Get to Know Clark's Corvair Parts- presented by Cal Clark

[Music] i'd like to thank everyone for zooming in uh please excuse my voice i don't usually do this much talking this late at night so hopefully i won't lose it completely i know quite a few of you already know a little bit about our history i'm going to do a quick summary of the history but then i'm going to tell you about six or seven things that we've never really talked about before as far as our history so my parents bought a 1961 corvair and that's what both joan and i learned to drive on and i think that was a pretty important thing that helped lead to clark's corvair parts the next important thing was that in 1970 i found a 1964 spyder coupe that i could buy for fifty dollars all i had to do was dig it out of the snow bank well that seemed like a good deal and i was teaching school at the time so the next summer we restored it and i started driving it the next year i just happened to be going along a side road and i found a 66 course a convertible 140 that had dropped a valve seat on the interstate that was for sale for 200 dollars so i got that started restoring that well like a lot of corvier owners two wasn't enough so i started looking at an ad and found a 64 spider convertible 100 miles away have a motor didn't have the interior but the body was supposedly very good so we went and looked at it and the owner agreed to deliver it to our place for two hundred dollars and that included the purchase of the car when he came to drop the car off i was in the middle of restoring the 66 and he wanted to buy some of my parts i said to him well your father has a gas station he could get him from chevrolet and get a discount and he said to me the dealer is extremely slow and half the time i get the wrong parts well i fully knew what he meant because during my restoration the pirates book was terrible and half the time i didn't get what i wanted but the fact that he asked to buy those parts that started me thinking about why don't i do a mail order catalog because i'm repairing corvier's and volkswagens nights and evenings and that would give jones something to do because i don't want my wife with nothing to do so that's when we started thinking about doing a catalog in a mail order that came out in 1973 and from there it's just grown but what a lot of people don't realize is just and how many things had to work or we never would have started clark's corvair parts or continued it number one was that my parents had a corviere because if they'd had 57 chevys or fords i probably never would have looked twice at a corvair back then the second important thing was in 1967 during my college summer vacation i got a job at the chevy dealership pumping gas and changing oil that got me a discount on parts the next important thing was the fact that i found the two corvairs very inexpensively and started restoring them the fact that the person wanted to buy my parts and probably the most important thing is that after having taught school for three years i had three thousand dollars in my retirement account and for some ridiculous reason they allow me to withdraw all of that so now i've got three thousand dollars that i can put into a mail order company but we're living in a restored farmhouse so i asked the landlord if it was okay if i put three shelves in the three-room apartment he said sure but before the catalog had even come up come out we had added four more down in the entryway the catalog came out in january of 1973. by april i had asked the landlord if we could use half of his attic which he agreed to by summer i asked if there was any chance i could use the second floor of his whole barn which he had restored he agreed to that but let's step back a bit in january and april or may of 73 the first big gas crisis was starting that meant every time we got in parts the prices seemed to go up we're doing a printing of 200 catalogs at a time on stencils if you're lucky you can get two runs of 200 catalogs out of a stencil that meant if we needed to run more joan had to completely retype the whole catalog on another stencil she was getting a little bit tired of that we were petrified that we were sending out catalogs the next week and the prices were already outdated so in april or may we both sat on our bed and we said i just wish i had that three thousand dollars back and these parts would just disappear but we agreed to give it one full year so we went for the rest of that year at the landlord's place by the time we got to december we said well it's time to decide in the meantime we had to put all our profit all our extra pay into parts so we couldn't possibly stop we were stuck we had locked ourselves into a corner at that point we knew the landlord couldn't continue to be this generous so we started looking for our first house 1976 was our third year i was teaching school and just to give you an idea of what it's like to start a business i got up at 6 30 in the morning to get to school i taught until three o'clock from three to five i talked driver's ed from 5 30 to 7 30 each night i would eat i would do my teaching lessons and i would take a nap we would then answer phones and do orders until midnight seven days a week somewhere in our memorabilia i have a label that joan was filling out because we did all labels handwritten she was filling out this label at 11 o'clock at night and you can see the writing just go right off the edge of the label as she fell asleep i really