Collector Part Exchange (CPX)

Chris Bright - Co-Founder for Collector Part Exchange (CPX)

I enjoy creating and growing businesses and collecting cars, so CPX is a dream come true. My earliest memories are filled with Hot Wheels and Indy 500s on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Life changing events include watching the Lambo in the opening scene of Cannonball Run and the R&T cover story on the Ferrari 288 GTO. My first interesting car was a Porsche 928 which I drove every day and put 175K miles on. I am the President of the Alfa Romeo Owners of Oregon (AROO) -- my daily driver is a 1974 Giulia Super 1.3 -- and have been a contributor to Sports Car Market and Alfa Owner magazines.

Contact: Chris Bright at Chris@CollectorPartExchange.com | N/A | Visit Online!

            

• The origin of CPX – the who/what/where/why of the effort + “What’s in a name”?
• You’re getting parts collecting dust back into circulation. Why is this important to the future of the hobby?
• The importance of the EV-olution to the Collector Car hobby
• Details about CPX like…
  • What kind of cars do you personally consider to be collector cars? Any year ranges (or limits) on the parts one can list or purchase?
  • How much does it cost to start a store in the online marketplace? How much does CPX take if a part sells?
  • How often are new items listed?
  • What’s PART PING?
  • What else is available on CPX besides car parts?

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motor Sports Podcast Break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motor sports.

With each passing gear and each generation in the automotive world, more and more cars are becoming collector items from your grandfather’s 35 Packard to a 63 beetle convertible or iconic eighties Ferrari tucked away in your garage. , wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a way to make it easier to keep these kinds of vehicles on the road no matter what?

We all agree we wanna keep these cars running and looking their best for as long as we can. Enter Chris Bright, co-founder of the Collector part Exchange, C P X for short, A new community designed specifically for Petrolheads, an easy and fun to use website, supporting great businesses that keep this hobby vibrant.

And with that, let’s welcome Chris to break Fix. Oh, it’s great to be here. That was an awesome intro. , as I start out, many of these interviews, [00:01:00] every great story has an origin. So let’s talk about the origin story behind C P X, the who, the what, the where, the why behind the effort. So Chris, tell us all. Sure.

Yeah. Well, uh, how far do you want me to go back to birth or No, collector, part exchange. It was kind of a happy accident. I’ve been in tech startups and an entrepreneur pretty much for my entire career. That’s a natural place for me. And I’d actually been the co-founder of a pretty successful software company out here in Portland, Oregon, that it got acquired in 2017 and we were continuing to operate the company.

But once that transaction happens, things start to change culturally and just operationally, and it became less interesting. I’m more of a startup person than I am, like running an a going concern type of thing. So I decided it was time to leave and, and one of my fellow executives, Aaron, who’s my business partner now, decided.

He wanted to leave too. And I said, I’m gonna start a new company. I have no idea what it’s gonna be. We decided to just [00:02:00] brainstorm. So I rented a cabin out in the woods. We were totally disconnected, only heated by a, a little wood burning fire out in this cold old growth forest. And we just started brainstorming and we got those post-it notes that stick on the walls, and we would like just sit down and randomly start spouting out ideas and writing ’em up.

If someone had been passing by, they’d think we were the uni bomber or something like that. And guessing these ideas range the gamut, right from one end of the spectrum together. So how did you settle on cars? Yeah. During that conversation, I said, I’ve been into cars for my adult life. And I said, Aaron, there’s this thing that happens in Portland in April on the one of the wettest weekends of the year.

It’s called a swap meet. This swap meet attracts 120,000 people and messes up traffic for days. People love it, and I don’t understand how that continues to exist in this. Electronic E-commerce, Amazon World. I said, there’s gotta be a, a better way to connect people and help them find those [00:03:00] parts and help them get what they need for their cars.

Because it’s really easy to buy stuff at a car level, bring a trailer, being the, the best example today. But if you wanna buy a car, you can buy a car online. It’s not that hard. Buying parts is a completely different story and, and I have experienced that frustration in my own life. We didn’t choose that idea, then we kept it in the hopper of like the good ideas.

So we went back and we started looking at all the different things that we had available to us, and this one just continued to come back to us as the best idea. I like the fact that it’s in an area that I’m interested in and that’s exciting to me personally. I honestly think that can be a problem in, in the business world.

