Pure unobtainium

Are we talking unobtanium, or just expensitanium?
I think I'm shortly going to be looking for a dashboard for a 1992 LHD Lancia Y10. I suspect the only way might be a flight to France, buying an entire car, and driving it back!
At least with scene tax, parts are expensive but generally available.

Do you want actual unobtainum or just expensive?

For me at one point the holy grail of car parts was an LZ head for the Nissan L4 engine, it is a twin cam head used in works racing L series engines. Eventually finding its way in to Formula Pacific cars. My dream was to build an LZ20B engine and stick it in the Sunny as a kind of "cars they should have made for racing" type thing. Only problem is the LZ head is insanely rare, what is worse is that I've actually seen one for sale and missed out on buying it by a couple of hours. That was 15 years ago now and I've not seen one since.


The other weird parts are the small things, like plastic catches and door car fitments and things. Luckily 3D printing can now bridge that gap. Hopefully one day we'll be able to print full body panels relatively inexpensively from actual metal.

Cutting up or just scrapping at least five mk1 escorts makes me cry now!

The "hedgehog" resistor for climate equipped Alfa 155s - looked for that for literally years
Most recent quest was for the rear brake compensator for the 916 V6. did eventually get one so not wholly unobtainable
Original coolant rads for Fiat Coupe 20VT

Load dependant brake valves for Maestro vans.......nope....

A recurring theme?

I fund there was only one supplier for this part for mine and that was one whose parts should never be fitted to a Land Rover, especially in safety critical role.

Had no choice, so shipped at huge expense only to find that the set screws holding the two halves together were loose. Fitting it unchecked would have resulted in brake fluid and a lot of PSI firing all over the engine bay. Unobtanium? No. Undesirable? most definitely.

I like it when the search for unobtainium turns into a successful quest for the holy grail 🤣. I was told by all and sundry that I would never get the orange lenses for my Mazda Rx2. Three years later I proved all the naysayers wrong, by finding three ,new in the box, complete lights. I turned down offers of $1500 us. Then last year I found two perfect secondhand ones from a guy who bought the car on auction in 1974 as a spotty teenager. Enthusiasm over took experience on a corner on the way home. The car was a write off. The taillights and badges got put in the garage and the rest scrapped. 35 years later he moved house,and advertised them. Mine for £36 ...🤣🤣🤣🤣. Keep searching and keep the faith

I wanted for a customer vehicle, the metal water pipe that winds it's way round the front and N/S of the block on a PD diesel T5. No can do, said ALL the VW dealers in England AND Europe! There was a brief rumour of one in a garage in Oxford, but when I rang them, they said they wanted the records updating, they hadn't got it, it was a stock control error, but if they HAD had it, they could have sold it 20 or 30 times over. And were sick of people ringing up asking for it!

Not wanting to put it on back order with an indeterminate but distant date, (The customer was literally screaming for his van back and I wanted to get paid for the cylinder head refurb etc that i'd already done, the pipe failure was just an a side issue) I decided to look for alternatives. It turns out that though there are a multitude of similar parts on various models of PD engine, the base part number is the same and the model is designated by a pair of suffix letters, in the case of this particular T5 the suffix was CE. So I put the base part number into ebay and got thousands of pipes, when the full number with correct suffix got me none. Then it was a matter of finding a picture of one similar enough to use and local enough to go and collect it where I could physically lay the 2 side by side.

Turns out that one for a Golf variant is close enough to use with only the resiting of a securing bolt into a different (but still present and threaded) hole in the block I found one less than 10 miles from home and for a mere £20! A new one of the same suffix from VAG (which is available) is over £100, but I didn't want an expensive new one at that point as I wasn't sure I could make it fit!

Steve

Peugeot 106 inner wings.