There are some questions in our According to You series that really hit home with readers of Hagerty Media, and parts hunting might be one of the best examples. Apparently, many of us have moved heaven and earth to acquire parts for our beloved vehicles. Other times, they have almost fallen into our laps.
We have a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get right to your answers!
DUB6: Not sure if this qualifies as either weird or wild, but it certainly struck me as highly unusual at the time. I had a ’66 Chevelle SS3 96 in the early ’70s (and my story about that car will go under a “weirdest or wildest car finds story” someday). Simultaneously leaving a four-way stop, some guy across from me forgot what turn signals were for and turned left in front of me, putting his right front corner squarely into the center of my bumper, grill, and SS hood, also causing a crinkle in my right fender between the headlight trim and wheel opening.
This was well before the days when repop body parts were available for popular cars online. (Heck, this was before there was even online!) The options in those days were the junkyard or, if you had either skill or money, maybe DIY or a body and paint shop. Since I had neither of the latter, I went on a search of all the scrapyards within a day’s drive of me. The car was less than 10 years old, and there were still quite a few on the road, although they were quite popular to be hacked up for small track stock car racing. But the boneyards had not gotten enriched by an influx of SS 396 Chevelles yet. So I drove around with a “v-shaped” indentation on the car for months, figuring I was never going to find the front-clip parts I needed.
At the same time, my wife was driving a Fiat 850 Sedan for her daily drives, and I had found a few local sources for parts and info for working on it. One fella—I’ll call him “Floyd” because, well, that was his name—was a particularly good contact. He actually had European friends and imported a lot of stuff that no local parts houses had. One day, I was at Floyd’s place picking up some gaskets or something, and he looked out at my crumpled Chevelle. “You want some parts to fix that front end?” he asked. I told him I’d looked all over and there were none to be found.
He led the way to an overgrown grassy area behind his shop, where exactly the parts I needed were lying. And I mean ONLY the parts I needed. He had a right fender, but not a left one. He had the right-side headlight trim but not the driver side. Valance, grill, hood latch, even the SS396 grill emblem. Most importantly and amazingly, he had an unmolested SS hood without the fake “scoop-louvers” – thankfully, mine were still good. Now for the most unusual part of the story: He GAVE me the stuff so he could clear out that area and mow down the tall grass and weeds out there, thus making his wife happy.
So, the car drove around for a few years with different colors on the front clip until I got a better paying job and could afford to paint it. But it was all straight for those years, because of the random sequence of my hunting for Fiat parts from a guy who I thought was just a foreign car enthusiast, who wanted to clean up his yard, and who just happened to have precisely the parts I needed for my A-Body GM muscle car, and who obviously also had a big, generous nature! (Or was he just scared of his wife?)
Js100: In the mid-’80s, long before the internet, there were swap meets, including the monthly one in Pomona, California. I was restoring a ’64 GTO and found a guy selling an entire ’65 GTO, sitting on a trailer, at the swap meet.
The only part that I wanted was the OEM dash tachometer, but he would only sell the whole car, with its Chevy drag-strip engine. A challenge, as I had driven a car from my home in Phoenix. After a few long-distance phone calls from a pay phone (remember the year), I arranged to buy and then resell the car to three friends who wanted various parts, arrange for free transport back to Phoenix (where everyone lived), and a place to part the car out, at another friend’s shop.
In short, a California drag car was parted out in Arizona, in under a week, to multiple buyers, and I got a rare dash tach for free!
TG: This isn’t tremendously weird or crazy, but I had a 944 that was close to end-of-life when it came to me. Fourteen years later, it chunked a tooth off the ring gear in the transaxle. Not wanting to spend a boatload of money on a car I didn’t have a lot of long-term confidence in, I found a transaxle on eBay for 275 bucks.
I got it installed, and it had a bad third-gear synchro. I lived with it for a while, either carefully rev-matching my shift or just skipping third and bogging into fourth a little, but I went to my local pick-a-part for something unrelated, and right inside the entrance is a 924 with an intact transaxle. 100 bucks and a weekend project later, I had a transaxle with five good gears.
(A year later, the timing belt snapped and crashed the valves … oh well.)
Jeremy: Around 1992 I was building my ’65 Grand Prix in high school. The 389 looked like it was pulled from the Titanic and was locked up, so the search began. A guy from the local Pontiac club suggested looking for old full-size Pontiacs that were sitting in driveways and obviously not driven. These were prevalent in downtown but not so much in the suburbs. Luckily, I found a light green ’74 Grandville with a bashed-in quarter panel.
I went up to the door and asked about the car. The original owner lived there—her dad had worked at a Pontiac dealer and was able to get her a deal on it. She said the rear end was broken and the frame was bent but she didn’t want to junk it. I told her my plan and she agreed to sell the entire car for the grand sum of $25! I couldn’t pay fast enough!
My dad and I got it running before we pulled the motor. We wanted to see if the transmission worked… It did, but the brakes did not. When we put it in gear, the car took off and took out the front porch of our house! We had to use a minivan to pull everything back in place.
The lady told her dad about it, and he asked if I was interested in his engine hoist and service manuals. He was a tech for years and had every Pontiac service manual from 1960 until about 1985. We bought all the good ones (late ’60s/early ’70s) for $10 each. I also dragged home the heaviest engine hoist I’ve ever seen. The entire thing was made of 1/4-inch steel and must weigh 350 pounds. It’s still in my dad’s shop, for some reason!
I bought a 455/ turbo 400 drivetrain for my build for less than the cost of my yearbook! That 455 was eventually pulled in favor of a built 455 but I still have it as a backup, 30 years later!
Aaron A: Searching for 1979 Volkswagen Scirocco parts is a treasure hunt in the first place. Some parts are not reproduced. My search for the front turn-signal light housings resulted in avoiding scams and broken lenses. Even the Hagerty Parts service came up empty. How was I going to find the missing Scirocco front turn signal lights?
Finally, a little bit of luck. I live in Washington and found an ad on Facebook for a set of turn signal housings in good shape. But there was one big problem … they were in Arizona. I called my buddy in Phoenix and asked how far away he was from the city in the ad. He said that he lived 20 minutes away from it. SCORE!
He offered to meet the guy and pay cash. It took a week to exchange info and get him in touch with the person posting the ad. I thought the deal was a bust, like the many others I was involved in. But they both came through! My buddy shipped the light housings to me and I transferred money back to him plus a little extra for helping me find the impossible parts!
Everything worked out, and now I can drive my Scirocco legally with turn signals. This was definitely the craziest thing that I have done to procure impossible-to-find parts!
Mike D: Had a Mercury Capri in the late 1970s. I was 17. Got into an accident and needed a rear wheel. Local junkyard had a set of four, but they were a different style than what was on my car. I bought two because I was too cheap to buy all four. I think they were $10 a piece. I drove around with mismatched wheels for the rest of the time I owned it.
Rob: This story probably sounds worse than it seemed at the time. I had one of my first cars as a teenager in the late ’90s, an old Datsun 120Y on its standard cheese-cutter 12-inch steel wheels. A couple of kilometres away, there was an old car, dumped off the side of the road on the edge of public bushland, with no houses as far as could be seen. The car had been there for as many years as I could remember, with flat tires, covered in branches and dirt—but it had what were probably fancy alloy wheels for its time. (I can’t even remember what the car was, but some ’70s thing).
After years of watching it waste away in the middle of nowhere, I decided no one would mind if it stayed there, minus the fancy wheels. Having no idea of stud patterns or offset, I set out with a friend, a couple of jacks, and a torch one night, to see if they’d fit my little Datto. The fact I did this in the middle of the night suggests that I probably knew what I was doing may get someone offside, but for all we knew, the car had been “abandoned” many years earlier.
You can see where this is going.
With three new wheels removed and put onto my car (they were twice as wide, but somehow the stud pattern lined up), we were working on the final wheel, when I heard a voice behind me in the darkness say, “I hope you’re taking the whole car too….”
I nearly jumped out of my skin, and swung around to find a bloke my parents’ age, who I knew as a local to stay well clear of, just looking at me. I stammered that I thought the car was dumped, and all I got back was, “I don’t think your grandfather [a well-known local of many decades] would be very impressed to know you were taking the wheels off my car…” So not only had he caught us inadvertently stealing his wheels, he knew who I was, and who my family was. I stood there, frozen, and he said nothing more, just walked off into the darkness, without so much as a torch.
Long story short, I put the last wheel on my car with shaking hands, and I never saw the bloke again. I just can’t remember now if I managed to avoid him, or if he just disappeared. The car remained there on the old steel wheels from my car for a great number of years to come, slowly rusting away until one day, it just wasn’t there anymore.
Sounds like straight-out thievery these days, but back then, there were a heap of cars just dumped in the area, amongst the trees, to just rot away. It’s just that this one still had an owner.
bseg: 25 years ago, I started refurbishing a ’68 Chevelle Malibu. I purchased two OEM, made-in-USA front fenders. The driver’s side fit perfectly. The passenger side was one inch short of meeting up with the door edge. I measured all four, (old and new), and the new fender was one inch shorter.
I called the supplier and he didn’t believe me, so I drove to his shop and showed him. He had no idea how this happened. He pulled another from his stock, and it was fine. I never figured out how a die-stamped piece of sheet metal could be that far off in size.
George P: Four of us were in my ’61 Econoline on a two-lane in Alabama when the driveshaft wound up under the left rear tire. I got my toolbox out and crawled underneath. The front universal joint wasn’t there anymore. So I hitched back to the last small town we had passed and found an open parts store, bought a U-joint, and hitched back to the van. My friend Bill had pulled the front yoke and discovered that it was broken.
While we were discussing this, a car pulled up. The owner of the parts store had gotten worried, closed up shop, and come over to check on things. Of course, he didn’t carry parts like that, and the local Ford dealer was closed for the weekend, so that guy drove me around to all three of the local junkyards hunting for that two-year-only part.
We struck out, so he drove me back to the van and wished us luck. I hammered the yoke back together as well as I could, and we limped on down to Panama City. Then limped back to Atlanta. A quick trip down to my favorite yard in Austell, and I found my replacement part.
Ospishus: I was dropping off a load of metal at a scrap yard when I looked over to a pile of transmission cases and discovered a complete Porsche 914 transmission, which I loaded onto the back of my pickup and then weighed out. I think at the time they were paying two cents a pound, which is what ended up being the cost to me!
Another time, at the local auto wreckers, I was looking for a five-speed transmission for a 1980 VW Rabbit and was told they only had four-speeds, so I reluctantly decided to go with the cheaper, more readily available four. When I got there, I was told to pick one out of the shed, and there was a nice clean five-speed with a tag on it reading four-speed. I got that one at much better price than normally charged for the five-speed!
Don A: Many years ago, I went to a very large and deep parts yard in North Carolina late in the afternoon. I asked the man if he had any ’68 Mustangs and ’66 Fairlanes in the yard. He pointed me to the first hill (one of three), said to go up and over, then go past many more rows.
I did just as he said, got excited because I was finding what I needed, and was collecting parts. It occurred to me that the sun was going down and I lost track of how to get back to the parts yard office. I became completely disoriented, which is unusual for me. I tried walking in different directions to look for landmarks, but there were none.
Finally, I came up with a solution: I cupped my ears, closed my eyes, rotated my head, and tried to listen for road noise on the four-lane road. I did zero in on the road noise and started walking in that direction. Success! I found the way back. Also, I got the parts I needed!
Bob C: As a stupid 16-year-old kid, I bought a very nice 1953 Studebaker Champion for $10 so I could hot rod it. A kid who would stop by the station I worked at offered me a running 322 Buick engine and transmission, delivered, for $100. I fabricated everything and was finally ready to install the drive shaft. I discovered the entire back part of the transmission was open. I had no idea Buicks used a torque tube, and realized I’d been screwed.
Later, while telling the guys at school, my instructor overheard. Turned out he’d actually worked in the GM Hydramatic plant in 1953 when it burned down. He told me that they used Dynaflows in the Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles until Hydramatics were available again. To do so, they used an adapter to convert them to open drives. I found a ’53 Olds in a yard in Gulfport, Florida. It was sitting on the ground with no wheels, and the yard owner was the nastiest person I’ve ever met—he wouldn’t lift or move it.
So, in the middle of an August summer in Florida, I chiseled a hole in the floor, then dug a hole beneath the trans. I then hacksawed the driveshaft and removed the assembly called a “ball retainer.” I bolted it up to my transmission, changed the yoke on the driveshaft, and it fit perfectly. I could drive the car, and did. By the way, the Olds was black. It took me two full days to get that piece out of the car in the August heat.
Wayne T: In the early ’90s, my friend and I visited his cousin in Germany. Out of curiosity, we went to a local Ford dealer. The parts guy had in stock a set of Euro bumpers for his ’76 Capri II that would replace the U.S. “brick” crash ones.
He was more than happy to get rid of the 20-year-old OEM parts from his inventory for a few marks. He even threw in the rubber trim pieces and mounting hardware for free. We brought them home in a ski bag as oversized luggage.
Robert H: Approximately 10 years ago, I purchased a 1965 Impala SS center console on eBay. The seller seemed like a great guy, and the experience was excellent. Inside the box, along with the console, was a note. It read, “My wife says this will never be in a car that runs again. If it ever is in a car that runs again, please let me know.”
The note was worth the $100.00 I spent alone, and I often relate the very humorous story to the car guys and gals I meet working behind the bar at a restaurant in Boston. I always end with the observation that the car community is a wonderful group of people.
Still haven’t let that excellent guy know yet … but someday I will!
Art Q: For my Factory Five 818 kit build, I designed custom taillights. The goal was also to meet the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 108 for intensity and all the rest of that rule. Each lens must be marked with specific information in the standard and so on.
The easiest way for me was to use existing lenses. After some pull-yer-part yard visits, I decided Impala third brake-light lenses would work. Because of their size and shape, I could machine them down and still have the markings, and there seemed to be lots of 2006–16 cars in two nearby lots I could scavenge.
I needed eight lenses, plus at least one for practice. The first yard had 13 cars, but eight of those—surprise—had missing trunk keys. How do ya guess they get in the trunk? Crowbar through the third brake light and pry it open. When all was said and done, I just got nine lenses from two yards. Cost? $7.99 x 9 at Pick-A-Part.
How about $197.62 each at GM parts? I had a good laugh at that. The build came out very nice!
RichS: In the early 1980s I scored a 1961 Chevrolet two-door bubbletop Impala. It had that great-looking, aerodynamic, rounded roof line used on many NASCAR and 409 drag race cars. It was in a police salvage yard, and the original 348 V-8 engine and transmission were missing.
Both the front windshield and the large bubbletop rear window were broken. The interior was trashed, and the car was generally tired and needed paint, but otherwise it was straight and pretty much rust-free. I paid $25 total for it and was told not to register it for a month in order for the paperwork from the impound yard to clear the DMV. The rear window on the bubbletop was unique and unavailable new.
It was before the Internet, and I was scrounging auto salvage yards for the parts I needed. After no luck finding a rear bubbletop window at several salvage yards, I finally located one. It had a scratch that wasn’t too bad and otherwise was in good shape. The yard wanted something like $35 for the window. I mentioned the scratch and offered him $25. The yard owner paused a second, looked at me like I was a complete idiot, and said, “Where else are you going to find this unique bubbletop rear window?”
I knew he was right. He had me. I paid him the $35. A local glass guy came to my house and installed it along with a front windshield I’d found somewhere. It fit perfectly and looked great. I never noticed the scratch again.
