Antique & Classic Cars Blog

And he’s got a lot of parts to make it all run good.”

Little Dearborn on University Avenue is the greatest indoor collection of car parts I’ve seen. Three stories, 35,000 square feet. In biz since 1952, at which point the founder to set up shop selling obsolete parts he would buy from dealers. I’ve driven by it for years, but the region of my brain that’s supposed to alert me to cool stuff was always off. Finally my editor, Angelo, said, “Why don’t you go over there and see what’s up.” ‘Bout time!

Hiring me to work at this business would be amazingly stupid because I’d spend the whole shift wandering around picking stuff up: “Wow!…. whoa!…. jeez!… holy cow!…. incredible!….”

I’ve posted some pictures, which fail to do the place justice. While the hard-to-find original Deuce and near deuce stuff has mostly gone, they have thousands upon thousands of amazing vintage parts–you name it. Flathead parts, trim, fenders, radiators, wheels, grilles, axles.

During the war, steel wasn’t available for grilles so people made them. This is wood….

…a stand-in for this.

They have mini fiberglass T-Bird bodies for electric cars that ran off starter motors. They have an original Maytag mini-racer powered by a gas Maytag engine…. The roadster in the back is built with aftermarket body parts, but the McCulloch supercharger was sitting under a desk for years till someone decided to fix it and slap it on a flathead.

I’ll be doing a piece for the print version of the paper on this place soon. (And I don’t even have a Ford!)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Car parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.