September brought a
review of Graphtec's Silhouette Cameo knife plotter. I use this machine mostly to cut party decorations and large letters for signs. I recently put it to use in a way I have long wanted. I used it to print an obscure gasket for a classic car.
I have kept an early
FIAT X1/9 for about twenty years. The landscape of parts availability has undergone several dramatic upheavals in that time. In the nineties, I could walk into a random auto parts store and buy nearly any part for the car that was common across the FIAT lineup or used in some other European marque. These parts were either low-quality parts that had been sitting in warehouses since the 1970's or fresh low-quality parts built in the former Soviet bloc to support the ongoing manufacture of FIAT cars built under license. We got one of those cars here as the
YUGO. That car used an
engine nearly identical to the X1/9.
Finding parts in this way was a bit like surface mining coal. It was dirty. Most of the parts were
covered in dust and grime from decades spent on a shelf. It was cheap. It was unsustainable. Most of the independent auto parts stores that sustained me have long since gone out of business.
I couldn't find most X1/9 specific parts. For the first several years that I owned the car, I couldn't even find a real shop manual. I paid the California-based FIAT specialist
Chris Obert some insane fee to make me a bootleg photocopy of a shop manual. He earned his fee standing at that copier.
Traditional FIAT boutiques often devoted a small part of their catalog to X1/9 parts. In retrospect, I think they did this to make owners of the more common and more conventionally attractive FIAT 124 Sport Spider feel lucky.
Getting parts from catalogs was like mail-ordering boutique coals. It was expensive and the selection not nearly comprehensive enough to be a sole source. In truth, these vendors often had no better ideas about where to get new, good FIAT parts than you might. Some catalogs were padded with floor mats and waxes and key fobs and other items easily manufactured without expensive tooling.
Despite decades of relative unavailability of many model-specific parts, there never was a true shortage of these bits. FIAT left the US in disgrace in the early 1980s and most dealerships folded quickly with large inventories of new, wrapped, and correctly labelled parts. These parts never disappeared.
Getting at these parts was like drilling
wildcat wells. Most strikes were unprofitiable. Many people held on to parts that were identified only by part number with no access to manufacturer's cross-reference tables or reverse indicies that revealed either what they did or what model they fit. It was difficult to monetize these collections. Many collections were sold intact to larger brokers who did have access to the tables necessary to market these parts to the widest audience.
During these dark years, many owners made do by finding a roughly suitable part from a more popular GM or Ford car. Many owners made permanent alterations to their engines or wiring harnesses to accommodate these expedient repairs. Many of the most unreliable gizmos were parts related to elaborate emission control systems. These parts had often been sources of trouble even when replacements were easy to source. These were now typically discarded without replacement.
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North Korean motorists also appear to delete emissions equipment when making part substitutions
Photo courtesy Raymond Cunningham through Wikipedia |
This era was not like mining at all. It was like World War 2 vintage wood or coal gasification for cars. It was a time best forgotten.
Ebay changed everything. Before Ebay, many rare parts changed hands through the classified sections of club newsletters. These appeared monthly for the best run clubs and sporadically for most. These small markets and high overhead costs made it very difficult to find a ready market or a fair price for most parts. Ebay made it easy to sell a two dollar part without even needing to know what it was. Ebay's auction format also erased the social stigma associated with getting a good price for rare parts.
Ebay effectively crowdsourced an extractive industry. I can now buy new, unused, original parts from the 1970s that I had earlier presumed were unavailable anywhere at any price. Many of these parts cost little or no more than the ad-hoc Ford or GM alternatives that are themselves no longer mainstream. Many of these parts cost less than they did from the dealer in the 1970s.
For the X1/9, the world has come full circle. The Ebay economy kept enough of these cars out of the crusher that there is now a market worth serving by an actual proper business. Matt Brannon operates
Midwest-Bayless Italian Auto and offers a comprehensive collection of X1/9 parts. A car could probably be maintained indefinitely using nothing but Midwest, a credit card, and a good relationship with the UPS guy. This part of the classic car world is aligned also with the growing 'Maker' movement. Henk Martens is a one-man Kickstarter of reproduction X1/9 parts. This is a necessary complement to Midwest and Ebay.
Access to original parts is not good enough for some items. Rubber parts age about as well on a shelf as they do on the car. A new gasket from 1977 may be of no more use than the rotten one it would replace.
I used
SketchUp to build a simple model of a gasket I need as part of an induction refresh. The gasket is available
new from midwest for $16.99. I converted the model to an SVG file with a
free plugin from Simon Beard. I opened the SVG file in Graphtec's Silhouette Studio program and cut the gasket on a
sheet of gasket material from Mr. Gasket. It works.
The sheet of gasket material cost only a few dollars less than the new gasket. I did it to capture the gasket geometry for posterity. The plummeting cost of 3D printing and small-scale CNC machining will bring the next chapter in parts availability for these cars. There is a certain role for rabid open-source types like me who want to collect and share data but I hope also that vendors like Midwest can form relationships with service bureaus like
Shapeways to support owners who just want to drive and enjoy their cars.
At the moment, essentially any new engine part built at home is
illegal. My present project is to fit modern digital engine controls to a classic carbureted car for the purposes only of improving emissions and driveability. Even modifications that halve the emissions would be illegal in California without a specific resolution by the State Air Resources Board. My project to reduce idle emissions is a likely violation of the Clean Air act.
In 2006, the EPA approved an exemption to the Clean Air act for an Arizona law that removed emissions requirements for classic cars. They should now go a step farther and create a blanket exemption for all cars more than twenty five years old that allows any technical change that can be reasonably expected to maintain or improve emissions performance.
This conservative change would harmonize well with NHSTA rules that allow the importation of cars twenty five years old or older without regard to compliance with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. The CBP
maintains that there are no EPA compliance requirements on the importation of
cars more than twenty one years old. Why require compliance from cars already in the US when cars with arbitrarily poor emissions can be brought into the US without restriction?
Any rule change that is focused on manufacturers rather than end users will be as obsolete in this maker age as my FIAT.