Like if you’re a startup person and you do something that you think is cool or fun, usually you don’t see the real business opportunity or you, right? So I kind of shunned those ideas. But this one, the more we looked into it, the better it got because it’s a huge marketplace. It is one of those places that just hasn’t caught up with the modern way of buying and selling things.

So if [00:04:00] you’re looking for a rare part for whatever car, it’s pretty difficult to find just by searching in Google. So we know from our backgrounds, Erin and I, that that’s something that can be solved. So we decided we don’t want to own parts or sell parts ourselves. We want to support all of these other businesses who haven’t yet modernized into the world because there’s new generations of buyers getting into this space, and they don’t want to pick up the phone.

Nobody wants to pick up the phone anymore, it seems like to call around and look for parts. They just want to go online, find it in Google, and then buy it. That’s essentially what we’re trying to create is connecting all of these small businesses in the universe of the collector car world and get them into one place.

We can help them be found in Google and help them find new customers wherever they may be. And we’re only six months into it, but it’s been a really exciting journey so far. So before we get into the more technical details of the how it works and why it works and all that, let’s talk about the name for just a second.

I have to [00:05:00] admit I struggled a bit. It’s not a plural parts. It’s collector parts Exchange or part. See, I’m doing it again. So why drop the S? There’s gotta be a standard. Every time you say parts exchange, we gotta drink something. . Agreed. Why drop the S? Originally it was that, and we have that url, but imagine the URL and you put.

The word parts and the word exchange next to each other. Now, imagine that s not being part of parts, but part of sex change. And once you see that, it’s like pretty hard not to see it again. So you decided. Uh, that could be problematic. So we just went with the singular, but if you go to Collector Parts Exchange, it still gets you to our website.

You bought both domains. That’s a smart move. Cause I was gonna say parts rolls off the tongue a little bit quicker. I know we all default to the plural because I don’t see myself buying one part. It’s gonna be multiple parts. Yeah. And all that. So you alluded to being [00:06:00] a car guy and obviously invention is bred by necessity, so you must have some sort of classic car or vintage vehicle.

That’s really the impetus behind this. So let’s dive into that a little bit. Yeah, I tend to like the unusual, you gotta keep Portland weird, right? Yeah, exactly. Always. So my very first collector grade car, I’ll say was a Porsche 9 28. You know, when I was growing up, that was on the cover of Road and Track Magazine and in all the top cars of the year type particles that you made, it was also in the movie Scarface and in risky business.

Exactly. So, and, and I just always thought it was a really cool and interesting car, but as we all know, Quite unloved. It was never accepted by Porsche files. I get why that happens. I don’t need to defend it. But if you just look at the car in and of itself, it’s an amazing hand-built machine, and it’s actually superior in many ways to the nine elevens.

And it’s build quality and the technology that it happens and aerodynamics, but we [00:07:00] won’t get into that. Even today, I look at ’em and I still find them to be very beautiful and even modern looking. Like the first one I think came out in 75 or something like that, at least the, the show car that predated it.

I digress. So I had a portion 9 28 and I had a great mechanic, but finding parts for it wasn’t that easy. But there were a couple of people that did that. And I drove that car. That was my daily driver, that was my only car for many years, and I put 175,000 miles on it. And it was great to own, to be honest with you.

It, it rarely broke down. It was hugely over-engineered. Fast forward, the, the next car I got was uh, an Al Alpha Romeo. So I got an Al Alpha Romeo G T V, it’s a 1972. And ooh, I’d been in Italy and I saw one and it. Oh man, that is a cool car. So I went and I started shopping around and I found one in my local Alfa Romeo Club and somebody was selling it, so I bought it and God, what a great car that was.

And just finding things for that. It was possible, but again, it was hard. It was not online. You [00:08:00] didn’t go somewhere, at least in, when I owned the car, you didn’t go to some. Website and go click, click, click and it arrives the next day and you can install it. It’s a lot of calling around. It’s a lot of like word of mouth or calling.

There’s this guy John Norman down in the Bay Area who’s got like this stash of parts. He’s a great guy, but none of it’s online and none of it’s even really cataloged in any way. It’s all cataloged in his brain. You know, you were always on the prowl for all of these parts and things that whether it was something that broke or something that you just wanted to upgrade or tweak on your car, whether it was wheels or seats or whatever.

To me that was frustrating because we’re spoiled nowadays. Honestly, whenever I clicked something, I expected to basically arrived within 24 hours, and I’m exaggerating, but only a little bit. If you have to call somebody and talk through things, it’s hard to make time for that in our busy lives. So for the individual owners, that’s a problem, but also, , even more so for [00:09:00] restoration shops and repair shops.

