Cross-country junkyard recommendations.

[Mogordo]

Hi all, I'm planning on heading on a road trip pretty soon from Pennsylvania to SW New Mexico and am wanting to know if anyone knows of smaller junkyards with older cars that might be hard to find through the internet. While I am looking for Tercel parts I am also looking for parts that will fit my '83 Nissan Sentra wagon. I think parts from the years '82-'86 will potentially fit. There seem to be perhaps fewer of those left than there are 2nd generation Tercels. I expect to have better luck west of IL and will be roughly headed I-44 to I-40. Past Springfield MO, Tulsa OK, Oklahoma City, Amarillo TX, then probably down through Clovis, Roswell, Alamogordo, Las Cruces NM. Possibly traveling to Phoenix after. I searched on the internet but am thinking of a few smaller yards in WA, ID, and AZ that I have been to and that would not necessarily come up in a general internet search and am thinking there are probably a lot of others like that.
Does anyone know of any roughly along that route?
Thanks.

[Mattel]

I'm Australian so excuse me if I got it al wrong. could you go through Colorado? they have an endless supply of wrecking yards there. If you follow Murilee Martin on TTAC and Autoblog he finds a lot of Tercels there... Just looked on google maps and its a bit out the way.

Try the Facebook group as well. there are heaps of member on there who could meet you on the way? good luck!

[dlb]

While I am looking for Tercel parts I am also looking for parts that will fit my '83 Nissan Sentra wagon.

Is this a 4wd Sentra wagon? The guy I bought a Tercel from last year also has a 4wd Sentra wagon that he wanted to sell me. I was tempted because they're cool too but I declined. Not enough time for another car. I think it needed the transmission swapped, and he had a replacement to go with the car. I'm in Canada so I doubt this is of any use to you but you never know.

[Mogordo]

It's just 2wd. I only recently realized there are 4wd Sentras. And I coveted one then (: But I wasn't sure if they came carbureted, the one I saw listed was an '89 and that year cars were often fuel injected. Since I'm on a carburetor kick I figured I would assume they were fuel injected and then I wouldn't want one as much. Hehe... (:
I did find an '86, sedan I think though, listed in a u-pull in Phoenix.
Thanks for the reply!

[Mattel]

Got to say I prefer fuel injection hands down. A lot less work.

[dlb]

Got to say I prefer fuel injection hands down. A lot less work.

I like Toyota's early 90's FI but I also love carb's because of what crazy mechanical engineering they are. Like, when I rebuild a tercel carb, I find myself wondering just how in the hell people figured out ways to do this and that, using things like tiny metal balls. It's really quite incredible, so that really endears carbs to me and makes me lean towards them a bit.

However, once I have time to finish work on the latest tercel and make it our DD and my wife starts complaining about it doing quirky carb things, I might feel slightly less endeared so we'll see.

[Mogordo]

I really just started having even a base knowledge of carbureted systems. And really all my fuel injected cars had nothing going on for me to even pay much attention to the system. Changed a few fuel filters and that's about it. I guess I mostly like that carbureted systems seem more accessible or something. And I'm not saying that is technically true since I don't know enough about the workings of both to compare. Or that they encourage you to be more present or aware or something. Or that they are more to the point or something (again, don't know actually (: )
Are you familiar with the mechanical fuel injection systems? I don't know much about them but I had an '85 VW Golf that had it and my one cousin liked the idea of that system. It was interesting what happened when it started to fail. Took me a bit to figure out how to keep it running when it had an "attack". It would start to feel like it was going to die and if at idle sometimes revving the engine a lot would keep it going until the "attack" passed. But in traffic I'd guess some people thought I was acting obnoxious...When accelerating the symptoms would be the most extreme "bucking" I ever felt in car and the way out of that was to excelerate very quickly to get it past some point at which it would smooth out but if you took too long stepping on it it would die and you would have to sit a while before it would run again. You would eventually get where you were going...