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Junkyard Gem: 1973 Mercury Montego MX Brougham Sawzall Convertible Edition

You know how it goes— the weather is warm, you want to do some top-down driving, and you lack a proper convertible... but you do have a hooptie Detroit car on one side of the garage and a big ol' Sawzall on the other. Put the two together and you have a Sawzall Convertible, which generally lasts for about one summer before it gets scrapped. Here's a fine example of such a car, photographed in a San Francisco Bay Area self-service junkyard. Most Sawzall Convertibles (yes, it should be called a roadster, but nobody does that) have raw, ragged metal edges, or maybe duct tape over the stumps of the amputated pillars, but someone went to the trouble to weld nice smooth metal covers over the hackage on this one. The windshield is gone. Instead, the windshield frame is ringed by tongue depressors held in place by gooey roofing tar. No, we don't know why. The Montego MX Brougham was a hot-selling personal luxury coupe in its day, selling for $3,041 in 1973. That's just under $17,000 in 2017 dollars. It must have been fun, cruising this thing on Bay Area streets with no roof and a rattle-can spray-bomb job. This one has the optional 400-cubic-inch V8 engine, rated at 171 horsepower. What would this car's original buyer have thought of its fate? This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. It's like a Marquis Brougham after you squish it in the car crusher! Featured Gallery Junked 1973 Mercury Montego MX Brougham Sawzall Convertible View 22 Photos Auto News Mercury Convertible Luxury Classics montego

Junkyard Gem: 1991 Mercury Capri XR2

Just a year after the Mazda MX-5 Miata first went on sale in the United States, Ford's Mercury Division began selling a similarly-priced two-seat convertible here. This was the 1991-1994 Mercury Capri, and I've found an example of the hot-rod turbocharged version in a northeastern Colorado car graveyard. The Capri name has an illustrious history within the Ford Empire. First used on a Lincoln in 1952, it went on to serve as the name for a hardtop version of the early-1960s Ford Consul in the UK, then as the designation for a low-end trim level on the 1966-1967 Mercury Comet. Starting in the 1969 model year in Europe (1970 in North America), Ford began selling the best-known Capri of all: a sporty coupe based on the Cortina, sold through Mercury dealers in the United States but never badged as a Mercury here. Sales of that Capri halted here after 1978 (they continued through 1986 in Europe), but the Mercury Division then moved the name over to its version of the 1979-1986 Ford Mustang. After that, Ford Australia took the Capri name for a new Mazda 323-based sports car beginning in 1989. Then Dearborn decided that an Americanized version of the Australian Capri would be a success on this side of the Pacific, and left-hand-drive Capris began showing up in American Mercury showrooms in late 1990. Today's Junkyard Gem is one of those first-model-year cars, and it's the very rare turbocharged XR2 version. While this car was intended to be a competitor for the Miata, it's really that car's Mazda cousin. Both cars got their power from 1.6-liter versions of Mazda's versatile B engine, though the Capri had the same front-wheel-drive setup as its 323/Protege (and Escort/Tracer) platform siblings. At the same time, Ford was selling Kia-built Mazdas with Festiva (and, a bit later, Aspire) badging, alongside Mazda MX-6s with Probe badges. Just to make things interesting, American Mazda dealers were selling Ford Explorers as Mazda Navajos, while Rangers with Mazda badges followed starting in 1994. The 1990s were Mazda-riffic times at Ford! This car wasn't the first Australian-designed, Mazda-based Ford product sold in the United States. That honor belongs to the 1988-1989 Mercury Tracer, which was based on the same Mazda 323 platform as the Capri and built in Mexico. Later on, the Tracer remained a member of the 323 chassis family but was a nearly identical twin to its Ford Escort sibling.

Junkyard Gem: 1993 Mercury Topaz GS Sedan

As long as the Mercury brand existed — a period spanning the 1939 through 2011 model years — nearly every Mercury sold in the United States was more or less a redecorated Ford model. The Torino had its Montego sibling, the Crown Victoria had the Grand Marquis, the Cougar was based on everything from the Mustang to the Mondeo, and so on. Naturally, when the folks in Dearborn developed the Ford Tempo compact, a Mercury version had to be created. This was the Topaz, with the official launch of both cars taking place on the deck of the aircraft carrier often referred to as the USS Decrepit. You can't make this stuff up! The Tempo/Topaz, also known as the Tempaz, has largely faded from our collective automotive memory by now, since it broke no significant new engineering or styling ground (this story would be much different if Ford had only put the amazing straight-eight "T-Drive" Tempaz powertrain into production) and didn't have any endearing features other than being a cheap domestic competitor to the Toyota Corolla and Nissan Sentra. Still, close to 3 million Tempazes left North American Ford and Lincoln-Mercury showrooms during the 1984-1994 period. As you'd expect, most of these disposable cars disappeared from both the street and the car graveyard long ago. It takes a very special Tempaz for me to break out my camera while I'm patrolling my local wrecking yards; generally, this means an ultra-rare all-wheel-drive version or at least a very early model in super-clean condition. Today's Junkyard Gem is neither, but I took one look at this spectacular Bordello Red crypto-velour-and-slippery-plastic interior and recognized that this was no ordinary junkyard Mercury. It appears that Mercury had dropped the idea of clever names for base-grade seat fabrics by the time of the Topaz, referring to this stuff as just "cloth" in all the brochures I could find. That's too bad, because Mercurys had cool names for upholstery (e.g., Chromatex) in the old days. The interior is in very good condition but the steering wheel shows substantial wear, so I think this is a high-mile Topaz that got meticulous care from its owner or owners. Ford used five-digit odometers on these cars until the end of production, however, so we'll never know if this reading indicates 65,404 miles or 365,404 miles. The body is very straight, but there's some nasty corrosion behind the right front wheelwell.