The Impala Project at Fall Carlisle 09

Posted by Carl King - 05/10/09 at 07:10 pm

Fall carlisle was a good source of amusement this year. The parade of people walking by was like an exhibit of creativity. I’ve never seen so many grown men pulling little red wagons. A lot of other parts carts were customized version of expandable shopping baskets, hand trucks, and hoverrounds. Others were more practical like industrial wagons made out of angle iron and stretched steel mesh.

Sales weren’t even enough to break even, as usual. It really wasn’t the money that brought me there though. It was a chance to get rid of some parts I don’t need, and hang out with my son. He messed up and started getting bad reports back from school about his homework assignments going missing, so we weren’t going to let him have a couple of school days off.

We don’t have a dog, so I don’t know what happened to the homework.

Anyway, I’d been putting parts in the back of my truck for 3 weeks before the Fall Carlisle event. I even made a trip out to a friends place in Berryville, VA to pickup some parts he’s had for a few decades and brought those along. His were mostly small parts like a lot of cigarette lighters, taillight lenses, power window motors, some trim moldings and a quadrajet carburator for 68 Olds 442.

I’ve booked 2 spots, ND28 and ND30 to spread the parts out when I get there. Thursday and Saturday were pretty quiet. Friday was really busy, there were a lot of people, but they weren’t spending any money. Jeff, one of the vendors directly across from me has named  Saturday “hub caps and girlfriends day”. Since the girlfriends are tagging along the guys aren’t doing any serious parts hunting. He should know. He’s been attending as a vendor since the 70’s.

I love the story Jeff told me about a kid that was there with his dad about 20 years ago. The kid had a small motor he was selling and was also greatly amused by starting it, and revving it up. This went on for a whole day. An elderly gentleman from a few spaces away approached the kid and asked him how much he wanted for the motor. The said “50 dollars sir”. The old guy slowly pulled out his wallet and gave the kid $50. With the motor still running the old guy bent over, picked up the motor by a side handle it had and spun around in a big circle flinging the motor over the fence and into the woods where it finally died a quiet death. The kid asked, “Why’d you do that mister?” and the old guy replied, “cause it was my motor”.

Jeff was full of stories. He’d come over and talk for 15 minutes straight without me getting a word in edgewise. The man is very intelligent however. He could recall suffix codes and casting numbers from cars he was driving in his 20’s. In fact his partner told me his coworkers at their shop call him Doc and it’s even on the name tag for his workshirt. He’s the company parts doctor.

George, another vendor across from me has been there since the 70’s as well. He sells a lot of small parts that he’s been collecting for decades. He got his start by accident. He knew someone with a garage that was going out of business and the guy wanted to unload his parts inventory. He asked george to come get it and store it in his barn. The guy never did come see George to get the parts. Once word got out that George was buying old inventory, more people started calling him and before too long his barn was full of boxes of boxes of NOS parts for cars going back to the 30’s. So now he’s retired and spends a few weeks each year doing the car show circuit to unload the parts.

And that’s pretty much what I’m doing too. Getting rid of parts I’ll never use. I stripped a couple of cars last year to get the parts I wanted and at the time thought that I should take everything I possibly can. Why not? I bought the cars to strip.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Classic car events. The entry is tagged under Fall Carlisle 09. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.