Hello Autopian members/fellow wrenchers. I’m finishing up moving my entire Michigan garage into a small LA office, and in so doing, I’ve realized that I’m a bit of a hoarder. I’ve got tubs full of car parts that, if I’m being honest, I may never use. But I can’t get rid of them, because what if — many of you probably know what I’m talking about. So let’s discuss this problem that many of us garage-dwellers struggle with.
Check out this video clip I recently posted to my Instagram:
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As you can see, I’ve taken everything from my Michigan garage, shoved it into (far too expensive) plastic bins, and crammed those bins into my office.
That’s all this stuff here (minus the crane, which is in the parking lot, along with my spare engine), just shoved into my place of work:
There are lots of spare parts here. I’ve got a spare radiator for a Jeep Grand Cherokee ZJ, a spare seat for a ZJ, plus in the video clip you see some spare alternators and a spare cylinder head. I could go on and on for days about the parts I have sitting around for my 1966 Mustang, 1985 Jeep J10, 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee, 1994 Chrysler Voyager Diesel 5spd, 1979 Jeep Cherokee Golden Eagle, and you’ve already read about all the parts my free Nash Metropolitan came with.
Parts — they just accrue!
I’d love to hear about your stach; is it out of hand? How do you deal with it? What kinds of parts do you keep around? What is the single part that you’ve had sitting on your shelf the longest?
I have a bunch of spare parts for my 1970 Cougar but since most of them could be replaced by Mustang parts or the aftermarket, I don’t worry too much about most of what I have.
But I have two complete spare sets of taillights for that car (two lefts, two rights) since they’re one year only. (The ’69 ones will fit just fine, but they’re slightly different.) Replacements are only a couple hundred bucks on eBay since they’re not all THAT rare, but I still like having spares.
Oops, I forgot about the seized turbo and all the assorted plumbing that he brought out to CO when they moved. That was left over from a ’77 Caprice Classic station wagon that he needed more power “for towing”. Sadly, when I blew the head gasket being a teenager on country roads, the turbo didn’t make the cut during the repairs 🙁
Well, when my parents moved in with me a few years back, we had to clean out a 6 car shop that was pretty full. Among the gems were some half-used Saturn brake pads for a car we hadn’t owned in at least 10 years and some 12″ front, 18″ rear magnesium drag wheels that had sat in the corner my entire life. On the other hand, when we were restoring his ’69 L89 Corvette (now dripping away in my garage), he popped up to the attic and retrieved the fender lips he had cut out when he autocrossed it in the late 60s-early 70s. At least most of what is taking up space is at least interesting now; ranging from a 427 with a scored cylinder to some small block headers, the original wheels and exhaust for the L89, and a weird overdrive unit that he bought decades ago “because it was cool”.
For many years I kept the OE struts and the blue Tokicos for my SE-R after I put KYB AGX struts on it. Then my mom was selling the house and I decided I didn’t need them so I told her she could get rid of them. Now, 20 years later, one of my AGXes is bad, they’re NLA, there’s nothing close available, and I wish I’d kept those damn struts. All of them.
Fifteen years ago, when I moved to Chicago, I thought the car had rod bearings that were starting to go bad. I didn’t really need the car in Chicago so it sat in my garage for years, with my lazily eventually getting halfway towards getting the pans off. In the middle of this, a friend parted out one of his SE-Rs and I bought the motor, the idea being that rather than doing rod bearings on my back on the garage floor, I’d just swap motors and do it on an engine stand, then swap back. Then i had to move garages and zip the car back up, and I found…that the rod bearings were fine. So now, like seven years later, I still have an extra SR20DE with Jim Wolf S4 cams in it, taking up space in my garage.
I had an old turbo for my subaru WRX sitting in a box somewhere. It came in handy last week because my teenage son and his friends destroyed the one in the car while putting in a new clutch.
The stupidest things I have are a pair of plastic grilles that snap into the front of a B5.5-gen VW Passat, surrounding the foglamps. I found them in my front yard one morning after a rainy night. I surmised that someone in such a car wasn’t controlling it so well that night, and skidded over a leaf pile at the curb and stopped about 10 feet into my yard. I only knew what they were because I used to own such a car. Sure enough, a few days later, I saw a neighbor driving through with those parts missing. I followed him to tell him he could have them back, but I guess he thought I was going to yell at him about skidding across my grass, so he wasn’t having it. All this happened about 15 years ago and 500+ miles away from where I now live. If any of you need a pair of these, just holler!
I have an old set of rear shocks and a wheel bearing (which turned out to be fine, sigh) for my truck. I should get rid of them since I can’t see ever reinstalling old parts, at least not ones that are relatively inexpensive to buy new.
The stupidest thing I still have sitting around is a drive pulley from an old snowblower I bought a couple of years ago. The previous owner had somehow managed to sheer it off the drive shaft and then continued to use it without the self-propelled feature for long enough that it completely destroyed the pulley. It will never be useful, but it’s the most interesting failed part I’ve ever replaced so I keep it around.