absolutely have to mention joan joan matched me hour for hour for all these years plus she did whatever housework she had to do to keep us going so she actually worked harder than i did this is from our catalog and shows a picture of 1977. as it says this was 25 percent of our total operation in 1977 we had moved into a 1500 square foot house joan and i are on the left kathy was our first full-time employee she started in 1977. after she had worked for us for two weeks we realized we needed another person she knew sharon so sharon started working for us kathy retired two years ago after 42 years sharon is now at 44 years and is still working for us um what we did right to begin with is the very first week that kathy and sharon were working for us they started learning everything taking a phone order writing up an order pulling an order packing an order and each of them had vendors or part suppliers that they were responsible for ordering for renewing our stock so here's two young people right out of high school that's the type of responsibility that we're giving them and that's the way we've always run the business if you are qualified and you get hired you're gonna have to do just about everything at this point we had well the next year 1978 we were up to 12 full and part-time employees working out of our 1500 square foot house as well as we were doing our carpets and upholstery and we had our two printing presses so it was time to do something uh next photo please these were our buildings in 2018 the first two the first two buildings we made in 1978 and 79 are in the bottom right hand corner before we had finished those in 1979 we added the next building up so we were growing extremely fast we were at this point we were up to 15 people full time and that's two years out of after moving out of a house of just 1500 square feet we were up to over 15 000 square feet there's one big advantage for having these different buildings the first building is most of our ordering and packing and our offices then we have a separate building for the machine shop a separate building for upholstery and the rest of the buildings are all storage the only problem is we have run out of space so it's forcing us to do a lot of housekeeping to keep space for all of these the solar that you see in the background just covers all our electrical use and that's been in place now for 10 years okay now we're going to meet some of the people that work for us the upper left you've got cheyenne taking an order she has two different computer screens um this is actually she's one of the few people that have a dedicated office home people and we have six people normally taking phone orders we have five other people that can back up those people if we have absences now most of the that the downstairs in the first building is 4 500 square feet that has the majority of our inventory it's where we pull orders it's where we take the orders and it's where we pack the orders so it's extremely crowded down there and unlike many businesses i don't have an office where the order takers just sit my order takers are also pulling orders packing orders restocking the shelf whatever they have to do that's why if you call it may take four or five rings before they can get it they may be packing orders in their workstation maybe 70 feet away but this way everybody always has something that they can be doing in the upper left hand corner all the orders get printed by this what we call our sorting table the orders will get sorted by how they're going to get shipped if it's fedex air fedex ground post office ground post office priority it also gets sorted excuse me if they have to go to other buildings so orders that have to go to the upholstery building will go there if they have to go to the machine shop they'll go up there the bottom right hand photo just shows you some of the many aisles everything is just in clark numerical order so unlike amazon we don't have any robot order pullers we don't have any overhead conveyors if the if a big order comes in one person is dedicated to pulling that order they pull the whole order and they will move it down to the packing room if it's smaller orders the upper left hand photo you can see there's a bunch of small orders on a shelf and that will get rolled down to packing the bottom right hand corner shows you some of the 50 different boxes that people have to choose from when they're packing in order some of these orders are incredible when you ordered coil springs upholstery trim to get everything packed into you safely it really takes a long time to train a person it used to be that the packing was where we started people because it was the easiest but now they've got to know is it an oversized package is it going by real weight is it going by dimensional weight i think i would probably get fired if i got put down into packing it is extremely complex these are five printers that print everything that gets generated in final packing so it might be a postcard it might be the shipping label it might be your invoice it might be a check i forget what the fifth one is but there's a lot of printers anyway and this is where the real final packing is done the order's been packed it's been weighed the paperwork is on it now the person has to go to order entry pull up that order add up the shipping charge the credit card print out everything in that printing room come back to the order finish sealing it and getting it out the front door now what you might find interesting is when we started as a mail order business i would guess 90 of our orders were through the mail mainly because joan and i were working full-time jobs so we were only answering the phone evenings before the internet we had gotten to the point where probably 60 to 65 of the orders were by phone and the balance was by mail and a few by fax now that we're fully into the internet roughly 50 to 60 percent of our orders are internet the balance or phone and we might get two to three mail orders a week if you remember i was telling you that we had 12 people working out of our 1500 square foot house i can clearly remember one day somebody had the stove on to heat up some coffee they had turned the phone the stove off but the person that opened orders the only place they had to open orders was on the sink so they put the pile of finished orders onto the burner on the stove not realizing it was hot and they started smoking luckily we were able to save all the orders joan also was doing our upholstery on the kitchen table so we went over a year in which i don't think we sat for any meals i think we just stood at the counters we've got it here as being our back office we call it the upstairs office most people working in the upstairs office started downstairs pulling orders packing orders taking orders eventually they move upstairs the upper left is barb she's been with us about 32 years she's in charge of ordering from the overseas companies she's in charge of communicating with our computer programmer if we've got problems or want things changed she could work probably 60 hours a week and not keep up with what she has to do the bottom right is linda linda's been with us over 35 years linda is a very bad influence she loves to cook and almost every day she brings in some kind of goodies so i find i do better on my weight when i don't go to work i think that's an excellent reason linda has the job of checking every single item on every invoice from every one of our three to 400 suppliers so she will check every price to see if it's increased since our last one she's also looking for errors did they say that they shipped a 100 but only shipped 50 then she'll contact them and correct that she enters the prices overnight the computer will generate for barb a list of all prices that have increased since the day before laurel orders from about 200 customers she's also gotten stuck with all the sales taxes that we now have to report to what i guess it's 12 or 15 states now we have to do sales tax what i don't think the states realize is everything all the money that we take in orders or sales tax gets charged to our credit card so we're losing several percent on the sales tax which we then have to turn around take the time and pay the full amount to the states doesn't quite seem fair um laurel's been with us well over 20 years the bottom right is sharon she's been with us 44 years she orders from some suppliers she takes care of personnel takes care of um benefits she's also the co-manager with john so she's basically the person with any headaches that exist another person that wasn't here the day i took the pictures is kelly and kelly enters all the different invoices determines which general ledger code they have to go in so we've got five people working full time just taking care of ordering from our suppliers and taking care of the billing from our suppliers uh the next one when we have our tours the upholstery shop is the one that the most people go back to year after year in fact speaking of our show we haven't had the show for a couple of years because of covid we were going to have it this fall but then everyone realized that if we wait until 2023 that's going to be our 50th anniversary so we're not going to have a show this year but next year we're going to try to have a super big win dig for our 50th year so in upholstery we've got four people that work in upholstery we start with rolls of vinyl rolls of headliner we have machines that can make that can slip the bindings that we use we can make our own beading we of course have the dielectric embosser which puts all the pleats into the materials the tooling just for the pleats alone is insured for over half a million dollars and i wouldn't be surprised now with all the inflation and everything that that should probably be increased to three quarters of a million the other thing that we've done because the upholstery is so important and we have about a four inch thick notebook that that documents how to do every upholstery because all the tooling for cutting and doing everything is in this building all the patterns all the tooling has been duplicated in mylar which will not stretch or shrink and all those patterns are kept in a another building 300 feet away just in case there should ever be a fire or any calamity we've got this complete backup and could get back into the upholstery um next one as most as some of you may have seen in 2015 wheeler dealer came to our place got upholstery both seats and door panels they were here for five hours there was a crew of five of them and we ended up with five minutes of video on tv you i don't believe the whole show was available but there is a clip that shows about three minutes of going over how the door panels were made next one this is our machine shop the two upper photos show our new boring machine which is always set up for boring corvair cylinders below that is our ultrasonic cleaner this ultra sonic