out Alfa Spider, likely with the same Alfa Twin Spark 2.0-liter engine. This was a fairly clean example, actually, although what that means for an Alfa is that the rust hasn’t entirely encapsulated every square inch of the car.

Even though this is a fairly late 1976 Spider, it still has a classic wooden wheel, this one well worn from what one imagines as years of Friday night summer cruises with some roadside curse-laden repair attempts by moonlight. I’m reasonably sure that’s the “passion” that everyone talks about with Italian cars, no?

In this sea of towering Isuzus, something small and red caught my eye.

It was a final-year MGB, a 1980 with the infamous rubber bumpers. I’ve always had a soft spot for these little wretches, even though the last years of the MGB found the ubiquitous lump of a 1.8-liter engine making incredibly sad horsepower amounts.

Still, this one took its owner around somewhere between its own bouts of British unreliability. The passenger side floor had an old parking permit from the Chicago’s famous Art Institute in it.

Just behind was another MGB, this one a chrome-bumper 1969. With the windshield pillars cut off and racing stripes, one wonders if this was a former race car.

The engine didn’t look terribly impressive if it was, but the workhorse old tractor-like motor was probably seldom an impressive sight. I do have nefarious plans for one of these engines if I ever get my hands on one.

While neither MG was in good shape, they hadn’t fared as poorly as this Triumph Spitfire. The little fella had quite literally rusted in half.

Here’s a thing that I see a lot as a 24 Hours of LeMons writer: People shout over and over on the Internet: “How do you even find a $500 [fill in car name].” Porsches get this treatment often, but this junkyard really drives home the reality. There were no fewer than a half-dozen Porsche 924’s and 944’s sitting around, some of which were nearly complete. While it’s not easy to find one, you can surely find a clean-ish chassis and piece together one good one out of a handful of less-than-good ones. If people are selling them to junkyards for scrap prices—which is probably around $150 a car or less right now—then you shouldn’t have much trouble finding a $500 944.

Of course, some of them probably had no redeeming value like this 944.

But even the bug-eyed 928 is found in junkyards today. Adjusted for inflation, this car probably sold for more than $80,000 new and now it sits forlorn and waiting for death.

I’ve always liked the archnid intake manifold on the 928’s V8, though.

The casual car fan is occasionally fooled by the similarities in design between the 944, RX-7, and later Datsun Z-Cars. This sounds absurd maybe, but it’s easily done at 24 Hours of LeMons races where the body lines aren’t always evident and hatches are often missing. Nevertheless, the teardrop shape of the Nissan 300ZX is pretty hard to miss. This old automatic Z31 would actually perhaps have made a great LeMons car.

The Z31 Turbo only made 197 horsepower, which was still almost a 40 HP bump over the naturally aspirated version, but with the automatic tranmission behind the VG30 V6, it probably wasn’t going to blow anybody away.

But hey, the ladies all love purple-pinstripe seats with “TURBO” embroidery on them.

To the end of “Where can you find $500 car for LeMons?!,” I found this old beater with a race car number on the side. It’s an ’89 Volkswagen GTI and it sure looked familiar.

A peak inside showed a general road-racing-style cage and I wondered if this was a former 24 Hours of LeMons car. A little digging turned up that it was, in fact, a LeMons car and it raced only once. That one race was at Autobahn Country Club in Joliet in 2010, which is etched in my mind for my part in cannibalizing my teammate’s daily driver Ford ZX2 to finish the race in our hooptie Ford Escort.

Anyway, this car was pitted just a few yards down the road from us and because we were ankle-deep in the sewage of our own failures, we didn’t really notice what anybody else was up to. In retrospect, we turned more laps than this car did despite spending almost all of Saturday off the track.

Still, the cage looked like it was reasonably close to passing current technical regulations (LeMons rules have changed quite a bit in six years) and if the engine is still any good, it’s a 16-valve 1.8-liter that put out a respectable 137 horsepower. With the light chassis, it’s no wonder these cars have been popular road racers and autocrossers. But here sits one such car, ready to go to the great racetrack in the sky.

Eventually, I convinced myself that I’d spent enough time in the yard and paid for my purchases—which also included a Ford Taurus dual-fan setup—and trudge home through a developing and soon-raging thunderstorm. You can spend Saturday mornings in far more boring ways, one supposes.