Chris S: Back in the early 1980s, I acquired a 1977 Mercury Colony Park with all the options from a co-worker. It was a great ride for my growing young family. Then the Automatic Climate Control quit. Using the manual, I traced the problem to the sensor under the dash pad. The dealer wanted $137 to fix it, which was a lot of money back then. I went to the local wrecking yard and located a Mercury hardtop with Climate Control.
It took me five minutes to pop the dash cover and remove the sensor. I stopped into the office and asked the clerk, “How much do you want for this vacuum tee?” He said it wasn’t worth writing up, and wished me a nice day. I sure miss those days.
Scott: In high school, I drove a 1979 Mercury Capri with the 5.0 V-8. Late one Friday night as I turned into my parents’ subdivision, I noticed my headlights growing dim. I parked and opened the hood to find the serpentine drive belt ready to fall off as the shaft holding the pulley on the smog pump had broken completely in half.
The next morning I called the local Ford dealer (Prater Ford) as well as the dealer in the town just south of us (Adcock Ford), but neither had the pump in stock. My dad then suggested I try a friend of ours who owned a small junkyard out in the county. He was closed on Saturdays but since he lived next door to his yard, I drove the truck over to see if he’d take pity on me. Thankfully, he did but he couldn’t offer much hope. I prowled around for about an hour and was inclined to agree with him.
Dejected and not holding much promise in the thought of borrowing my mom’s Olds 98 for the evening, I started on foot out of the yard when something vaguely familiar poking out of the red North Georgia clay caught my eye. I dug around and managed to unearth a Ford smog pump. Lo and behold, other than a different pulley, it was identical to mine. Mr. Cooper was as surprised as I was and decided that $5 was a fair price. I couldn’t have agreed more. Thirty minutes and a new drive belt later, my 17-year-old self was back in business.
Luvs A. Goodstory: In the early ’00s I was fast approaching middle age. I acquired a ’63 Fairlane two-door hardtop. I drove an hour south to get a front bumper advertised in the Little Nickel want ads. I made the deal for the bumper, and the gentleman asked if I’d like to see his collection. I don’t remember any of them, but one. It was a nice-looking ’55 Chevy pickup.
He popped the hood. I was expecting yet another iteration of a Chevy small-block. I did a couple double-takes. I looked at the guy and said, “That’s a small-block Ford! Why did you do that?” He told me that he hated messing with the distributor way in the back against the firewall.
A small revenge for all the small-block Chevys in early Fords!
Rich M: Drove 200 miles to Fresno and back in my M38A1 Jeep to procure two NOS fenders. Still paying for the sunburn!
J4: In 1997, I was looking for MGB parts for my ’71. Nothing major, just door cards, lenses, etc. I connected with a gentleman, via telephone, who had placed an ad in the local newspaper for “MG parts—come get them.” When I arrived at his property, I discovered that he had a two-stall garage full of parts. FULL!
The owner of the parts let me know that all of the MGB parts had to go, and told me to make him an offer. On top of that, there was a fully torn apart, titled MGB he was considering as parts. A bit overwhelmed, I let him know I didn’t need everything, but he persisted. “Throw out a price,” he said.
Well, it took four trips and several days to clear everything out. He was happy to have it all gone, I got my next two projects for a very good deal. Right place, right time.
Oh, door cards and lenses … Check!
Bert B: My story starts at my desk at work. One of my buddies from our shop came to tell me that somebody was looking for the owner of the light blue 1957 Cadillac in that parking lot. (That would be me.)
When I spoke with the man he said he had a 1958 Cadillac that was going to be junked. Did I want any parts from his car? If so I could come to his business on Saturday and take whatever I wanted. There were many parts that were interchangeable between the two cars, including lots of the glass. I was delighted to have so many spare parts.
Cody D: Went to a guy’s barn to look at some square-body Chevy parts, and ended up bringing home a ’68 Mustang Fastback, which I have fully restored, and have insured with Hagerty.
David W: My ’97 Civic was stolen twice, and both times the thief wrecked the starter and the plastic around it. The garage replaced the starters, but it took a year for me to find the plastic. I eventually found it online from a junkyard in North Carolina.
