Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Sometimes classic cars trade hands–or never come into them–because a person feels that “parts are hard to find.” Great!! If you love classics for what they are–pieces of a vanishing past–elusive parts is just another quality to recommend them.

It would be a lot less fun finding that original pressing of A Hard Day’s Night at a garage sale if every home you walked into had the complete Beatles vinyl library in the rec room. If you could walk into the woods, close your eyes, draw back your compound bow and be guaranteed of bringing down a 12-point buck when you released the string, would hunting lose some magic? Of course it would. It’s much more satisfying to wait for hours and play a big gamefish than to walk into a store and buy it.

Parts hunting is fun. It’s a game of wits–learning where to look, and a game of patience because you must try again and again. Every miss makes the hit more rewarding.

Here’s a tough-to-find part I searched hard for–a 198 V6/215 V8 stickshift bellhousing. It was a great moment to come back from a grilled cheese sandwich at the local watering hole and find this part in its battered box on my back porch, right where I asked UPS to leave it.

Here’s the tale of the hunt: try eBay and searches like “215 bellhousing, 215 bell housing, 215 V8, BOP V8, Buick V8, Olds V8….” They all turned up nothing. So on to craigslist and the same search–actually an advanced search using “craigslist.org” as a site limiter (because a lot of rubbish sites incorporate craigslist as a search term to try to get you to click on them). A couple leads dried up–link expired. On to Hemmings where you can get some hits but they’re the 215 V8 supplier D&D in Michigan looking to buy them–and resell them to you. While D&D is an invaluable resource to 215 enthusiasts, I wanted one straight from a private seller or wrecking yard. Deep into the searching, I found reference to a 198 V6 bellhousing, the only other bellhousing said to share the 215’s unique bolt pattern. I expanded my search and found a Jeep enthusiast offering one of these bellhousings to someone else.

I was briefly excited until I saw that the post was from 2005…. But my disappointment lasted only for a second before I remembered my own motto–never give up. I joined the site, got the seller’s email address and said if he still had the bellhousing, I’d be interested. He did. He was ready to sell it because he had moved on from that conception of his project.

What was once a buried comment on a two-year-old web page about a “hard-to-find part” made for only a couple years more than 40 years ago is now a very real component in my basement, waiting for a couple other pieces, a warm afternoon, and a day with the wrenches. This part and the opportunity to trade a few emails with a fellow car enthusiast in another state make a classic car project all the more valuable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Car parts, Car stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.