Sajeev! You are very cool and you wrote a great article. I have been touring auto salvage yards for about 50 years and I love them. In the past 10 years, I have restored an '88 Mercedes W124 Coupe, an '87 BMW 325is and a 1992 Taurus LX. ( I already know that I'm the only guy who loves an old Taurus.) Salvage yards have been critical is finding parts for all of these car.
The Mercedes is surprisingly the most difficult car to source parts. The E Class coupes are rare, but they share some parts with the W124 sedans which are common. An intake tube to the air cleaner is an example of a discontinued part. On eBay, you can find them for $200, but in the salvage yard, maybe $15. I have spent many hours touring salvage yards in search of hard to find parts and I've been doing it for decades. My favorite cars are the ones with parts that can be found in salvage yards. There is no joy like finding that rare, hard to find part in a yard, especially if you have been searching it out for a while.
Salvage yards have changed a lot over the last 50 years. Much of it is for the better, I guess. Many of the salvage yards that I knew in the olden days were environmental nightmares. But they had so much more character than the corporate yards of today. The old yards were run by individuals or families and the yards reflected their characters and idiosyncrasies.
I remember one yard in Delaware that didn't have junk yard dogs. It had junk yard bulls. The yard had swaths of grass between the rows of cars and the owner told customers to get up on a roof if a bull came too close. I imagine that his liability insurance company finally put a stop to that. More recently, I went back looking for that yard and it was gone.
I remember yards that would stack the cars up two and three high. You would have to scale the stack to carefully remove the parts that you wanted. There is still a yard near Scranton that was one of the biggest on the east coast. We spent a day trying to find the back of the yard, but never did. It must have gone for miles. A fire reduced it's size in the 1990s. In that yard, we found cars that we had never seen in any other yard like XKEs and Corvettes. Some yards take better care of their cars than others. The yard in Scranton just dumped their cars in the dirt, while other yards put them up on rims.
Finally, I always try to show courtesy for my fellow pickers by doing the least damage and disrespect to the parts cars in order to leave more good stuff behind for the next guy. That's especially true with the higher end cars. I respectfully ask that you do the same. It's good Karma