cleaner works with water-based detergent the basket moves up and down to oscillate and you've got the ultrasonic waves going through this produces incredibly clean parts even inside passages for example in our carburetors because it is a water-based cleaner we're able to put this into a special evaporating machine so our total waste created in a year is about a 55-gallon drum which we can then dispose of we also do all our own rebuilding of starters generators alternators rear wheel bearing units everything is done in-house so we know that everything is done the way it should be if there's a problem we stand behind it the next one okay i know what most people are interested in for their corvair is parts and probably the biggest problem we have as far as parts is that the corvair has a relatively small following compared to camaros mustangs 1950s chevys we're not what i call a power broker there's power brokers out there selling parts for eight to 15 different cars they can spread out their expenses they if they're selling something for a corvair they don't really care if it's for corvair or not they're making their profit that's what they care about we actually care about supplying parts for coordinators and are always trying to reproduce more parts the next one please the front grills for the 1965 and the 1966 to 69 these were probably one of our largest reproduction projects ever to make those two parts you're looking at approximately seventy five thousand dollars worth of tooling a two week a two year turnaround period and i could really only afford to buy 300. if you're making parts like this for a camaro or a mustang you're probably going to order thousands of them i'll be happy to sell out of the 300 it will basically pay for our tooling then we make our money on the next run the next one please last year we also did the 1966 rear course a trim the 65 corsa trim these are honestly better than any nos i had saved so my nos now are going up for sale and i'm putting the repros on my cars okay you're the first ones to know that on the upper left clark's corvair parts now has their own gas tank we're going to continue to sell the tank that we initiated over 20 years ago by buying 500 of them but by us now controlling our own gas tank we've been able to cut the price by thirty dollars we've also been able to specify that the trimming around the edge and the corners are bent more accurately so it's a little bit easier to get it up into the 61 to 69 corvairs some of them it can be a pretty tight fit on the right hand side these are due in in march or april these are washer nozzles washer nozzles are almost always corroded and blocked up so those have been reproduced down at the bottom i have got to thank i think i've got to thank bill hubbell and i say i think because this has been a nightmare of a project these weather strips fit the quarter window of a 62-64 convertible bill wanted him for his car i'd forgotten that they even exist i had never seen a new one i took the best ones i had off my car bill took him off his car he then got eight more samples with all these samples we could pretty much tell what they were supposed to look like this is a photo i just got in last month they are just about done we hope to have these by summer like i said i have never seen a new one bill tells me that those were selling for a 60-something chevy basically the same part but i think 170 159 dollars we've got ours priced i believe under 75 dollars until you see and hold one of our repro oil pans valve covers or power glide pans you just won't believe the improvement and quality and also the fact that they're 50 to 60 thicker when i got the first prototype of the valve cover back i thought there were two valve covers stuck together it's that much heavier and that much stiffer now all the repros that we've just seen and any repros that we've had for several years luckily were all ordered and paid for before all this coveted inflation and availability and everything i'm hoping by the time we need to go back and reorder these items that some of the pricing problems will have taken care of itself just in case it hasn't if you're interested in any of these you may want to order them now but i'm very hopeful that pricing will start going back down the clark website up until the last two or three years i've got to admit our website was a disaster what we wanted to do was generate the equivalent of our catalog with over 10 000 entries in the index the problem was is that the catalog was not digital so in 2015 we started a complete revision of the printed catalog which when it was finished gave us all digital so then the website person was able to download the digital catalog was able to clear up all the links that weren't working or were taking you to the wrong place yes our website is a little confusing to start with the best place to start is the second one down the online catalog there you can access the index of over 10 000 entries it will take you right to the catalog page you can click on any part numbers it will bring up the information if it's an item that has a color there will be a drop down menu where you can click on the color if it has a color there will also be an item that you can click on and it brings up all the color samples um and the thousands of parts we've we've got photos but i think it'll be another two to three years before we'll have photos of all 16 000 parts it's just an incredibly slow process but i just ask you to