FLAP – How do they do it?

WARNING!  Ungodly amounts of photos to follow…

I was told that I just had to visit this place and I am grateful that I was told about it.  Certainly I have seen my share of wrecking yards, automotive recycling yards, car junk yards, whatever you choose to call them, but I have never seen a working yard quite like this one.

Most of these companies are driven by the assumption that if a car sits around for more than a couple of weeks it has been stripped of its monetarily useful parts, and is more valuable if it is crushed and sold for its metallic constituents than it is to let it sit in the yard taking up valuable space.

I suppose that the folks who keep the books have done all the necessary calculations to confirm this, but it often means that some classic or near classic is shipped to a steel mill and ends up becoming a clothes dryer or maybe a truck lid.

Such is life.

But not here.  Not at French Lakes Auto Parts (FLAP).  Here you can find cars sitting around that have not seen a road for multiple decades.  And they don’t have trees growing through their trunks either.  It is a restorer’s paradise.

Just look at all these cars:

Slowly the more modern cars appeared.

Oh, that must have hurt! And that reminded me, how so few of the much older cars had been involved on a collision.  Was it really representative of the crash rate?  I don’t think so, but it was interesting none the less.

This was quite the unexpected experience for me.  One last snap as I left through the office: