Safety Good, Sanity Bad: Build Your Own Acceleration Warning Horn For $7!

Ford's is pretty effective, but how do you punish drivers for such dangerous acts as turning or accelerating? Bring seven bucks to the junkyard, my friends, and you'll find everything you need to build the Ozzy Osbourne Inertial Penalty Horn! This all started out when the at the Toledo race...

Dec 22, 2024

Advances In LeMons Penalty Cruelty: The Lexus LS400 Starter Removal Challenge!

Some of the most evil best 24 Hours Of LeMons punishments are those suggested by the teams themselves, and the Lexus Starter Challenge will no doubt live on in LeMons Texas legend. It all started when Team Highbrow Ghetto blew up the engine in their Caddy-grille-equipped Lexus LS400 late in...

Dec 22, 2024

Eyesore Racing's Ghettocharged Miata Fears No Turbocharged Peugeot Surrender Monkeys!

You know how these know-it-alls keep telling you that you have to be all, like, scientific and stuff when you want to add turbocharging to your engine? Forget that noise! When you're on a -mandated $500 budget and you've already spent $17.99 on the most hideous wrecked Miata imaginable, you...

Dec 22, 2024

Junked BMW E30s Provide Cheap, Easy Way To Trunk-Mount Your Battery

Moving your race car's battery to the rear of the car helps reduce the nose-heaviness problem inherent in most front-engined designs, but heavy-gauge battery cable is mighty expensive stuff when you're on a tight budget. When you're trying to squeeze under that $500 limit at the 24 Hours Of LeMons,...

Dec 22, 2024

Power Steering Belt Won't Stay On? Junkyard Serpentine Idler Pulley To The Rescue!

Since many of our cheapskate thrifty readers appreciated the tip about from junked BMW 325s, here's another nearly-free trick we discovered while preparing the V8 Volvo for . The had just one mechanical failure : the power steering belt came off the pulleys a couple times during the course of...

Dec 22, 2024

Aluminum Magician Makes Beautiful Toyota 2000GT Body

If you were going to hire a fabrication god to scratchbuild the car of your choice, what would it be? It's hard to go wrong with the , and that's what's happened here. The 2000GT is one of those cars you might not be able to buy, period; the few...

Dec 22, 2024

Italian Stallions' Fiat X1/9 Totally Reliable At LeMons, Other Than The Blown Head Gasket

Most racers see a blown head gasket as a huge setback, but not Tony, Tony, Tony, and Tony from the Italian Stallions Fiat X1/9 race team. They know it's time to fix it again! I before the race, though I was hoping they'd do better. Come on, I thought, it's...

Dec 22, 2024

Jalopnik "Hacks" Chrysler Concept UConnect In-Car Internet Service, Lives To Tell About It

Chrysler debuted their HAL 9000-like next-gen system in the and it proved to be an impressive piece of tech. It's so impressive that we, uh-hem, had to "hack" it. Brad Gieske, a designer at Chrysler, provided us with an in-depth look at the system from the user provided "smart phone"...

Dec 22, 2024

Samsung Transparent OLED Display Pitched As Automotive HUD

displays are normally shown over a black background to provide contrast. This see-though Samsung display, however, does not, providing a creepy, holographic quality perfect for a high content heads-up display. The booth professionals from Samsung make a hard pitch for applications in the automotive sector, with uses in heads up...

Dec 22, 2024

Are They Breakin' Parts In Texas This Weekend? Does An SHO Taurus Eat Transmissions?

Clutches will fry. Engines will overheat randomly. Homemade wiring harnesses will melt down. Honda racers are going to blow head gaskets and throw rods. BMW E30s will develop undiagnosable electrical problems. That's how the works; you start with 90 cars and maybe 55 will be running at the end of...

Dec 22, 2024

Which Would You Take: Lightweight Porsche 928 or LS1-Powered Mazda Miata?

I visited the secret laboratories of last week, to see what manner of madness they had cooking. While there, I encountered a couple of track-car projects that presented quite a dilemma. I was really hoping to take a look at their , but I was only able to shoot the...

Dec 22, 2024

Junkyard Hero Mike Bumbeck Lowers The Internet's Property Values, We Rejoice: Clunkbucket!

Ex-Jalop Señor Bumbeck is twice the wrench and three times the photographer that I'll ever be, so weekend Jalopnik readers oughta be overjoyed to hear that he's back in action with a new site: Yes, the man who showed up to my recent birthday party bearing the incredibly thoughtful gift...

Dec 22, 2024

Get Your Bearings, Courtesy Of Chrysler's Spherically-Craniumed Tech!

When I was writing shop manuals for transit buses, the only were nixed by my boss. That didn't happen with these Chrysler Master Technician pamphlets of the 1940s and 1950s! The folks at the site have obtained and scanned from the 1947-1978 period, and the early ones are heavily illustrated...

Dec 22, 2024

Heroic Tunachuckers Perform Amazon Engine Swap In 90 Minutes, Back In Race!

Last year's LeMons South Index Of Effluency Winners, the , had to come off the track just before the People's Curse began. Things looked bad: seized engine! We all know the Volvo B18 is extremely tough, but an original 300,000 mile engine that last saw a wrench in Göteborg, 1966,...

Dec 22, 2024

Fun With Fireballs, Handmade Hooch, And Art Cars In West Oakland Tonight!

Want to check out the , a fire-belching -based giant snail that seats six and packs an 800-watt sound system inside its shell? With snake charming to boot? Head to Oakland tonight! is having a May Day celebration at their , starting at 8:00 PM tonight. It's unclear how many...

Dec 22, 2024