When Mercedes proposed today’s Ask, my mind instantly went to the Cadillac XLR and its infamous taillights. After a quick Googling, I can confirm the XLT tails are still going for a pretty penny, with a low of about a grand and a high of $3,000 or so. But they’re out there, so not exactly unobtanium. More like “unobtanium without a lot of cashium.”
Some parts, however, are much harder to find, at any price.
Mercedes has this tale of woe:
For me, it’s this damn wheel:
I’m trying to restore my 2012 Smart to as close to factory condition as possible. It shipped new with these wheels. As it turns out, very few Smarts ever came with these wheels in America
I should never have sold mine!
There’s a set for sale in Tampa, but the guy refuses to ship and didn’t even respond to my message, anyway.
All the others are in Germany and are like $400 per wheel, plus shipping and import duties, and that’s a hell to the no.
I occasionally find entire Smarts for sale with these wheels, but I don’t feel like buying a whole car just to steal its wheels.
I feel you, Merc.
How about you? Have you encountered a required part that was so Unobtanium it may as well have been mined from Pandora? See you in the comments!
Top graphic image: GM
A couple things for my ’65 (really ’60-’66 encompassing) Suburban.
The door and window seal on my old Delta 88. Impossible to find.
A few years ago I changed the turn signals and sidemarkers on my ’88 Crown Vic to the ’91-only clear lenses (they were hard but not impossible to find back in 2020). Great look, but one sidemarker has gotten cracked from UV exposure, and being a one-year-only part (and that one year was 35 years ago) it’s become a weekly ebay search.
I learned this lesson a few years after I picked up a 2002 Olds Aurora in 2009. The division was gone of course, but it was GM…mechanical components are easy on domestics, right? In 2011 reality hit when I needed new brake lines. They were incredibly hard to source and when I found them, they were marked up 3x over what they would have been otherwise. I didn’t keep the car too long after that, and I haven’t looked back. Since then I’ve only bought used cars with deep back catalogs (Grand Cherokees) or recently obsoleted models (Mazda6). Eventually time will come when the parts for that 6 are going to be unobtanium, but there’s enough commonality with the rest of the line to keep me in most mechanicals for a while.
Ignition switch for my ’67 VW sqaureback. A transistion year, of course. First year of 12v, last year for carbs, lots of electrical oddities. I installed a generic key-switch screwed to the underside lip of the dashboard. Upside, is that with a long slotted piece of PVC pipe I can turn the ignition key from the rear engine area, which helps a lot tuning and adjusting fiddly bits on the engine and just getting it started when it is reluctant to do so.
Steering Wheel. Mine has been degrading for quite some time, so I figured why not look it up. Yeah, discontinued about 4 years ago, and when it was available, it MSRP’d for over $700. For a Compass.
So, cheap “leather” cover from Amazon it is lol
My 2012 Volt bricked itself a while back. I was able to clear the codes and was moving again. After it happened again I realized it was the result of wall-charging it and I started researching what the deal was. With the help of the Volt forums was able to isolate it to the “contact board/assembly” or “High Voltage Battery Disconnect Relay”. At that time it was basically unobtanium as GM didn’t make the part anymore. I found an untested eBay one off of a junk car for $250, but considering one has to drop the HV battery back to install it, I passed.
I see now new ones have become available, but at $1400 for just the part I think I’m still going to pass. It’s been doing fine on it’s gas engine for over a year now, so I’m just going to see how many more miles I can squeeze out of it that way.
Another one was the 1957 Plymouth Savoy I used to have. I learned pretty quickly the only way I was going to get a replacement reverse-light lens for that car was going to be a custom 3D-printed set.
Rear window gasket for my BMW bavaria (and E3s generally). They’ve been unavailable for years and you can’t really pull one off a parts car because it will turn to dust.
1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue rear air shocks: All M-body Mopars suffered from weak rear springs that would eventually cause the ass to sag. My go-to on the 80’s Dodge Diplomats/Chrysler Fifth Aves/Plymouth Furys that I used to own was a pair of Gabriel HiJackers. Monroe made an air shock for this car too. I recently acquired a 1985 Chrysler Fifth Avenue that needs this treatment, but neither Gabriel nor Monroe manufacture an air shock for it anymore. I’ll be ordering off-menu and welding on some lower shock mounts for compatibility.
Apparently, for my FR-S, it’s the damn spring clip that holds the clutch fork on the clutch fork stud. At least, from a Toyota dealership. My local mechanic spent weeks waiting when I brought the car in after my throwout bearing melted last year, waiting for the dumb, tiny, but very important bits of bent spring steel. Eventually, I went to eBay. There they were. They were cheap and easy to get, and showed up quickly. Why, Toyota, did you have to wait so long?
