chop-shop

chop-shop (plural chop-shops)

1. Alternative form of chop shop

chop-shop (third-person singular simple present chop-shops, present participle chop-shopping, simple past and past participle chop-shopped)

1. To cut apart a car in a chop shop, either to sell as parts or to alter its appearance.
   • 2007, Eric Jerome Dickey, Waking with Enemies:

     Look, the car will be clean. If you're not comfortable, you could chop-shop it.

   • 2009, Michael Eury, Michael Kronenberg, The Batcave Companion, page 71:

     Sleeker, faster "muscle cars" were the rage, and so when DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz updated Batman in 1964, the Batmobile—the tank-like sedan with a bat-head grille—was chop-shopped into a sportier model.

   • 2010, Mary Jane Jacob, Michelle Grabner, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, page 53:

     On the concrete floor were distributed groups of fenders, doors, sections of roof, hoods, and other more or less "prime cuts" of chop-shopped automobiles carefully sorted by finish and hue, ...

2. (by analogy) To cut something apart and restructure it.
   • 2004, New York - Volume 37, page 16:

     He's considered something of a scold on Wall Street, a hectoring moralist who rails against the business practices of his rivals— an old-economy guy known more for building businesses than chop-shopping them for parts, a brilliant crank with a nearly unbroken string of successful investments.

   • 2007, Raja Alem -, My Thousand and One Nights: A Novel of Mecca, page xii:

     Plus I moved the paragraph from its original place in the manuscript to another place hundreds of pages away. In short, I chop-shopped it.