Junkyard Exploration

The consummate "shagging wagon" - this van is a typical example of a plain ordinary van that was handed over to a conversion company straight from the Ford assembly line and converted in a bordello on wheels. These were fairly common vans throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s and were quite luxurious when they were new, often sporting custom captain chairs for all passengers and custom carpeting throughout.  I particularly remember the van that my uncle and aunt had when they visited us one summer. I remember marvelling at the custom wood trim around the doors and playing with the swivelling reading lamps in the ceiling.  In fact, during this time Starcraft had a plant in my town that pumped a lot of these vans out in the world.  Needless to say, these vans were a fairly common side in my part of the world.  Unfortunately, custom vans don't really age very well and as they got older, they developed more of a shady reputation. The interiors...

Every once in a while you find some pretty strange stuff sitting in the junkyard and today's example certainly fits the bill. Our vehicle here started out as a pretty standard Ford E350 Econoline cutaway van that typically is sold to third party manufacturers to be turned into cube vans or RVs. In the case of this particular van, it seemed to have ended its life as a "Hot Shot" truck. Hot Shots are typically medium-duty or one-ton trucks that pull trailers and get time-sensitive loads to their destination on time. These trucks haul loads that most freight trucks don’t want to haul since they are too small to economically haul with a large truck . It doesn’t make sense for a large trailer to carry small loads that are better off hauled by a Hot Shot. This van is certainly configured to do this type of work since it has what looked to be a very nicely appointed sleeper attached to the back of the van's cab, and there was a 5th wheel hitch installed on the van...

Back in the early 1990s, I had a summer job with the federal government that required me to travel around fixing computers at various locations. One of the perks of the job was that I was given use of a vehicle, a brand spanking new 1990 Ford Taurus. This was the first generation of the Taurus and at the time it was pretty exotic looking compared to my own car that that time - a 1979 Mercury Zephyr. It had a very space-age appearance with it's rounded, almost bubble-like contours. As I drove the Taurus around that summer, I was quite impressed with how smooth and quiet the car was. Definitely made tooling around that summer a very comfortable affair. Over the years the Taurus slowly lost its iconic bubble shape and morphed into looking like all the other cars on the road. Eventually, in March 2019, Ford built the last Taurus. This particular car was the fourth generation of the Taurus and had a 3-liter V6 engine. The interesting thing about this car was that it came ...

I'll be honest, I always liked the look of the Crown Vic. In particular, the "civilian" versions of it that basically drove like you were riding couch. My very first car was a 1979 version of the Crown Victoria which I had when I left home to work at my first job in a city that was about a 5-hour drive away. With no air conditioning and only an AM radio, it certainly didn't fit the image most people would have for these cars. It did have a 302 V8 engine in it though, and for a 19-year old kid, that was the only option I needed, though I did collect the occasional speeding ticket. I drove that car for a couple of years, doing that 5-hour drive to visit "family" (OK - the girl I was dating at the time) until one night in February the oil pump gave up the ghost and left me stranded literally hours from anywhere. Even though it let me down in the end, I always had a soft spot for these cars so I was quite excited to find this one since the major...