For the Bug, (a Super,) it’s the front control arms. No-one makes these forgings, and there’s no super adjustable camber bro tubular racing units made either, that I could find. I wish there was.
And for my Stingray Deluxe…Yay, Schwinn’s stupid nonstandard “middleweight” Front Tire! Not like they’re hard to find, but it really limits your selection. And how much pressure you can run in the tires.
This schadenfreude is making me feel very good about holding onto my old Accord. The hardest part I think to find will be fully functioning LED taillight assemblies but I see those are available on eBay for the outrageous price of $80.
Not everything is cheap, but for NA/NB Miatas, there’s is an aftermarket option for literally everything. The main thing that kills them is frame rust and there are even kits for that too. So many ship-of-Theseus Miatas out there
It is gone now, but the Hummer Alpha engine specific parts such as the stock air cleaner assembly and the power steering pump reservoir are damn near unobtanium.
I have a Scout 2 from 1971 and although they are surprisingly decent for finding parts, but if you want a doorless SS2 style set up, good freaking luck.
I don’t have any issues like that, as my Jeep TJ has fantastic aftermarket support and my other cars are but a few years old. However, before my GX470 was totalled a couple of years ago, there were a few hard to get parts, notably factory CV axles. I ended up rebuilding mine instead of going aftermarket, though there was a company in Denver that made beefier remans of the OEM axles for a hefty upcharge. OEM headlights were also impossible to find, which is part of what led the insurance company to total out my GX.
1994 Honda Accord 4d EX – green interior door pulls Dark Jade Green.
Plenty in black to be found…but Dark Jade Green…no luck.
When replacing old and dying lights with some nice red LEDs on my birds cluster I accidentally broke the plexiglass/clear plastic lens cover on the gauges and yeah the only way to find that is buying a whole new cluster that hopefully doesn’t have one that is already broken. I just glued mine back together luckily it was just a single crack so was easy to glue back on. Just sucks because it was in great shape. But that is only GM plastic for yah.
My uncle has a 1931 Packard 833 and I know when restoring that years back was a hassle to find parts. He recently did leafs on it and had to special order them from someone that custom builds them.
Mercedes, LKQ/Keystone Automotive has those wheels. They don’t have Smart as a brand on their drop down menu but you can enter it into the search bar to find what you need.
My electric quad and trike both use KMX frames, which are out of production. Almost everything on them is now unobtanium. The steering spindles, specifically the 3rd generation model I use, are unavailable. I can get 4th gen models, but they won’t fit my frame or headset. I’m going to have to fabricate stronger spindles because they crack regularly at the speeds I push this thing to. The aftermarket suspension I used is also discontinued.
How bad do you want the wheels? Looks like you could get them plus a whole parts car if you want to buy your way of your problem.
https://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/6100630c-ab8e-42d6-bd0e-307e809af771/?sid=e98aae0e-597f-4a24-aac7-cc9c284c23f3
https://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/6e8190d1-a347-406a-9674-23c53f6bfd7c/?sid=e98aae0e-597f-4a24-aac7-cc9c284c23f3
Pretty much all the pickup conversion-specific parts on my Ford Durango as only 212 were built. Mine is missing the two long side bedrails. Amazingly there is a guy in Missouri who has a pair, but let’s just say he has very vocal opinions that I disagree with so he doesn’t deserve any of my money plus they’d cost like $250+ to ship because of the awkward size. Luckily I found a local place that can reproduce them, but at $500 that’s a hard pill to swallow on a car I bought for $2K.
And on a unrelated note, last week I got to drive in an imported G&K Smart, and then got to draw on the Smart owned by Maynard Keenan, the lead singer of Tool. Hooray Lemons Rallies.
Exhaust manifold preheater shroud. No one seems to make a modern copy, new old stock doesn’t exist, it was one of the first things to rust away under the hood, it was the first thing removed by people thinking it robbed them of horsepower. Haven’t found one in over 20 years of on and off searching.
Fiero GT taillight lenses
On my 1963 Ford F100 with the 223 six cylinder, the piece that connects the throttle linkage to the carb is not available for love or money.
Guess what’s missing on my truck?
I had a ’94 Trans Am WS6 with the 6 speed stick. It was the last year for the old school small block. A piece of the starter broke off and got lodged in the bell housing and ended up breaking the lever that moves the throwout bearing. GM declared them obsolete years ago. There was ONE GUY in South Carolina (Hawk Perfomance) who makes them. Occasionally. Fortunately, I only had to wait a couple weeks for him to make up a batch.
It’s not a car, but the 1981 Kawasaki GPz550 rear brake master cylinder is nearly impossible to find.
Kawasaki used that specific part only on the 1981 GPz550 – no other years, no other models. Because they were used so briefly, there is no aftermarket support (e.g. rebuild kits) from the usual suspects.
I searched eBay genuinely for years until I found one, and then for several more years before I found another one.
