Agnes: "Seymour! The house is on fire!"
Skinner: "No, mother. It's just the Northern Lights."
Chalmers: "Well, Seymour, you are an odd fellow, but I must say you steam a good ham."
Agnes: "Help! Help!"
There are easily well 200 vehicles in one salvage yard local to me with "$$ for clunker" or just "CC" written all over them in paint-pen. There are at least 100 more in the parking lot waiting for a place inside the yard. It is my understanding that the crankcases of all of these vehicles were drained of their oil and filled with sodium silicate.
For more information, google sodium silicate cash for clunker.
This renders the majority of the engine's internal components unusable, and has filled the salvage yard with vehicles that are very pretty, have great body panels, interiors, chassis, and so on.
However, these vehicles are entirely useless for things like:
It's sad that they didn't just "destroy the oil filter sealing land and threaded fastener boss" to render the vehicle undrivable. This could have been a real boon for anyone rebuilding a vehicle, and for the salvage yards. What a waste!
An automatic transmission's torque converter effectively disengages the engine from the transmission for your purposes. Next time you park your automatic-transmission car on a hill, instead of placing the gear selector in park and setting the parking brake, just leave the car in reverse or drive and see how long the car stays put.
The parking brake is often referred to as the emergency brake.
"Just think of a computer as hardware you can program." -- Nigel de la Tierre