rev up your engines, today I'm gonna answer bill's question
where do I buy car parts from, I'm always struggling with that myself I've been
we're gonna cars for 51 years but things change, places that used to sell good
parts now sell crappy parts, places I've never heard of sell good parts, but
places I've never heard of sell bad parts too, so how do you figure out where
to buy them, well the first thing I'm going to start out with this we're not
to buy car parts, I would not advise anybody to go to a place like eBay and
randomly buy car parts from people that they don't even know who they are where
the parts come from, I tried them in the past and hey it bit me in the rear end
and every once awhile I get a customer that bought some parts on eBay, more than
half the time the part doesn't fit or it's a cheaply made part that doesn't
work right, you got to know where your parts are coming from and it depends
what kind of parts are you buying, let's say I want to buy some quality oil
there's nothing wrong with going on the internet and buying the oil at the
lowest price you can find, as long as you know it's the oil you want, as an example
my Triumph motorcycle I use this very expensive Motul racing oil for
motorcycles and very good oil filters, but I don't go to a motorcycle store and
buy them i buy them online to find the best price, it's the same product it's
just someone selling it cheaper, and the same goes true for bigger more important
parts, like say you need a fuel pump, when you buy a fuel pump for a car my advice
is your best to go OEM, the original equipment manufacturers, say for a Toyota
now this old Celica and most Toyota's, they have Nippon Denso pumps Toyota doesn't
make them the company Nippon Denso makes them, so as long as you're getting the
Nippon Denso pump it's fine you can buy it anywhere, but since fuel pumps are an
integral part of your fuel injection system, they have to be perfectly made
and you want them to last, don't go out and buy this cheap knockoff ones
especially chinese-made ones, I've had people do that
sometimes they don't work out of the box, sometimes
six months later they break, you want a quality part you can go anywhere and buy
it feel free to price all over the place,
just make sure that it's the OEM manufacturer like Nippon Denso in this
case, but don't be fooled by the name OEM there's a lot of manufacturers out there
and they claim their products are OEM it'll say OEM this OEM that, well like in
this Toyota, if it's a fuel pump
it'll be Nippon Denso, if it's some other company and says its OEM they're just
lying to you, people can print out whatever they want
so make sure you know what you're looking for, and do a little price
comparison and quality comparison, let's take oil filters, now you can go to any
discount auto parts store and you can get cheap oil filters, usually they
aren't that expensive, but if you want the quality oil filters sometimes they
charge twelve or fourteen dollars a piece, hey I buy the same stuff and in that
case I do buy it online, I'll buy a case of them online for way less than half
of what they're charging at a supposed a discount auto parts store, and of course
do shop around, take something like car batteries, yeah they're very important so
you want a good battery, but the prices are wide, I've seen the same crank and
amperage battery sold at a store for $70 or $130, and I'm talking the same exact
battery, you need to do research on it when you're buying parts, you don't want
to just go to someplace and buy whatever they got lying around, now this is an
extreme example but years ago there was an auto parts chain here in Houston that
they were affiliated with some kind of convenience store, there would be a convenience
store on one side and an auto parts on the other, and a friend of mine was a manager
of one of them and he said at night they would raise the price of headlights, they
know that somebody's headlights burn out they're coming in at night and they
were open till 11 o'clock at night, they gotta have the headlights so they don't
care what the price is they're gonna buy it, I mean you
don't normally see things that bad but there's a lot of cases
where, there's false leaders in the store to get you in but the prices of other
stuff isn't so good, but many auto parts stores
hey they jack up the price on items that they sell a lot of them and they're an
impulse like windshield wiper blades, not only can you buy windshield wiper blades
cheaper online or at different kinds of stores like Walmart.
but if you do research about things like silicone
wiper blades, you'll find that the silicone blades can last a really a long
time, I asked a guy at a discount auto parts store once, why don't you guys sell
silicone wiper blades and what did he tell me,he said Scotty every month
we sell thousands of wiper blades, we don't want to sell them silicone wiper
blades that might last for years and years, we'd be cutting our own throats
and getting rid of one of our big revenue streams wiper blades, cuz in the
case of wiper blades, our polluted modern society wears them out so fast, there's so
much dust and stuff in the atmosphere that the thin rubber on those they're
thin so they wiped good and don't clatter, wear out real fast
where the silicone ones are tougher and they last a long time
so in that case, hey you might want to go online and buy silicone wiper blades
you'll save money and they'll last so much longer, you won't care that they
cost a little bit more, because if there's one thing I've learned over the
last 51 years of fixing cars, and that's don't just go by your pocketbook, don't
always go for the cheapest price, because a lot of times the cheapest price is
really cheap quality, especially with tools, these are gear wrenches they're
cool because they have flexing heads at different angles and an open end, so they
can get to just about anywhere, these weren't cheap but these things are
30-something years old and yeah I'm a slob there's a little bit of rust on
them because I don't polish them, but hey they still work perfectly fine I've seen
knockoffs of these gear wrenches I even tried out a couple of sets years
ago and the stupid things would break when I pulled on them hard, your better
to spend a little bit more for a quality tool if you're gonna use them all the
time and expect them to be working years from now, and when it comes to buying
quality electronic components for your vehicle, you're always best to stick with
orginal equipment a hundred percent, I learned that the hard way, years ago I used
to work on a lot of German cars and some
of the maf sensors, the mass airflow sensors, some of those things could be
six seven hundred bucks even years ago so I try these aftermarket ones that
people made that said, oh you know they're cheaper and they're brand new or
they work just as good, well no they didn't they worked horribly, sometimes the
car would run worse than it did and I think, gee maybe I diagnosed it wrong, or
I'd put it in six months later the car is towed back to my garage and it's the
stupid MAF sensor gone bad, so on really critical parts like that electronics,
you'll want to stick to the original equipment people, and especially with
things as complex as a MAF sensor, you really should go new, not rebuild, because
those things are so critical and I've seen so many rebuilt MAF sensors not
work right or go bad quickly, that you're better to bite the bullet and buy a
brand new original equipment one, but like I said, say it's a denso, you could buy
it anywhere as long as it's Nippon Denso, you don't have to
go to the dealer and pay whatever ridiculous price they want for them, but
you want to stick with the original equipment on it, now sure we all want to
say money buying the right parts, but we don't want to get stuck with a bad part,
one that isn't gonna last, or one that might not even work, because that's the
worst thing on earth, I've been doing this for 51 years and even once in a
while I get stuck with something that you put it on it doesn't work, and then
you think the car is still running the same, maybe I diagnosed it wrong, but then
you find out hours or even days later that hey you were right in diagnosing
what was wrong, but the stupid part you got isn't any good, which is the main
reason that for complex parts I stay away from the internet in buying parts,
because hey you got to buy them, you got to get them shipped, you hope somebody put
it in the right box, and then if you got a problem you got to send it back, and
your car is not working the whole time you're much better finding a local
supplier for what you're getting, because with the insane competition in business
these days, especially in auto parts a lot of times you can even barter the price
at stores, say get your phone, hey I found these guys down the street they're
selling this for that, half the time those guys will match the price, because
hey it's a competitive world and if they don't they're not gonna get any business,
so now you've got a better idea on where you should buy car parts, we're all in
this together we're trying to save money but we're trying to do it right,
and since this is the Thursday segment where I answer a viewers question,
place your own question on the YouTube comments below and I'll answer the best
one in a single video, and where else can you find a guy with 50
years of experience of fixing cars so answer your own question with a video,
so if you never want to miss another one of my
new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!