as some of you may have read i broke the rear mounting bracket on my generator this weekend. so it was off to the (realitively close) bone yard to retrieve a "new" bracket. the place is called hidden valley in maricopa, arizona and was a great resource for dry desert preserved parts from old chevrolet pickups and trucks.
as i pull up to the front of the yard i notice that there is not a single car or truck left in a yard that was home to close to 1500 cars and trucks a portion of which was good vintage material. turns out that the owner of the land who apparently also "owned" the cars on the lot but did not operate the lot, decided he could make more money selling the land to home developers than scraping parts.
the people operating the yard have set up a new yard down the road but could only bring a few parts with them. they informed me that all the cars and trucks from the old yard were crushed! now there were definitely some real junk pieces in the yard that should have been in the crusher long ago, but close to 20 old bolts including trucks, burbs and a very complete and very straight coe that are all now flat as a pancake.
very depressing. just too bad they could not have seen the value in what was still in the yard. i did manage to find the replacement part for my generator, but it was still very sad to see that resource gone.
