Parts By Craigslist…

My Mustang is forty-six years old. It never ceases to amaze me that as old as the car is, it’s actually trivially easy to find parts.

You can buy everything from itty-bitty plastic washer fluid hose splitters to door lock knobs to complete $18,499 body shells.

My favorite place for buying parts for the Mustang is cjponyparts.com. They’ve got a great selection, free shipping and actually answer the phone when you need to call to change an order. I’ve purchased most of my Mustang-specific parts through them so far with more to come. Up until a month or so ago, I hadn’t found a part that I needed that they didn’t have.

Then I found out I needed one of these:

To explain what that part is for requires a bit of background in automotive style nomenclature. What makes a 1969 Mustang Coupe a “Coupe” is the absence of the traditional “B” pillar that most cars have.

Other terms for cars like this are “hardtop” and “awesome looking”:

Since there are still two windows on each side, there needs to be some form of weather stripping between them to keep the rain and wind out when they’re up. Which brings us back to our part.

The trim piece I needed affixes to the window that’s in the door. It holds a piece of weather stripping that seals against the quarter window:

In my case, the passenger side version of this piece is mysteriously half-missing. The half that affixes to the window is there but the piece that holds the weather stripping has gone AWOL.

No problem, right?

A quick trip to cjponyparts.com brought up the equivalent pieces needed for 69 Mustang Fastbacks, but nothing for coupes. Checking elsewhere on the web yielded similar results.

As it turns out, this part is simply not made anymore for some reason. There’s no way to get a reproduction so in order to get one you have to find one used.

I called the nearest Mustang-specific salvage yard (R & S Classic Mustang Supply in Albany Oregon) only to find out they didn’t have the part. I contacted another (much bigger) Mustang-specific salvage yard (Prestige Mustang) and found out they didn’t have the part either. More ominously, the man I spoke to at Prestige said

“Those parts are almost impossible to find. As soon as we get them they get sold.”

Getting desperate, I fell back to my last, best chance for parts – Craigslist. A few weeks of searching using searchcraigslist.org provided a couple of leads, but no parts. Finally, in late January I saw a posting from Scotty in North Carolina stating he was parting out a 69 Mustang Coupe. A quick email that attempted to disguise my desperation yielded the following picture of a blue donor Mustang that had the part I needed:

I immediately agreed to pay twice what I expected to in order to buy the part and have it sent to me. Last Friday, my long national parts-searching nightmare finally ended when this showed up at the door:

Whew! Thank you Scotty and your blue donor Mustang. I can now return to buying ridiculously-priced parts through my normal process.