(The rear MC from a later Ninja 250 can be adapted fairly easily but that detracts from the originality.)
(I don’t know motorcycles nearly as well as you so please indulge me in my analogy with bicycles)
I guess then questions then are:
1) How different is it?
2) Whether it does the job as well as (if not better) than the original?
3) Could it have been OEM? (e.g. for bicycles, period correct Suntour parts vs Shimano or Shimano Deore to Deore XT)
3) Why should you or anyone care?
On #4 I get it. I like to keep my 1980s era bicycles as original as possible to retain the look and feel of the bike. This can be very difficult as previous owners have changed things out and as in your case some parts can be difficult to source in good condition at a reasonable price (although I’m often surprised at how much vintage NOS is out there). There is also the problem of a lack of information. Some manufacturer’s catalogs are easy to find (Schwinn, Peugeot, Trek) where they list every part but some are unobtanium (Shogun, Sekai, Lotus).
I think it’s fine in such cases to use a non original part provided it’s as close as is available to the original in form and function and that it will be replaced with the correct original part if and when possible.
I also think one its fine to upgrade to a superior, period correct part. In my case I replace the nasty original zinc plated carbon steel spokes with stronger, lighter, more forgiving double butted stainless spokes. Only the very high end racing bikes of the period came so equipped. I can’t say I feel much difference in the ride but the spokes are easier to install and stay cleaner longer.
I also replace all ball bearings from G100 to G10 or better. Again I dunno if I can actually feel the difference since the reason I’m in there is to replace the rusted, worn parts but any difference should be smoother, longer lasting operation. I can feel that after I put everything back together everything is smooooooth.
Neither are particularly expensive upgrades but I figure if I’m in there I should do the job right.
I got into this hobby when I found out about L’eroica, a vintage bike tour held at various locations around the world. In this tour only bicycles predating 1987 are allowed and those bikes can only be built using period correct parts and ridden wearing period correct clothing. What I found out when I got there is even these hard core vintage fettishists, despite the blustering of the official rules are pretty flexible on what they accept. It’s an Italian thing or so I was told. So I am too…within reason.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply!
1) Rather 🙂 It has a different finish from the original, and is a slightly different shape. IIRC it uses only one of the original mount points and the other needs to be fabbed. I believe the brake fluid reservoir is different as well. (I haven’t done the mod, have only read about it)
2) I believe the Ninja 250 piece has the same diameter piston as the original and should replicate the stock brake feel
3) Sadly, no – the two bikes are separated by 25+ years
4) The 1981 GPz550 is a seminal model: it was the first middleweight sport bike to be sold in the US (though I didn’t know that 34 years ago when I bought it) and it was the forerunner to the Ninja 600. It is also a one-year model: the 1980 bike that spawned it and the 1982 bike that followed were very different. I care because it’s my bike and I’d really prefer to go original/correct. Some other people probably have opinions as well but it’s not their bike and it’s not for sale, so nbd 🙂
I am 100% on-board with period-correct mods. Tucked away in the shop, for example, is a[n] NOS fork brace, to be installed… later. The GPz currently sports the same 4-into-1 exhaust that was on it when I bought it; that will be refinished in a ceramic satin black. It also has the clubman (very low) handlebars I installed in 1992 (1993?). I might replace those with period-correct clip-ons, if I can find a good set. I also picked up a set of Keihin CR racing carbs a couple years ago, so it will be upgraded and still maintain its early 1980s character.
Hope that helps 🙂
It does. It also makes me miss my one and only motorcycle, a 1980 KZ250LTD thumper, gifted to me by my friend who had picked it up as a 8 yo Penny saver special for the low, low price of $40, a battery and the time it took to clean out the fuel system.
It was a fun bike, much better than the awful Hondamatic thing my friend had replaced the Kawasaki with. I dunno why I didn’t hang on to it longer.
SEIMA 41270 – the plastic housing for the license plate in the R4 and, I believe, Estafette van. It hasn’t gone fully extinct, and used parts availability fluctuates (every now and then someone gets their hands on a nice cache of used parts or new old stock, and some things that used to be somewhat rare suddenly become much more common), but it’s rare enough that when I needed one for my car, I seriously looked into borrowing one to scan and 3D print. Then I found someone who was parting a R4 nearby, and when I asked if he had some parts I needed, the guy priced the whole haul at €50, including the plastic housing. Sellers were trying to get away with asking prices starting at €75 back then, and I haven’t searched this part since. Maybe I should finally have it 3D-scanned to release the printing documents online, otherwise smartasses in the know might start scavenging these parts; they’re always just two screws away from somebody else’s pocket.
I still have a set of the trim that goes around the back window of a MK1 Toyota MR2. I heard people tended to lean on the side pieces and break them. I’m guessing they are un-or-close to unobtanium.