Salvage yards are the perfect place to find bargain parts, but there are other reasons to make routine visits to the local wrecking yard. Photos from wikipedia.org

If you are a true do-it-yourselfer, you probably spend much of your weekend digging through junkyards looking for that one piece of gold. That bargain that keeps you digging through the trash and twisted metal for months. At Chevy Hardcore, we are like that. The weekly trip to a local salvage yard is the best part of our weekend. Recently we found a junkyard tip that we had been missing all these years.

We ran across an older do-it-yourselfer that was taking apart a windshield wiper motor. Watching with great interest, the old timer took the motor apart, examined it, then started to put it back together. When he noticed that we were watching, he offered an explanation. “I have one like this but I didn’t want to ruin it when I took it apart. I always come here and try taking apart the stuff here before I attempt to fix my own parts,” he said. “If I take it apart and can’t get it back together here… who cares?”

It dawned on us at that point that we had been missing one of the greatest learning opportunities at junkyards. Taking stuff apart for experience. Think about it! How many parts have you broken as you have struggled to figure out how to take something apart? Remember the first door panel you removed? Did you break a window or the door handle? Maybe the lock mechanism came out in pieces? Wouldn’t it have been nice to have a practice run before you risk breaking your own stuff?

If taking parts off, disassembling them and not putting them back together correctly bothers you, consider this: the cars eventually get crushed to make way for more wrecked cars.

There are some salvage yards that will work with you on specific things like ring and pinion gears. If you want to try different ratios, you pull one set and give it a shot on your vehicle. If it doesn’t get the speed or torque that you want, bring it back and swap for another set. Of course you will be doing all of the labor, but in the end it might be worth it.

Next time you are at the salvage yard and you see a part that you have always wondered what it would be like to take it apart… DO IT.