How come so many items for the 93-97 camaro's are discontinued? Don't you sell the machines that make these parts to various companies after so? It's a pain in the butt to find parts, if you can find parts.

 

I have to agree. Do you know how long it took me to find an entire EGR System mounting bracket and everything...

 

I can help with this one.

It’s called economics. Most automotive parts are made on a custom production line. The line will run until there is not enough volume to keep it running. Normally a large volume of stock is run off right before the line is torn down. As these parts run out part numbers are discontinued. Rebuilding the line for a day to two worth of running is not worth it.

GM does not make a lot of pc/parts. Most is farmed out. GM cannot force a vendor to make a part number after volume falls below a certain point. Example if you wanted a new vortex head you would have to start with a casting run. When the head was original made they ran 4000 a day (just a guess). It would be machined on a transfer line. The tooling for that transfer line will take weeks to setup. The original transfer line could make a head every 25 seconds. As you can imagine it is huge and needs to make 10's of thousands of heads just to justify the setup.

As demand raises either another department of the OEM or some other vendor will have to create a completely new process using more configurable CNC machines to mill the heads. The startup cost for new process can be 100K. So they would need the volume to support all the new tooling. These parts will not be anywhere near as cheap as the original. It can take up to an hour to machine a head with a CNC machine. Because of this need for volume and increase cost many parts never get reproduced. If the void can be filled by reman or used parts it will. It is simple economics. If the demand rises and people are willing to pay the projected price someone with make it. US manufacture are hungry. Problem is there is rarly the volume at the required price and someone has to front the cash to get things going.

 

Its called economies of scale...the quantity required to make it profitable just aren't there...or maybe they are but the start up costs are so high they prohibit anyone from starting

 

Umm, STILL waiting for GM's response... That's the point of this section, right? Someone from GM will be responding? LOL

 

I think they need another bail-out to answer questions on this forum. They had to let the one person monitoring forums go because of the economy.

 

They should be able to throw an intern at it LOL.

 

While this is a true fact of life for our cars there is one manufacturer I know of that still supports its older lines. Mercedes parts can still be had as far back as the 1940s, most every engine or body part is still available. Yes you pay a premium for some of the parts but for some one restoring a 1953 Gull wing, worth over 1mil, you are happy to pay $500 for a battery box. I do wish that we 4th gen owners had places like Year One and Classic Industries to help us with parts, I guess we will have to wait till our cars are classics.

Massey

 

^which will be never. I don't see our cars becoming a "classic" or "collectible". Too many people have them. They're not rare at all... Defeats the purpose.

 

I know 4th gens are pretty much throw away cars, but dang it I like mine and plan to keep it around for as long as I can. Year one and some other places do make some parts for the 4th gens, but what I need or are looking for they don't.