How to correctly order parts for a project car | Austin-Healey Bugeye Sprite Project

Update by Tim Suddard to the Austin-Healey Sprite project car
Jul 6, 2021

There is a right way and a wrong way to order parts for your project car.

A few common mistakes:

• Cherry picking parts prices makes it hard for these companies to survive and be there when you need them. When you find a good partner, treat them as such.
• Ordering too much too soon can cause into storage issues. Remember, a disassembled car takes up more space than a complete one.
• Not opening boxes when they arrive can make returns difficult. It’s hard to send something back a year after it was shipped.

We try to order parts according to the next step in the project. While it’s tempting to order everything at once in order to save on shipping, we’ll often just order body parts or engine parts or so on. We’ll use the parts in a timely fashion and move on to the next section of the restoration.

If your project scope changes–or you need to change horses or whatever–you’re not also stuck with a lot of extra parts.

However, we didn't take our own advice with our Bugeye Sprite project and ordered more than $3000 worth of parts from Moss Motors. We also grabbed a supercharger kit that likely won’t be installed until the project’s later steps.

The reality: When the parts arrived, before we could even store them, we had to first organize and catalog.

In our defense, we were worried about future availability of the supercharger kit since that’s exclusive to Moss. Plus, a Sprite is a simple car, and we think we can wrap up this one in less than a year.

Next, time to get back into the shop.

Comments

View all comments on the CMS forums

You'll need to log in to post.

Sponsored by