Talking to two people at once, Marty Karsinski stands behind the counter of Route 12 Auto Parts and Salvage with a phone and a cigarette in his left hand.
“For a Bronco? We don’t have that,” he tells the person on the phone who is looking for an ignition system. “That’s gonna be tough for you to find. Good luck.” Click.
Another patron who called ahead is luckier. A window for a 1996 Chevrolet Astro van sits on a dusty chair in front of the junkyard counter.
“There it is. It’s been waiting for you,” Karsinski tells the man.
Karsinski works for his brother, Eric, at the auto salvage yard just a few miles south of the Wisconsin border near Richmond. It is something of a traditional junkyard, only a little neater than you might think.
Any place there aren’t rows of cannibalized parts, there are piles. Struts lean against a wall with the disc brakes attached, like little unicycles. A few dozen front ends sit on metal racks three high, headlights staring out. A large mound of engine fans yet to be sorted linger in the back room.
The six-acre, triangular-shaped yard runs along Illinois Highway 12, with a large billboard in the middle. On the billboard is a huge pair of neon blue eyes, a modern version of the Dr. T.J. Eckleburg billboard that watched over the characters in “The Great Gatsby.”
A Saturday spent at Route 12 Auto Parts and Salvage is a combination of the dreary workaday and a dream come true for a boy or girl.
“Sometimes when I am out smashing cars (during the week), the school bus drives by and all the little kids about break their neck, they turn their heads so hard to watch what I’m doing,” said Jeff Ragsdale, a long-time worker at the junkyard.
The yard is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 8 to 2 on Saturday. The majority of the business on Saturday is wholesale, so the crew of three to five workers spends much of the day catching up. That means taking apart new stock, dealing with the dribble of customers off the street and cleaning grease spots or unwanted springs and hoses and fasteners. Lots of cleaning.
Much of the early morning belongs to customers off the street waiting to get a part for a Saturday in their garage. Karsinski takes the phone orders and Ragsdale checks to see whether he has the parts among the foreign cars along the back of the yard and the domestics filling in the front of the triangle.
Walking back to find a power window regulator, Ragsdale passes rows of Toyotas and Hondas and a mixed bag of foreign castoffs. A 1984 Maserati with no markings remaining sits oddly paired with a 1987 Yugo with racing stripe.
A baby seat is flung halfway out of a broken window in a horribly crumpled 1990 Mazda MX-6.
“It’s probably not from the accident,” Ragsdale said. “People tend just to throw those in the car when they get rid of them. I don’t think the garbage man will take them.”
Indeed, people seem to leave a fair chunk of their belongings behind when they ditch their cars.
For instance, a 1996 Pontiac Bonneville had an odd inventory in its trunk: a broom, Trak Auto antifreeze, rubber gloves, a can of Old Style, a face plate for an electrical outlet, a pack of Marlboro Lights with one cigarette remaining, a garish painters cap and one package of Bigen hair coloring (“Darkens gray hairs in five minutes”).
With seven years of service, Ragsdale jokes “I come with the place” and has been here long enough that he can do an amazing amount of “interchange” in his head. He can tell you off the top of his head which parts can be used from vehicle to vehicle in the homogenized 1990s lines of cars.
Ragsdale walks past a 1993 Chevy S-10 with a 4.3-liter motor in it. What will that go in?
“Your Blazers, your Jimmys, even your Astro vans. That’s about it,” Ragsdale said.
How about that 1990 hulk of a Chevy Camaro? Could one use the body off that on a Pontiac Trans Am?
“From about ’82 to ’94 a lot of that stuff fits. You can cut the quarter panels off a Camaro and put it on a Trans Am if you wanted to. Bolt it right on,” he said.
He also has an opinion about the durability of cars. For instance, he says frames are getting lighter and lighter, and in his opinion cheaper and cheaper. He shows two piles of GM subframes only two years apart, and the latter weighs about two-thirds of the former.
Much of the rest of the day is spent talking about what looked like a beautiful 2000 Chevy Monte Carlo SS. A vandal set it on fire, and the insurance company has sold it as junk. But some of the front end is good, so the crew starts carving it up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
They put it on a front loader, lift it in the air. Ragsdale and a big Polish immigrant named Bob Zielinski have at it with pneumatic wrenches. Off come the wheels and struts, then the subframe. The engine is taken from the subframe as are various goodies: air conditioning, anti-lock brakes, alternator, etc.
Everything must be carefully tagged and logged with make, model, year, VIN number and Hollander number, referring to a proprietary inventory system.
“If you don’t tag a part right away, you might as well throw it out,” Karsinski said.
A car can last eight to 10 months on the lot. At that point, the crew goes over it another time to take off more of the wanted parts, and then it is crushed until the scrap company comes to pick it up.
A moderately sized yard, in comparison to some that can be 25 acres, Route 12 Auto Salvage tries to keep about 500 cars at a time, nothing more than 10 years old generally.
“That’s what people generally want. Anything older and it doesn’t move very fast. And moving parts is the name of the game,” Karsinski says.
And Karsinski said later that size isn’t as important as volume. “There are some operations that might do 700 cars a year that are two to three acres.”
Shortly after 1 p.m. Eric Karsinski shows up to handle some of the paperwork and see how the day has gone. Taking his place behind the counter, Eric Karsinski says the business has changed greatly in the last decade, largely because of increased documentation requirements from police and environmental agencies.
“There’s a lot more paperwork in the business. That’s what you spend most of your time doing these days,” he said.
According to Brad Slater of the Automotive Recyclers Association, Karsinski is not alone in that feeling. Slater said increased regulation is a major part of the workload for auto salvage operators across the country, broadly estimated to number 6,000 to 8,000.
A particular concern is properly draining the fluids, from anti-freeze to engine oil, in a car.
“Today’s vehicles have lots of environmental concerns, but the professional auto salvage knows how to do these,” Slater said.
In a last jaunt trip around, the graveyard image is hard to avoid. Almost every car has a sad-looking deflated air bag coming out of the steering wheel, and several seem down to their last few useable parts. But it is hard to get Karsinski or the other men who spend their days in the yard more than a little romantic about it.
“It is kind of depressing to see all these cars this way, but you can sort of think of it as they are getting another life, in that they are being recycled into other cars,” Marty Karsinski said, shrugging. “I guess.”
At 1:45 p.m., just before closing, Jason Briesch, 25, of Crystal Lake brings in a 1987 Oldsmobile Delta 88 to sell for junk. He gets $100 for a car that looks immaculate except for a dent that pushes both driver-side doors in about 10 inches, the result of one of the two times it was stolen.
“You know it was a pretty good car, except people kept stealing it,” Briesch said.
