After several straight days of museum and historical site visits, the information was becoming a bit much to digest day after day - like drinking from a fire hose - so a day of some sort of mindless diversion was welcome.
Driving through San Antonio, one quickly realizes it is a hotbed of automotive recycling activity, with the arid Texas conditions providing perfect conditions for the long-term preservation of junk vehicles. There are something like 100+ automotive scrapyards in the San Antonio area, and several clumped together in a several square mile area south of town. Always seeking something interesting, I set about determining which yard I'd like to visit (all of them wasn't an option). A quick google search for "classic car junkyard" revealed the ultimate find! John's Salvage outside Seguin, TX specializes in classic cars ranging from 30’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s...a perfect place to explore and maybe even look for more horns!
This junkyard is unlike anything I've ever seen before. It is extremely rare to locate a scrap yard devoted almost entirely to vintage cars. They have over 5000 cars in various states of disarray, stacked on top of each other, trees (really entire forests) growing up out of and between the cars, and decrepit buses and trucks packed full of vintage parts. Only in the dry Texas heat would vehicles from the 1930's remain in preserved condition to pull parts from them.
First set of horns pulled from the firewall of this '39 Buick.
Vogue RV, a company which later evolved into producing very high-end tour-bus type RV's.
Need hubcaps? Go look through the supply in the "hub cap bus." An exhaust manifold? There's a "manifold bus" too.
Circe 1950 Chevy Coupe, from which I promptly pulled the 6V Delco 643 and 644 horns.
"Deluxe," describing the Chevy above.
Datsun Z cars, stacked on top of 60's era Mercedes Benz sedans. I don't know how they decided to stack all the Z's on Benz sedans, but that was the setup for the entire collection of these cars. I actually needed a rear bumper for the Supercar, and they had a perfect candidate in stock on the middle car stacked below, but I had no economical way to get it to SC.
Horn in-situ on the (?) below. Still not sure what kind of car that was!
A whole section was devoted to the NOT unsafe at any speed Chevy Corvair, many stacked on top of each other.
Olds Toronado diesel...I remember when GW3 had one of these in the early eighties, and he would have agreed it belonged in the junkyard THEN...
Field full of engines and transmissions...
In all, I pulled approximately 25 6-volt horns from various vehicles throughout the yard, knowing most would likely not work. The employees were so friendly and even lent me a good battery and a $170 Snap-On electrical tool to test the functionality of my horns. In the end, I narrowed my collection down to 6 horns, some of which may make it onto our van in place of those that perhaps aren't quite loud enough.
If you are any sort of automotive enthusiast and ever in the San Antonio, TX area, a trip to John's Salvage in Seguin will be unlike anything you've ever experienced. I spent 6 hours there looking through the relics, and I barely nicked the surface. Bring a trailer. There are a few whole cars you will want to buy.
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