try the website get to learn it get to use it i think you'll find it's fantastic up until a year ago my people always use their paper catalog now that they're used to the online one they don't even touch the online one anymore the one thing that i do like about a paper catalog i find it easier to flip through see different things circle them tab the pages for ordering but and and we'll probably continue to do the printed catalog mainly because that gives us the website if you find any problems believe me this is a very complicated website if you find anything that you don't think that's working right please let us know we've spent hundreds of hours trying to perfect it thanks for that uh next one these are some of the videos that we offer i'm working on one for a general engine rebuild as i'm doing restoration on two of my cars if you haven't ever looked at any of these videos i would really suggest you look at making it here which was done by public television that one is excellent and the other one that if you haven't seen the pm magazine that was almost movie quality and if you haven't seen it i think you'll really like it if you have seen it or you do see it there's a scene where joan and i are running towards a corvair that was taken where our last building now stands okay um quite a few people have wanted to know what's going to happen to clark's corvair parts um we've actually had a succession plan for over 20 years as i said at the beginning we train people and we expect them to be able to do the job so when we hire a new person a new person comes in and they're wondering where is the supervisor everybody seems to be doing whatever they're doing and they know what they're doing and nobody's telling them what to do and that's because every single person that comes in we train them for their jobs and we almost every job we have we have at least two people that are capable of doing it in case somebody's out in case something happens during the covid it's been fantastic um and this is the way i've always run my business is i'm there to just give a general oversee i'm there to add more parts i'm there to have fun with my corvair and they do the actual work because they do the actual work if anything was to happen to jonah myself there's a plan in effect believe me they can run it probably better than i do i come in they don't say it but i think i cause more problems than i solve but i really have a tremendous group of people and this isn't just a little i mean it's a little business but it's not a shoestring operation i've got now eight people that have been with me 20 years or more with sharon being the highest at 44. i've got another seven or eight people that have been with us for 10 years or more i believe the most important thing that i have after parts is the people i've got working for me and the knowledge that they have by 14 years they earn four weeks paid vacation they get nine paid holidays they get three optional holidays they get a 401 that's sponsored by the company if you don't know what not a 401 excuse me it's a simple ira the advantage of a simple ira is the person has an account they own that account all the money goes into that account and as you may have remembered 15 or 20 years ago people's 401s were disappearing and they ended up with nothing so we really try to take care of our people once they hit 20 years every five years we have throw a party for them during the day we have a great meal um and so i we do our best to keep people because it is so important in a business like this where you have got to know the suppliers the suppliers have got to know you 25 years ago i thought that i just really needed some outside help on how to do a business because i had no business training so i paid a company a thousand dollars to come in their biggest suggestion on how i could make more money and i swear this is true they said mr clark you should start stringing out your suppliers don't pay them on time pay them 10 days later and call them up and say you know i need a bigger discount i threw them out the door and i've never had let anybody else in to help me with how to do a business i need my suppliers and the fact that i'm loyal to my suppliers has helped dramatically during this covid problem they know that i will pay they know that i will place orders and just like i hope people feel that we give you good service i know my suppliers give me good service and i have got to stand behind them and that and my employees is what's important and my employees have to know how to deal with the suppliers and how to treat them well just like we try to treat customers well do we ever make mistakes yes we make some mistakes and somehow i don't know how but sometimes if you make one mistake on an order you compound that mistake and i'm sorry if that happens but again my people will go out of their way to try to to try to make it right so yes i expect clarks is going to be around for as long as somebody's going to be hiring or wanting corvair parts um so i know there's some questions we got lots of questions i hope we can get to all of them i've been trying to go through the chat while you've been talking and first i just want to share i will be providing cal a copy of all the chat and the reason i'm gonna make sure he gets it is because there's a lot of nice compliments in their cow and i certainly want you to see those because they're well deserved so we'll make sure those get over there so i'm gonna try to mix