My hit-and-miss experiences with parts cars

Posted on Apr 2, 2014 in Featured | 1 comment

Parts car availability seems to be shuffling toward the realm of dinosaurs, VCR repairmen, desktop computers and hula-hoops, thanks mostly to the fact that with collector car prices being what they are, every candidate is now viewed as restorable. Some parts cars may be good enough to save; others, however, may require the replacement of 97 percent of their sheet metal to be reborn.

So what better time than now to talk about parts cars? Even if we can no longer find one, let’s look back to the days when rusty quarters plus a blown engine instantly translated into, “parts car.”

I’ve had a couple worth talking about, and as you can surmise by the title, I have had mixed results. There are parts cars that you buy to help you build another car, and there are parts cars that become parts cars due to the unfortunate discovery that they were in much worse condition than you first thought, or there is a paperwork issue.

Three guesses as to how I got my first parts car. Back in the mid-1980s, I bought a ’66 GTO to restore. The owner was moving and had to sell. He was asking $1,800, I offered $900 and he took it. I was 19 years old and very happy. After leaving a $100 deposit, I came back a few days later with the balance of the cash and a flatbed. We exchanged money and the title. I matched the VIN on the title to the car and it was fine. I checked the name, but it wasn’t the same as the guy I was buying it from. He casually explained that he had purchased the car about four years before and never titled it in his name, so the name on the title was of the previous owner. Red flag—promptly ignored.

I took the GTO and title anyway and headed home. The next day I went to complete my part of title and confirmed that I was in fact an idiot. The previous, previous owner mistakenly signed the title under buyer and not seller. I went to motor vehicle anyway and surprise, the title was rejected. According to N.J. DMV all I could do was find the owner and have him apply for a new title, get it and then sign it over to me.

Remember, this was way before the Internet, so finding people wasn’t nearly as easy. Regardless, I actually found him. He worked as a bartender at a restaurant about six miles from my house. I bought the car about an hour from my house in the opposite direction, so it was fate right? Everything was going to work out. When I went to see him, I explained the situation and told him that I would of course pay for everything, and he agreed to follow the DMV procedure.

I never saw or spoke to him again after that. He was never working each time I went to the restaurant, nor did he respond to my phone messages. After chasing a ghost for a few months, I finally decided to part out the car. Don’t cringe, it wasn’t a horrible loss of a great GTO (see photos). It was a $900 GTO with Le Mans grilles, the wrong engine and trans and enough rust that it probably should have been a parts car in the first place. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth, but I still made pretty good money on it once I sold off the parts, which helped finance buying the ’67 GTO I still own.

The second parts car was a 1980 Firebird Formula that I bought in the early 1990s for $250 (if memory serves), simply because I wanted the 15×7 aluminum Snowflake wheels to put on my 1977 T/A daily driver. A kid who was about two years behind me in high school had this car. I had seen it around town and spoke with him a couple of times because I had the Trans Am. It was a 301 car, black over silver with red trim and interior. I later heard that the engine had blown and the car was for sale. I paid the money and he even offered up free delivery. He called AAA and told them that his Formula’s engine blew up and he had to have the car taken to where it was going to get fixed, which turned out to be my driveway.

I lived in an apartment in the center of town at the time, and the driveway was behind the building and was surrounded on three sides by walls. It was really for parking only. I wasn’t supposed to be working on car stuff there or in the basement for that matter. (So of course, I had already swapped a 455 engine into the Hurst/Olds and swapped a four-speed into the T/A in that driveway.)

Nobody complained, so hey, why don’t I part out a car too? It took a while, the car got stripped down to basically a bare shell, and I made some money. The landlord complained, so I had it dragged away, and then I moved sometime later. I couldn’t fit the 2.56:1 limited-slip rear into the truck when I left, so I’d be willing to bet that 22 years later it’s still sitting where I left it in the basement of my building. Nevertheless, it all worked out, and the parts from this pretty wasted Formula contributed to many other peoples’ projects, including my T/A.