Junkyard Find: 1970 Alvis Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked)
Published: September 30th, 2019
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From 1962 through 2016, one of the continent’s most amazing junkyards operated in the Sun Valley neighborhood of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles: Aadlen Brothers Auto Wrecking, also known as U-Pick Parts. Plenty of scenes for movies, TV shows, and music videos were filmed there, in addition to providing some great Junkyard Finds (not to mention parts for my personal cars, when I lived in Southern California in the late 1980s).I snapped a couple of shots of an armored vehicle of some kind there, back in 2014, and now it’s time to share them.
As well as I can tell, this is a much-picked-over example of an Alvis Combat Vehicle Reconnaissance (Tracked), built in the UK in 1970 and sold to military organizations all over the world. I can’t tell if we’re looking at a Sultan, Scimitar, or Sturgeon here, but — because of all the other funky movie vehicles and props scattered around the U-Pick yard — chances are that it had a role in a film or video production at some point.
The CVR(T) was in the IMPORTS section, naturally, near some pretty impressive vintage inventory. Yes, the Nash Metropolitan is an import, assembled by Austin in England.
Here’s the truck from Universal Soldier, providing that extra bit of junkyard ambience. I would visit this yard whenever I hit Southern California on junkyard-photography expeditions, and now it’s gone forever. You’d think it would have made the UNESCO World Heritage Site list, at the very least.If you like these Junkyard Finds, you’ll find 1,700+ more of them at the Junkyard Home of the Murilee Martin Lifestyle Brand™.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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Scrap is at an all time low when considered for inflation. With Environmental regulations for fluid containment and rain water run off requirements it's a tough business to turn a profit. I do not blame LKQ for wrenching off the good parts before hand, you got to do what you need to do to survive. China ain't buyin' and it's worse if you are not close to a major steel producing region. Here in Colorado we have Evraz making Seamless Rail in Pueblo. How is that high speed rail project going in California? No takers, so scrap is worthless.
I miss this old yard and am well pleased to see some one took pictures ans is sharing them . They also had a home made 'Stoll' Coupe (VW derivative) that was pretty crude and as mentioned, lots and lots of TV / movie cars ~ before they closed up I got parts fro my 1908 Cadillac S & S Victoria hearse there, two of them used in a shoot were summarily dumped after the job . For a long time they had Motocycles in there too . Too bad you didn't take photos of the 1958 Cadillac four door sedan with the roof cut off and filled with mannekins up on a pole ~ someone drove by and unloaded a few deer slugs into it late one night.... Memories, lots and lots of them there . Adlen Bros. dated back to the 1960's and rented out space to independent import self service yard operators before turning it into "Dos Pendejos" P-A-P . -Nate