VCCA Home Forums GENERAL DISCUSSION General Discussions Different World Today

Restoration is a different world these days. When I started this in 1960 I had to look for parts in Swap Meets. Make the parts, or restore what I had. Today I called the Fillingstation and Chevs of the 40's and my parts will be on the way. Thank goodness it isn't like the good old days.

As the saying goes " these trying times of today will be the good old days of tomorrow." I;m not sure that is true in all cases.

Its true that you can order up a ton of parts and yes it is a lifesaver in a lot of cases. I couldn't imagine restoring a pre-48 Chevy back in the 60's without the aftermarket support of today.

There is one downside to modern convenience. Most of those mail-order parts are poor quality reproductions from far-off countries.

Order a new fuel tank ( and a second one since the first one will leak) for a '41-47 and it will come with a Metric drain plug. Your pedal pads and soft rubber parts will turn chalky and gray in months and eventually crumble. And I've read about bad reproduction lifters causing some Stovebolt guys problems as well.

One thing I'll say after growing up with swap meets and referrals and 3 hour trips for NOS / good used parts...at least you knew they were going to fit, work correctly, and for the most part last a while. Maybe the old guys were onto something :)

There was always that 15-20 year gap after the car was past it's standard 10 year "use-by" gap that some parts were impossible to find and not reproduced. If you had say a 1964 Impala, not many repop bits could be found until it was around 25 years old- early to mid 90's, then those models became popular to restore. Even worse when you are on the other side of the world, before the days of the internet.
Lots of home-made bits and imagination required. It's a snap nowdays.

Junk yards were different too. Often in the '70's a corner was kept for older cars. Now, they are more business like. Crush them all as fast as they can. Sell only major components, not part by part... Oh, and no sir, you can't go in the yard and pick parts! We're not insured for that!

In the early 70's when I started buying discontinued NOS Chevrolet parts from dealers and attended swap meets I made the decision to only buy 20's,30's,40's and 50's parts,A BAD DECISION. My thought was 60's parts are too new and no one would be looking for 60's and 70's parts. A few years later the 60's parts became very popular so I hit the road again and discovered that a lot of the 60's parts that I left at dealers had already been purchased, NOS 60's parts are some of the most popular parts at swap meets and on Ebay today.

There are still places in the U.S.that allow you to go and remove whatever part you are looking for and they are national chain yards. It's amazing that most of the cars are newer models (10-15 yrs old) and sometimes in better condition than what we are working on. With the high cost of labor and repairs it doesn't take much for an insurance company to total a car.

Yes, Doing My Restoration would NOT be Possible with out this site let alone the Internet Plus those mentioned

and ePray, i mean eBay

Back then the junkyards had old stuff unlike today.