it up here and get to a bunch of them for those of you who have not been on this uh these zoom calls before we don't take live questions just so we can keep the call moving along but feel free to ask them in chat um first i just want to um we had a number of questions regarding fc parts um rep reproduction body emblems um there were a few more related to fc parts maybe just address cal that some of these questions regarding fc parts in general yeah body parts are well most parts are a problem money wise but um fc parts are especially a problem and let me just give you an idea of a body panel we just two years ago started the tooling for the lower body lower front body panel for the late models tooling for that at the old cost for the materials was twenty two thousand dollars it's taken two years to get the tooling made they've had the money for the tooling the prototype sample for me to approve is finally supposed to come through before spring i am promised unless they can't get any steel so tooling for body panels is the big problem the other problem is emblems are extremely expensive a small emblem like on the front fender a monster cross or something tooling for that is usually seven or eight thousand dollars rubber tooling is the cheapest you can get some rubber parts still for one to two thousand dollars in tooling but emblems almost always along with plastic making plastic parts is almost as expensive as emblems so if you've got seven or eight thousand dollars in tooling for an emblem for an fc and i'm going to order 500 of them i'm probably never going to sell 500 to start with and i've got that initial cost of the seven or eight thousand we had a company that was doing a pretty good job with rubber molds the emblems would be off like maybe five percent so the holes might not line right up the emblems were a little soft but we could get the tooling made for five or six hundred dollars they've been bought out twice in the last four years we can't get a straight answer out of the new place as you as most of you probably know the ramp side has a sweet place in my heart and i i try to do what we can but i'm just not sure how many body panels we'll be able to do honestly for the fc the emblems i would still like to do okay that's a good one hey um here's a fun question cal how many corvairs do you own and do you have a favorite one to drive oh you own too many if you guys think it's i think it's eight but it could be ten um the ramp site is just such a blast to drive i like that the 64 spyder convertible is a blast um i'm finishing up my 1960 monza which only has 24 000 original miles the interior is just like new john says i have to do the 61 wagon next because we've only had that since 1976 but then we've had the 65 corsa turbo since 1976 also um so anyway that's that's approximately i'd have to add them all up but i know it's eight to ten i love it i love it okay um cal you know that it's always been a very popular part of the national convention when you would bring all the parts and you haven't been able to do that can you address why and what your thoughts are around that and what do you do at the conventions when people go to conventions yeah that that broke a lot of hearts at my place because i had three or four people nadine todd cheyenne joan and myself barb just loved going to the conventions it was it was a workout but we really loved it for those of you that have never seen our setup we would take a space 40 by 60 feet and it just looked like our parts exploded out of the truck and trailer so what happened was until about three years ago the law was that if your truck was under 10 000 pounds you could tow a trailer up to 7 thousand pounds and not have to worry about the d.o.t somebody in the government changed the wordings to be if your truck and trailer exceed 10 000 pounds together you must follow 98 of all the rules and regulations of a tractor tractor-trailer truck that means fuel taxes road taxes stopping keeping the logs digitally i had two high school friends that were independent truckers their whole life so i called them up when i found this out and they said they had both stopped about five years ago from being independent truckers to joining a trucking company they said even with all their years in it they could not keep up with the laws and regulations they needed the backup of a major company i even called the usdot to make sure that i was understanding the law and they said yes that's the law you will be held to it it just wasn't worth it so as much as we wanted to we had everything we knew what we were doing we loved doing it what we are doing is we're trying when there isn't covid we're trying to send at least one or two people with our latest 50 to 60 repro items we also offer a discount to the people that are at the national convention and we hope that that helps in some way but i know those of you that saw the old us at the national i don't think you'll ever forget it and we used to have people that when we were packing up they would come out and make bets as to whether it was all going to fit back in the trucking trailer yes it was really well orchestrated okay um let's talk a little bit more about parts in terms of um you have a new process for course uh a new shipping process can you tell us a little bit more about that process and why you put it in place yes we were not getting back nearly enough cores and we can't reproduce everything that's in these cores so i came up with the idea