Posted by David Sherman on Tuesday, October 26, 2004 at 10:51PM :
In Reply to: This is TOO good to pass up! posted by MoparNorm on Tuesday, October 26, 2004 at 9:01PM :
I'll admit I don't like it when somebody thinks he's sitting on a gold mine with his parts or truck or whatever, and nobody buys it and they rot into the ground, but nobody's putting a gun to anybody's head about buying this stuff. If the price is too high, don't buy it. At the trucks get older, the question becomes "how much is the last one of whatever worth?" After the last good whatevers are gone, the only way to get them is for people like John Henry's friend to make them. $1000 for a set of fenders might sound like a lot, but subtract the amortization of your shop equipment, the cost of materials, divide the result by how many hours it took to make them, including some fraction of the time it took to design them and market them, and I strongly suspect that anybody who's making replica PW metal parts by hand is not even making minimum wage.
The problem is that we're used to stuff made in China by people who work so hard for so little money that we can't even comprehend it. Or in the case of old trucks, we remember when you could get NOS parts still in cosmoline for slightly above scrap price from the surplus dealers.
Things can be cheap because the people that made them didn't get paid much (Chinese stuff), or they can be cheap because somebody's selling them for way less than they cost new (government surplus, or old trucks "hauled away for free" from people who don't want them) but when those options are gone, all that's left is to pay people a fair price to make them.
I used to make the odd piece of furniture now and then for friends, but I quit doing it when I quoted a very cheap price for a book case and they told me they could get it cheaper at K-Mart. I said, "go ahead".
Well, enough of that... "Sambo" was just some troll that will probably never read any of this anyway.
PW content: We had our first snow night before last so I fired up the Tucker to make sure it's ready for the winter, and the new neighbor came running over to tell me how good that old flathead sounded.
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