Junk yards getting rid of older stock?

[BigMike]

I had a disturbing experience over the weekend. I've been looking for bits & pieces for my '68 and hitting the junkyards close to my house. Every one of them said "we don't have anything that old."

No problem, I said. I'll just go to the yard where I found parts in September. It's all the way across town, so Saturday I headed out there and found they have gotten rid of all their older stock. About 2/3 of the lot was empty because the yard had sold to a larger outfit late last year.

Has anyone else seen this happen? Is this a trend?

[chad67]

Alot of them don't want to keep a truck around so that 1 person every 2 years can come look for a part. Also, eventually, all the usable parts on a vehicle get picked. That's whan they recycle them into parts for a Nissan....

[BigMike]

Gather ye carparts while ye may...

If I had known that was going to happen, I'd have harvested lots of small bits that were in good shape on these trucks.

[fastEdsel]

Junkyards up this way are shredding old stock like crazy for the Nissan factories. I had a friend that worked there and asked if they had any dash boards for our trucks. He had three, one only showing 23,000 miles, he gave them to me because they were "cleaning house." I hauled some old farm steel to the iron works the other day and sitting on the sidelines waiting to get shredded were two identical Volkswagen window vans it apparently good condition. Just the bodies are worth about ten thousand to a genuine rebuilder but, who cares anymore.

[BobbyFord]

I don't have anything against Armenians, but they have bought up almost all of the wrecking yards in the San Fernando valley. Pacific Truck used to be owned by a friend of my father's. Bob used to have all of his parts removed and stored on shelves. He disassembled trucks and stored the parts on organized shelving. When the Armenians bought the business they scrapped all of the parts that Bob had spent 40+ years collecting and restocked the yard with modern-era auto parts. This happened at almost all of the local wrecking yards. Scrap prices were at a premium and the new owners weren't collector car guys. PDQ used to be a Ford only wrecking yard, not it is gone.

[Ranchero50]

Yep, the funny thing is the spaces that used to have bumps and dents now have '90's Explorers which are almost all off the road around here. One local yard went from 15 to 3 over the winter. I'm not sure about the others.

[Camper Special]

I called around to all the yards here in the greater Los Angeles area - Wilmington, Alameda corridor, etc. none of them had any bumpside parts. the guys answering the phones don't know anything about vehicles older than 25 years. they all seemed disorgnaized. I expected them to have some sort of inventory on their ipads, but nada

[marxtoys]

The local yard gets a bump every so often.... and complains about how the only part that will sell is the steering box. And sure enough when the crusher shows up a year later the only part gone is the steering box. Had an F600 and a 750 sit around and the only parts that came off before they got mashed were the gauge clusters that I pulled.