that if we could help people on the shipping and make it easier to ship them back maybe that would help now we've still got about we went through we've tried to send letters to everyone that had a core a major core in the last six years you may have gotten that letter if you haven't they will probably be going out in the next two or three weeks so what it says is if you're in the 48 lower states we send you a fedex shipping label you can get all your cores together there's even some used parts that we're buying and that we allow you to put in with the cores you can pack it up you can either drop it off at fedex or you can call them up or you can do it online they will pick it up they will bring it back to us once it gets back to us it takes us a week or two to process because we've got so many cores now coming in which is great um and we cover 40 of the shipping so if you're shipping let's say you had a transmission i think there the core is way up on 300 maybe so let's say the shipping was a hundred dollars we'll cover forty dollars of that shipping the other sixty dollars will be subtracted off your core and then you'll get your core refund so so far the response has been excellent for people that are in hawaii alaska canada and european countries within the next couple weeks we're going to come out with something we aren't sure what yet but it's too complicated to do a percent of the shipping from foreign countries or alaska and hawaii so that's what we've done on coors and yes we need cores i don't care if you've had the court 12 years if you want to find out if you can return it send us an email our computer system goes back to 1988 in coors send your course he needs course okay let me go through a few of the ones that are people are asking and these might just be yes no questions or maybe about parts people are asking if you're going to reproduce um 66 through 69 style headlight bezels are you thinking about reproducing those it's it's still at the top of my list the last time i had tooling costs estimates it was thirty thousand dollars so it's always a toss-up of do i do four or five smaller repros or do i put the money into a big item the trouble is since covet is hit all the tooling tooling is made out of either high quality steel or what's called curtsite as i understand it curtside is almost like a powdered metal it's very formable they can make it into stamping dies and depending on what you're stamping you might get 500 to 1000 stampings um with aluminum probably more than that and it costs like one fifth the cost of a solid steel die so yes i'd love to do them will it happen immediately probably not i would my best guess is a couple of years okay um how about um 1964 monza horn buttons uh someone asked the question and then there was a second like yeah pretty unlikely okay however and nobody else knows this other than the group watching we have paid for the tooling for a 1960 gas tank 1960 gas tanks we hope we will have by summer i've already approved the sample i wish i had it so i could put it in the 60 i'm working on that's going to be the last thing i'm going to put in is a brand new gas tank also i've been working on my 60 i actually came up with four more parts for the 1960 and i came up with a little part for all 60 to 64 corviers which is the ridiculous little bitty round wick that goes in the bottom of the directional lights you're showing nick moisture out of the directional light so you're sure you're showing some early model love there if you're going that small all right next one they're asking about is will you ever start rebuilding fuel pumps fuel pumps is a major problem i've put off several times making my own and i have finally had it i personally like a mechanical fuel pump if it's reliable and we have sent it to my most reliable person in taiwan i have a company in taiwan i've dealt with for 30 years the father of the company has met with me twice in the united states his son has taken over he's met with me they are one of the few companies overseas that i will deal with they are the only supplier overseas that i have ever found that john and myself have approved a part and he's gotten back and said well i'm surprised you didn't complain about this so he really looks out for our quality he is working on the fuel pump i hope that we can finally have a fuel pump that's reliable um like they used to be that's that i think that's good good news because that's always a there's a couple other questions around fuel pumps so that kind of answers theirs um people kind of want to know are any parts getting extinct or rarer or even more scarce and someone just asked and what are those so they can start getting orders in now so stock up on them i would say some of the rarer parts are probably trim for the 60 61 62 cars um we have a few pieces of them left they used to be so plentiful that we would basically give them away but i haven't seen hardly any in years so if you've got one of those cars that's got the trim that goes around the belt line i would get that the other thing is when we did the fc rear axle bearings they were supposed to run 500. they only ran 350 axle bearings i went back to them and they said the only way that they would re-run them now is 2 000. well i don't remember exactly but i think we've had fc axle bearings for 10 or 12 years we haven't sold out of the 350 but we're very very close um so if you need one for your fc you better get them because there's no way i can afford to