The Internet has made it easier to do many things that used to be nearly impossible. Collectors from all over the world convene daily at auctions to buy and sell exculsive and rare car parts that formerly would have been sold twice a year at conventions. Everyone is advertising themselves on dating websites and finding high school romances years later on social networking pages. This extends to the world of car parts. Whether you’re refurbishing that classic Studebaker, building your own DeLorean, or just repairing the trusty family wagon, if you’re not doing it with used car parts (or even cheap new car parts) sourced from people over the Internet, then you’re probably paying too much. In the bad old days, you might have one, maybe two salvage yards or car part dealers in your town, and that guy (apart from having the meanest dog in town) could probably charge you whatever he wanted for a nearly new Chevy carburetor, but now, with the Internet, you can shop dozens or hundreds of places, find a nicer carb and pay less for it without picking up a nice set of tooth marks from that junkyard dog.
You can also forget about waiting months or years finding that perfect part for your restoration project. The factory original porthole window for your Galaxy that would have taken you months to find by calling around to car salvage places, visiting junkyards and shopping yard sales can now be found by a simple search and shipped to your house overnight. It’s amazing how much more you can get done when you’re spending most of your car fixin’ time in the garage rather then in the salvage yard. So if your passions lie with old Ford trucks or small block American Muscle cars you can see how a technology that is rapidly making the world a very small place is something that can be of enormous help to you. You can find used car parts, new car parts, even small factories in Taiwan to make a new replica of an old car part. The key is to think of it as just another tool in your toolbox, right between the torque wrench and the socket set, a magical tool that puts every piece of every car in the world (well, most pieces of many cars in the world, anyway) right at your fingertips in the time it takes to type a few words into the search box.