Where Cars Go to Die, Parts Survive
It’s a grim place, this auto junkyard in Anaheim. Hundreds of scarred wrecks and lifeless hulks arrive every week -- 50 to 60 a day, hastily dumped by an endless parade of tow-truck drivers.
But for enterprising do-it-yourselfers looking for hard-to-find or discontinued auto parts, the 7-acre yard is the answer to many a prayer.
Where else can you get a fender, front bumper, muffler, headlight switch, turn-signal lens and two door panels for $151.50, as one customer did recently?
This madness goes on from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays at this and the other seven Pick Your Part yards in California. More than 100,000 vehicles pass through the yards each year, a company spokesperson said.
About 700 people a day visit the Anaheim yard, manager John Cruz said. On weekends, that number jumps to 1,500 each of the two days, he said.
Strolling through the yard, it’s hard not to be reminded of a morgue. Each car is propped up on metal poles about 2 feet high, their hoods and trunk lids wide open, exposing body parts, light fixtures dangling from their sockets, windows smashed and even some personal items in plain sight.
Most of the personal stuff is removed at the yard’s receiving section, where the vehicles are sucked dry of gas, oil, Freon, brake fluid, antifreeze and other fluids before being put on display.
Clothes, toys, shoes and whatever else was left behind are removed and tossed into boxes. Three large boxes at the yard hold countless license plate frames, from dealers as well as the personal variety: “I can’t be overdrawn, I still have checks.”
Customers could not care less, though, about the tragedies or circumstances that brought the vehicles here. They are interested only in parts.
They crawl around, stand on tires to reach deep into the engine, sit in the driver’s seat to strip the ignition from the steering column or rip out the console or dashboard.
Innumerable bolts, screws and small unwanted pieces of the cars litter the blacktop.
The vehicles are spaced so there is a uniform amount of space between them, making it possible to open doors without difficulty.
At 10 acres, the Pick Your Part yard in Anaheim is the smallest of the seven owned by the company, now in its 25th year.
The Sun Valley yard is 50 acres, and yards in Wilmington, Bakersfield, Chula Vista, Milpitas and Hayward are about the same size.
A Stanton yard will open this year, said Donna McGee, director of advertising.
The company also has a yard in Sun Valley called Memory Lane, featuring cars from the 1970s, and Kilroy’s, a yard in Wilmington where parts already have been pulled from the vehicles.
But in Anaheim, customers come with tools in professional boxes, plastic containers, plastic bags or in their hands, strolling up and down the aisles, as though in a supermarket, looking for that certain Nissan, Mercury or Mercedes.
The rules are simple: no open-toed shoes, bring your own tools and pay $2 admission. Also, don’t bother to ask if they have a ’94 Seville. There’s no record of the inventory. The vehicles and their parts move too rapidly for the company to keep track.
Vehicles have a shelf life in the yard of about three weeks, Cruz said. After that, to make room for the never-ending supply, they are loaded nine at a time onto flatbed trucks and hauled off to scrap yards.
“Customers come in and say ‘I saw that Toyota yesterday,’ ” Cruz said. “Sorry, it’s gone,” he tells them. “When you see it, you gotta grab it.”
And there’s a utopia-like equality in the junkyard, where a part’s origins are unimportant.
“I don’t care if you have a Mercedes or a Pinto; the price of a bumper is the same,” Cruz said.
For some people it’s a pastime just to visit a yard, stroll through the aisles and get a glimpse of the Southern California car culture from another angle. “It’s just like going to a car lot, except everything is wrecked,” said Ed Lippert of Long Beach.
Many customers are regulars.
Tom Dye of Stanton said he spent about $6,000 at the junkyards last year.
Dye races stock cars at Irwindale Speedway and bought “two or three motors, three transmissions and 10 rear ends, all for the same car,” he said.
The customers work quietly, sometimes whistling as they unbolt a transmission, sometimes cursing as they struggle with a difficult part.
“This is the most complicated car there is,” said Javier Mendoza as he wrestled to reach a motor-mount support in a 1990 Nissan Stanza.
He had been working on it for half an hour and estimated he had another half-hour to go. Mendoza explained that to get to the supports he had to remove the starter, motor mounts and some brackets attached to the transmission.
The Santa Ana resident owns a car repair shop and said it probably would take about a month to get the part from the dealer, if it was available at all.
His struggle was just what Cruz was describing when he explained how even the uninitiated customers manage to get what they want from the wrecks.
“You just gotta take bolts off, jiggle and unscrew,” Cruz said. “Whatever’s attached to the part, just keep unbolting and sooner or later you get it out.”
A big advantage of going to the junkyard is that Mendoza expected to pay about $15 for a part that would cost at least $100 new.
Hard-to-find or otherwise, price seems to be the biggest attraction at the junkyards like Pick Your Part and Ecology Auto Parts, which has nine locations in California and one in Arizona.
But for newcomers, it can be a little creepy, being around so much destruction.
Erik Byington and Gary Harrington of Westminster were looking for brake parts for a 280Z. Harrington, the veteran, worked methodically as he found what he was looking for. Byington looked around and noted that the cars have been in accidents and “people could have died in these cars. This one here,” he said, pointing to a car that was shredded, much of its body cut away.
“Jaws of life,” Byington said.
