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That "junk" is gold
Insider advice from an auto wrecker
By: Mick Lowe, Senior Correspondent
Nothing puts a smile on Paul St. Amand's face like a good ice storm, the kind that turns the 401 into a reasonable facsimile of Hockey Night in Canada. He hopes you don't get hurt, but the sound of breaking glass and crumpling metal is music to Paul's ears.
Paul St. Amand is the proprietor of Champion Auto Recyclers just north of Sudbury. With 18 full-time employees, 25 acres of land, and well over $1 million in inventory, Champion is one of the largest auto wrecking yards in Ontario.
Cars, car parts, and car repairs have dominated St. Amand's waking hours for the last 38 years, so when Paul talks about ways the average car owner can save money on repair bills, as Straight Goods invited him to do last week, people listen.
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Sophisticated car design is driving the backyard grease monkey into extinction |
First, the good news. "Cars are better now," Paul avers simply. He credits the influence of Japanese automakers for forcing North American manufacturers to build a better automobile.
So much better, in fact, that if you change the oil frequently and have your car rust-proofed regularly, you can now expect old Betsy to last for 500,000 - count 'em, half a million - kilometres.
But there is a downside. Late model cars have become so technologically sophisticated that St. Amand offers pointed advice should yours break down: "Call a tow truck. If my own car breaks down, I don't even lift the hood."
The same innovations that are producing more durable and efficient vehicles - electronic fuel injection, computerized components, (a late model Cadillac boasts no fewer than nine on-board computers, Paul announces after checking his parts PC), and modular construction are also driving the backyard grease monkey into extinction.
"There's no such thing as mechanics any more, really," says St. Amand. "They're technicians. And the biggest tip I can give is, if you have a mechanical or electrical problem, get your vehicle diagnosed. People still try to tinker. Take the vehicle to the guy who has the computer.
"Before, every vehicle part was serviceable. Now, they're sealed units. You use a computer to diagnose the problem, and then change a whole module or component."
His second biggest tip? "Don't go off on a tangent buying the parts you think you'll need - you'll be off every time. That's number one." Let the expert do the diagnosis, and follow that lead.
Three different kinds of parts
It's after that point, however, that motorists begins to have real choices, and that's where Paul and his fellow auto recyclers come in. Three different kinds of parts are available, whether you're repairing a break-down or collision damage:
new parts ordered from the manufacturer of your car, for which you will pay full price;
aftermarket parts, which are new but were not made by the original manufacturer and which will cost you roughly 70 per cent of full price; or
recycled parts, which will cost you half, or less, the price of a brand new part.
Paul punches his computer keyboard for an example. "Take a 2000 Ford Windstar van with its tinted sliding door glass. The price for a brand new one from Ford is $900. I don't have one in stock here, but I can order you an aftermarket one for $125 retail - $100 wholesale."
The modern vehicle is a composite of thousands of components which may contain literally a million parts. Multiply that by hundreds of makes and models and years and you begin to understand why the computer has been such a huge boon to the auto parts recycling business.
The largest Ontario recyclers are tied together in an on-line computerized net that boasts $100 million in inventory, millions and millions of parts, "and it's cleaned up every night by modem." Once a part is located, it's ordered on-line, and then shipped around the province by courier, often arriving the next day.
NOT a junkyard
Paul winces visibly when a visitor refers to his operation as "a junkyard." It's an auto parts recycling business, he emphasizes, with a huge positive environmental impact.
By recycling and re-using every single piece of an automobile ("except the tires," Paul says sadly, "there's still no use for old tires,") St. Amand and his ilk are attenuating the amount of a vehicle that ends up in landfill or rusting away in the environment.
Cars are emptied of fluids like oil, gas, windshield washer and anti-freeze, (Paul re-sells the latter - cheap), before being stripped of major components, which are inventoried and warehoused. The body may sit in Champions' yard for years before it's finally sold for scrap.
There again every conceivably useful or valuable part of the vehicle is cannibalized and eventually re-sold, thus reducing the amount of mineral that will have to be mined to make a new car, not to mention the greenhouse gas emissions required to mill, smelt, and refine the raw material.
Prices vary, of course, and that, too provides a window into the state of our economy as well as our ecology. Scrap metal prices are "very low. We're in a recession, right now." A notable exception is platinum, a rare metal used in catalytic converters. Used converters which once sold for $10 to $15 apiece now fetch up to $85.
The non-mechanic shouldn't feel intimidated by the arcane world of used car parts, St. Amand concludes. "We're here to help, we're here to sell, and we have cost-saving in mind all the time."
Paul's Picks:
Parts replacements from the Big Three, ranked from most to least expensive:
Components that tend to break down most:
- The Ford Taurus transmission - "Garbage"
- The Dodge-Mishibushi transmission "They're better now, but they were quite poor."
- The Toyota Camry transmission.
Components that tend to break down least:
- Honda Civic engines "You don't sell them - they don't break."
- The Ford 3 litre engine.
- The GM 3.3 litre engine. "I can't sell 'em."
And the winner is. . .
Posted: February 12, 2001
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