do 2 000 fc axle bearings it's things like axle bearings that you know we have tried to step up mechanical we know people want trim but the mechanical is so important that that's what we invest in i know so there's some parts on the internet you can get for core bears there's a few other suppliers that sell for other cars that have corvair parts maybe their price is less maybe it's more i don't know i can't keep up with everything on the internet what i do know is any support you give us goes into my employees and more corvair parts um and i hope we've proved that especially over the last four or five years if you look at the number of reproduced parts it's it's ridiculous um for some you know for for the corvair it's the customers are fantastic the support from the customers is fantastic i think the majority of them realize that we can't be in business without them and we certainly realize that we can't be in business without customers and we really try to keep as many parts available as we can um yeah i'd like some profit but i also it's just i love making pirates for the core of here well your your passion has supported our hobby and as i said i'm going to send you the comments because people have some really great feedback and positives about the interaction with your employees and everything you and joan have done for us as a car hobbyists i mean let's face it we wouldn't have our beautiful cars if it weren't for your attention to detail on these parts um someone did put out here though uh something to think about um you know would you consider if we if there were some of these rarer parts that needed more money that goes into them would you consider someone putting together a kickstarting kickstarter campaign to get funding to do some of these so it's something to think about for the future if there's some kind of way to get people to put money into it and uh it's just something to think about so um but yeah i i i i guess it's a possibility it's just i don't know i've never i've never really relied on anything like that i don't like to take pre-deposits on anything because you just don't know the they tell you it should be done in six months and it's two years it's just you just don't know what's going to happen with with the things but um well cal you've really done a great job of explaining a lot about the business and we all got to see the folks if everybody noticed cal went around and took pictures but notice how many of them said i don't want my picture taken and they turn their back so but do tell them they were stars tonight and we certainly appreciate it and i think everybody on this call who's uh communicated or worked uh on the phone with your folks know it's not just a matter of placing an order it's the customer service it's the knowledge that they provide when you are on the phone with them you order a part and they say don't forget this other part there's a lot of knowledge or people have about these cars and these parts that i don't i don't think can be replicated by any other vendor so um there is one there there is one last thing i would like to say um you know some of my newer people are phone people and because that's just where they start is taking orders and pulling orders and packing orders and with 16 000 parts it would help a little bit if people would have a little bit more of an idea of what they want sometimes they call up yeah i need some parts for my front suspension and it's like oh my god you know please start someplace um and there are so many parts that we link in the catalog or if you take the time to read the web the description on the web page it may say well you know if you're installing this seal you also might need the gasket so i know in this age of instantly getting this and instantly getting that um i need people to just look at stuff a little bit more and kind of help my people at my end because they're trying their best but not everyone speaks the exact same core beer part language so um that's good that's great feedback be an educated consumer would help the ordering process yeah that's great and there's just so many parts in the catalog that they can't possibly tell you all there's some parts that we have had for seven or eight years and i would go to the show well when are you gonna do section so and i went well that was in the supplement four years in a row and then it went into the catalog and it's right on page 99. it's funny that's so much in there well cal thank you for your generosity of your time tonight and your support you're getting rounds of applause by people i can see them and certainly pass along to joan all our thanks too for all that she's put into this um if i didn't get to your question again know that cal is going to get all the the questions i tried to kind of group them together and most importantly um i hope that everybody on this call has enjoyed the time that he put into putting this story together and do go out to the to the website and watch some of those videos we thought about trying to show them but videos don't always do very well on zoom so we're just encouraging you to go out and poke around out there there's a lot of great content that cal has on his website that would be interesting to watch too so everybody good night everyone bye

Channel: Corvair Society of America

Views: 5,698

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Id: Ovr31OcLr1s

Length: 65min 10sec (3910 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 23 2022