IML: Trouble in Paradise? Dwindling spare parts inventories.

[Kenyon Wills <imperialist1960@xxxxxxxxx>]

Kragen has stopped carrying parts for anything older than 1965 says the man at the counter.  My parts guy can still get them, but the generator is becoming iffy.

 

That year may be subject to change in the future?

 

 

 

I am ebaying parts and have tried to unload a stack of engines, alternators, and other items that are pretty much just cores.  It seems that the world has changed, and it frightens me.

 

Nobody is interested in cores.  Not the several hundred brake shoes that I have access to, not the piles of starters.  Nothing.  Not even for free unless I'm selling for the scrap metal value, at which point they go to India to be cast into manhole covers or something.

 

Too expensive to take them and work on them and all?  No profit in them anymore from a national parts-chain viewpoint?  I can't even find a phone number for Raybestos that goes anywhere near someone that knows the difference between a shoe and a pad, let alone cores of old ones.

 

This is the end of an era.  Just as the late 1970's were the end of the full-frame dynasties of american cars that had interchangeable parts and continuity of design and all-metal parts without microchips, may we now be at the beginning of the tail end of the supply of those parts?

 

Used to be that you got a core charge and had to return your "bad" unit to the store.  It seems that they have given up on that.  I don't remember having to deal with that sort of thing in the last few years, but can remember doing so in the mid 1990's.  Since I doubt that they are making new ones, the supply will run dry sooner or later, and we'll be reduced to what the Budd brake folk already know:  No available parts drives you to all sorts of desperate work-arounds.

 

Now I have a better idea of what the prewar folks are facing, and it's an unsettling thought that I'll be alive when all of the cars that we are discussing will have parts availability rivaling the early Imperials.  Things could get interesting.  I once again conclude that we are nearing the end of a golden era for this hobby. 

 

Get em while they're hot....

 

If anyone knows anyone in the industry that has a lead on where I can turn in a large volume of parts to be recyled on the west coast, I'd be mighty interested in talking to them.  Otherwise the scrap guy will be melting down some parts that people may miss 20 years from now.

Kenyon Wills