Art & Inspiration It’s the melamine, the smell of the dust, the one good guy left back there...

I thought I'd add something here as well, I'd replied earlier, but the thing is, pretty much in the 70's you could get a part for your car/truck at any decent AP store and it would be in stock. Heck, only 2 different SBC water pumps used in 30 years...now, stores can't stock enough parts, so they have to be sent in. My feeling is if I have to wait for them to have it sent to them, why not save dollars and have it sent to me?

Even GM doesn't stock parts for vehicles more than 4-5 years old. In the late 90's I had to go elsewhere for some parts for my '89 Chevy. Still pre-internet days for me, but it was phone calls and driving to get what I needed. Sorta took the "luster" out of pulling up a stool at NAPA just to be told I'd have to come back tomorrow at 9:00am to get the part.

 

I miss my old parts store, I was loyal and was treated right for years. It went down about the time the internet kicked in. Now it’s an Advance Auto. I’ve adapted to the modern ways pretty well.

At least I have part of the counter top that I bought hundreds of parts across, this is part of the actual counter from the old store.

 

There was a local place in South Texas I went to all the time, they knew me on sight. Now in north Texas there is an O’reilly and the manager drives a ‘57 Poncho. He’s really good.

I went in one day and he wasn’t there. Dude that WAS there asked what I needed, I told him a throttle return spring.

Guy said that sounded made up to him. Insisted I was messing with him. He went to look it up while I grabbed one off the shelf. What a dumbass.


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That has a lot to do with it. There are just so many different makes, models, sub models, engines, etc., it would take a warehouse bigger than a football filled just to keep common parts like what everybody carried in the old days. So much stuff is specialized to one engine or one bodystyle it's impossible to carry the same part for two different cars even though they may have that same engine. I blame the carmakers for most of this, they found out that by changing parts up and having different ones on different models they could sell more parts.

I'm just happy I can still find parts for engines and cars that have been out of production for several years, even if some of it is offshore crap. Just think what it will be like in a few more years when you need a control module for some car that's been out of production for 20 years, and nothing else will work. The parts guys will roll their eyes and tell you you're own your own....

 

I will research parts for hours .. Find the #s I need and send the wife to the parts place...Then they ask her whats it for? Her answer is I don't know! My husband says this is the part he wants and what I know about cars make's me a really good hairdresser

 

Hi guys, getting a bit of a chuckle out of a lot of these posts. I started in the spare parts trade here in Australia in 1981 going on 19y.o. at Repco (Replacement Parts Co, or if you believe a lot of people it was/is an acronym for "Rip every poor c**t off"). At the time Repco were the kings of the spare parts world here, sadly today they are barely a shadow of what they once were. We had great stocks (range and quantity), and a machine shop out the back with full engine reconditioning services, tailshaft balancing etc, etc). I was lucky enough to learn the trade from some older guys (early 40's to mid 60's y.o.), not just parts, but inventory control, customer service, how to continue behaving like an adult when some drunken moron was giving you crap from the other side of the counter etc. Through a handful of other spare parts related jobs over the last 38 years I've worked for and with some great guys, each of them teaching me something along the way. Sadly the business is not what it was, in so many ways, not the least being the complexity of cars these days and the vast differences between makes and models. When I started if someone wanted a headlight you only needed to know if it was 7" or 5 3/4" round! I think it's like a lot of trades these days, the practices are not being passed onto the younger generations. Not sure about now but back then after a period of time (4 years if I recall) you were classed as a "spare parts interpreter", i.e. if someone asked for "the round bit on the side of the engine with the wires" you could interpret that they needed a distributor cap for example.