New Car – Auto Loans

Archive for September, 2010

Ever since the Internet went into the mainstream e-commerce has grown exponentially. E-commerce the business of selling products and services online. You can find almost anything on the now. It has become an excellent research tool and many people do most of their shopping online. Buying auto parts online is no exception. There are many ways to research and buying auto parts online and many benefits of it.

Why would you want to buying auto parts online? Mostly all the same reasons that you would buy anything else online. Availability of auto is better then trying to run around and find the part you need at different parts stores. Store competition is also much higher because all of the online stores nationwide are competing against each other. The are not limited by location so you can pick from any of them. You also have many more options when shopping online. Not only can you find the part you need but you’ll have many different ones to choose from. Not just some OEM part or just one brand of aftermarket part that your local parts store carries.

Are you trying to find one of those hard to find parts? There Internet is the place to be when looking for these kind of parts. All of the different parts stores have the web sites that give you the ability to be buying auto parts online. There are also a few that are an auto parts warehouse online and can sell parts at discounted prices compared to the normal stores. These kind of places are more likely to have a part you need. If the part your looking for is not in any sort of reproduction, OEM or aftermarket, then you can still by used. There are people selling many parts all of the time like ebay motors. This portion of the famous auction site is like an online swap meet where you can find almost anything that you can bolt to car. So if you can find it at the online stores try eBay Motors.

Why is the availability and prices better online? The biggest reason is store competition. There are thousands of different stores online that give you the ability of buying auto parts online. All of the stores that you would locally buy parts from have give you the ability of buying auto parts online. They offer all the parts that you would find in the brick and mortar store plus everything that the organization would offer. Then there are the internet auto parts warehouses where they offer many brands and carry almost anything that you could bolt onto your car. Then there are specialty stores that offer parts for specific reasons or specific cars that that are a little harder to get or more uncommon.

You can find almost anything online these days. Buying auto parts online are not exception to this rule. Buy from stores that are local online, auto parts warehouses that offer a wide range of parts at lower prices, specialty stores that have more exotic products and auctions sites like Ebay that allow anybody to sell anything they want online so you can find that non-reproduction part. What ever the part, if you can’t find it online then you won’t be able to find it.

This depends on a lot of issues, most of which we can’t determine without tearing your car apart, at this point we have already begun the work on your car, the cost to restore your car is a subjective thing, we have no idea what it will take to restore a car until we look in to it.

Is the car from an area that makes it rust heavily, if so what damage has rust caused to the car, do we need to replace most of the metal parts of the car, such as the floorboards, trunk floors, rocker panels, and inner wheel wells, well you get the idea.

Does it have excessive body damage, electrical damage, interior damage, or mechanical damage, all of these things weigh in to the cost of getting your car restored, most reputable shops will have a shop labor rate that is high, if you locate a $25.00 per hour shop beware of what might happen to your car.

You might think that this sounds unfair, but your paying for their knowledge, not for their time, most reputable shops have owners that have spent a lot of time learning how to restore cars, and they should get paid for their knowledge of your car.

This is not collision repair, it’s nothing like it, we have no book to go off of to estimate the cost to restore your car, we have our knowledge of of your car, and the restoration of it, people often ask me if they can restore a car for less then it would cost to buy a fully restored one, the answer is no.

It will always cast more to restore a car then the blue book value of the car, so restoring them to resell, and make money off of is not the answer, you need to restore the car because it holds nostalgia for your, it brings back memories of the good old days.

There are just way to many factors to look at, factors that require us to begin work on the car to know what’s going on with it, a car can have a lot of hidden surprises, things that you’ll never see from just an outer inspection of the car, we need to get deeper then that to know about that car.

I know that to you this sounds like an excuse to get started on your car, but there really is no way for a restoration shop to know what’s in store in the restoration of any car, it is 100% impossible to estimate the cost of restoring your car.

An average restoration can, and will take a lot of time to complete, even if the car is in excellent condition, it will take at least 1,000 hours to complete the restoration of your car, so let’s take my shop for example, the shop labor rate is $75.00 PHR, this means at least $75,000 in just labor.

It does not include parts, or supplies, it does not include any custom work that you want done, nor does it include any high performance work that you want done, this just gives you an idea of why a shop would say that they don’t estimate restoration work on any car.

If you want the car restored faster, all the shop can do is to put another tech on your job, and most shops won’t do that for free, they’ll charge shop labor rate for each employee that works on your car, so you should also keep this in mind when you want to push the speed.

This is not the first article that I have written on this, and I’m sure it won’t be the last, I seem to keep getting the same questions, a professional restoration shop is not in business to rip you off, they are only charging what it costs them to do the work.

Car Restoration

Muscle Car Restoration

Supply and Demand: The magic words that govern our economy.

When the supply goes up as the demand decreases, prices drop.

When the supply gets skimpy as the demand increases, prices increase.

That’s all an American needs to know about economics.

Well, most Americans know this already and they are not too happy about it when it comes to gasoline.

The supply of gasoline depends on the availability of crude oil.

The supply of gasoline depends on refining capacity.

The supply of gasoline depends on distribution capabilities.

Right now it seems there is plenty of crude, the refineries are keeping up (after a sag due to Katrina), and the tankers keep pulling into the service stations with gas to spare.

The Gasoline Shortage of 1973-1974

In 1973-1974, you could buy gasoline only on odd days or on even days, not both. Some stations were out of gasoline. What happened to cause those unfortunate conditions? Read about it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis

The 1974 shortage was a pain to me because I was traveling around the country at that time. I rented a car at Hertz and was told, “You have about an eighth of a tank. You can fill it up on the New Jersey Turnpike today because your license plate says so. Don’t wait until tomorrow! You won’t be able to get gas.”

That was called the “odd day” and “even day” system.

I thought, I probably have enough to get back to the airport.

That is called “fanciful thinking.”

I found myself in the deep stuff and had to find some “illegal gas.” I was lucky, the company I was visiting gave me a shot out of their pump but they were not happy about it. They were under the same restrictions as the service stations. They could have all gone to jail.

To see what happened to create the gasoline shortage of 1973-1974 go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis It started with the Arab’s being angry over the Yom Kippur War, restricting supply to those they didn’t like such as Israel’s allies (us), and OPEC’s desire to quadruple the price of crude. Read the rest of this entry »