I had a thought while I was lying underneath my Montero, test-fitting a skid plate I’d pulled off a wreck in a boneyard: My truck has parts recycled from no less than eleven dismantled Monteros. That seems like a lot. Do I have a junkyard addiction or is this normal?

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to confess that my mechanical skills are mediocre and most of the harvesting I’ve done has been for pretty painlessly extractable parts. Trim bits, small pieces, stuff like that. I haven’t had to do anything as involved as yanking an engine or transmission from a parts car and moving it over.

Still, between things pulled from junkyards and things bought or gifted from other Montero owners, my truck makes use of eleven “donor cars.” Unless I’m forgetting something and there are even more. Oh, there definitely are more, because the truck was already over 20 years old when I got it and the previous owner was very thrifty and mechanically inclined. I bet he totally was a junker like me.

I’d like to think that some part of those old Montero souls live on in mine. Or if there’s an off-roader afterlife, that they’re smiling down on my facelifted second-gen as it roams the southwestern U.S. and Baja peninsula.

But I wanted to pose this as a Countersteer question, both out of genuine curiosity about the Jalopnik commenter community and to try and gauge if I am an aggressively thrifty freak. (Then again, I’m not changing my ways regardless.)

So who else is out there harvesting boneyards?