(Words and Video by McTaggart) After the Dirty Cougar’s unfortunate impact with the southbound end of a northbound Chevy recently, the question has been simple. What the hell do we do with the car now? With no front lights left, a fender pushed back two inches from its stock location, and a hood that I had to hammer-smash back into place (much to the horror of the daughter of the current caretaker Chris Conn), we decided that the most frugal way of salvaging our forlorn Fox personal coupe was to start hunting junkyards to see if we could locate sheetmetal. It seems like a joke in hindsight, finding a car from the 1980s in a mainstream junkyard, but we had to give it a shot, especially when Conn located a 1985 Cougar in a Nashville junkyard. Neither one of us would be too bothered by having a four-eye look to the car. Hell, if anything, it’d make sourcing lights that much easier since the original 1987-1988 only Cougar lights are virtually unobtanium, and shared only with early 1990’s Lincoln Continentals.

At the crack of dawn on a frosty Halloween morning, I grabbed a small tool kit and borrowed a truck before picking up Conn and heading south. By the time we got to the first yard, the temperature had climbed from “frost warning” to 70 degrees Fahrenheit, which made my time outside miserable. Since the weatherman hadn’t mentioned anything about a surprise warm wave, I was expecting temperatures to remain near the low 50 mark and subsequently was sweating my ass off, huffing and puffing like a fat kid who chased the ice cream truck for three miles for his Bomb Pop. But I wasn’t giving up the opportunity for a yard crawl to check out some of the thrown-away machines that could be interesting, or could simply be dead on arrival. Maybe both.

Language Warning: This was off-the-cuff and not scripted. My usual language level applies…which means shield the kids’ ears!