Project car parts - What Do You Reckon?

By: Glenn Torrens

Date: 14.05.2023

It's great being able to buy new parts for our project cars, but there are risks

A big task with restoring older cars is chasing the parts. And in the pleasant pursuit of providing you good lads and ladies plenty of project car and video content, I’m chasing parts quite often.

Anyway, with my cars being the age they are, the parts I’m chasing are often second-hand but there’s a growing range of new and reproduction parts for popular classics these days too, including for beloved Aussie cars such as Commodores and Falcons.

But as with many other aspects of life, there is good and bad when it comes to quality and it seems that the more popular a car is, the more opportunity there is for get-rich-quicks to produce cheap, rubbish parts in the hope they’ll sell a few and make a profit before the bad news spreads.

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This was reinforced to me with some Holden Commodore bits I bought recently. What I bought, mail-order, was a set of the rubbers that sit just inside the top edge of the door trims to seal against the inside surface of the door glass to keep out noise, breeze and dust.

When I clicked buy it now, I knew what I was buying wasn’t new old stock or a ‘Holden approved’ replacement part. But when these parts arrived, they were rubbish.

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Disappointed, I emailed the selling company to highlight the design’s shortfall... in other words, I complained about how they could possibly be described as ‘original’.

"Hello Glen, thanks for making contact," read the response. "The items are as original, not sure where you’re getting your info from but we are supplying these to restorers and end users without any prior returns.

"These are produced from original example.

"They are literally flying out the door every day and have been for the past four years. The photos are incredibly clear so we don’t understand how you would see the photos on the listing to show exactly the item we offer and still buy if you were expecting something else. i.e. different material or shape."

Well, actually, I was getting my ‘info from’ the parts sitting on my workbench right in front of my eyes. They were nothing like the originals on my Commodore’s original door cards, also sitting on the workbench in front of my eyes. I couldn’t see how the new ones could be installed or used; I couldn’t see how anyone could honestly send this crap to a paying customer.

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But the company responder did have a point about the pictures. As claimed, the pics were exactly what I’d bought. My mistake – and yes I’ll need to accept some blame here – was in assuming the picture in the ad was one of those ‘sample shown – not actual product’ pic, so common with online sales sites. The product shown was soooo different from the original Holden part that I simply didn’t believe the pic, or that anyone could ever be so arrogant or stupid as to promote the picture of the part anywhere near the word ‘original’.

Instead, I more-or-less trusted the word ‘original’ in the item description…

After all, how difficult can it be to replicate/recreate the original size and shape of a half-metre-long straight piece of steel-backed rubber?!

Anyway, lesson learned. If you can’t touch, see, feel, drive, squeeze, hold or taste whatever it is you’re considering buying, then there’s a risk you might not get what you’re expecting. Yes, the company did offer a partial refund (as I think it legally must) but its arrogance – that there was no way it could be wrong with its product or its description, and no way that I, a reasonably experienced car restorer, could be right in telling them they’re wrong – had already disappointed me so much that I didn’t want to waste another minute on the crap.

It was $100-plus down the drain.

To repair my door trims I found a nice little stick-on rubber profile at Clark Rubber for – I think - $12 per metre.

Job done!

From Unique Cars #477, April 2023

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