If you run a specialty collector vehicle service or restoration business, you have staff or a lot of your time is dedicated to calling around and trying to find what you need. And to me, that could break the back of the collector car business in many ways. Like if these parts get increasing lura and increasingly hard to find, people aren’t gonna want to pay for that time to find them and do all of these things.

Again, it’s a problem that can be easily solved, but it’s gonna take a lot of work and a lot of perseverance to kind of actually pull it off. And some people might argue that that was part of the fund maybe 20 or 30 years ago, right, when you didn’t have the accessibility is, is working on some of these rarer or vintage cars.

You know, we have to put it in perspective. It’s like a treasure hunt, right? You’re out there exploring, you’re meeting new people, you’re discovering, oh this guy, you know, John Norman, he’s got the stash of parts in the Bay Area, you know, whatever. And then you become friends with that guy, you know, and it, and it builds these relationships and it’s, it’s a different.

Way of being. I suppose I came up through that era, right? But I also learned very [00:10:00] quickly if I was smart, especially with European cars, I would cross match. I could figure out, well, that blah, blah, blah 9 28 part was actually available on every Volkswagen from, you know, 1982 to 1994. So I could just go to the local junkyard and get the same thing and not pay, you know, the Porsche tax or whatever.

Obviously, it’s more difficult with something like an Alfa male or a Ferrari. . But I even learned working on some British cars like Lotus’s and stuff where it was like, oh, that’s off of Nash, which is actually off of a Chevy. You know, things like that. So again, that was part of the fun of, of learning that then you became this subject matter expert.

But now, as you said, times have changed. A lot of those folks that we relied on as pillars in this collector car world are now, you know, maybe they’re gone or they’ve moved on, or you know, collections have been inherited by the people that were left behind. So, to your point, how do we overcome the challenge of , you know, getting, let’s say these large collections, some might say Pack rat collections.

Yeah. Up on a website, let alone up [00:11:00] on C P X. So how are you aiding people and doing that? You nailed it. I think it’s one of those situations where we have to help it adapt and that’s what I kind of see as the mission of collector part exchange, which is helping connect these business to the greater global network so that people can find ’em.

And to your point, it is part of the fun of getting to know people and trading that knowledge. But, It’s evaporating, it’s not captured anywhere. It’s all word of mouth. And those elders are moving on, whether by a choice or not, I really feel a mission to try and create an alternative path to capture that knowledge.

Either through community forums. We don’t have those yet, but we intend to like build areas where you can go and ask for advice and get help. Yeah. And, and ask those subject matter experts cuz you don’t know that subject matter expert for your car. He might be in Japan. Yeah. Or Australia. You know, you don’t know.

Like the one guy who knows that model inside and out isn’t in the US anymore, it’s somewhere else. So just having a place for that and then helping make sure that those parts don’t accidentally get trash for businesses [00:12:00] that are going under, or collectors that have a mass, like a garage full of parts. We need to have a ready place for them to send those parts.

And that’s where collector part exchange comes in. Yes. And you know, it always happens. And this, I saw this. Recently, a friend of mine unloaded a bunch of 16 valve Volkswagen stuff from the eighties, and he’s like, nobody wants this stuff anymore, blah, blah, blah. It’s all trash. And he dumps it without fail.

Three weeks later, somebody goes, I’m looking for a blah, blah, blah for a 16 valve. And he’s like, well, I just threw that away. I’m like, right . No, that, that happens all the time. And to me it’s like, uh, a, a little piece of my heartbreaks when I hear stories like that. And I know of a really famous, um, alpha Romeo dealership on the east coast that the guys aged out and they just wanted to be done.

So they basically shut down their business, put everything in some containers, and people were buying entire containers of parts for like $2,000 just so that they didn’t go into Yep, the landfill. We can’t have that happen. I wanna be tied into estate sales. I wanna be [00:13:00] tied into junkyards. I wanna be tied into all these businesses and, and help broker.

If somebody wants to retire, Hey, I’ve, I, maybe I’ve had a successful business career and I’m a car guy. Maybe I want to take over your business for you. It’s like that would be something that we could do. But getting back to your original question, which was how do we help them get parts on? Right now, anybody can load parts, indoor system, and it’s free.

By the way, if you sell it, it’s a 5% commission, so there’s no barrier to e entry right now. We have people who either already sell on eBay or are a little more robust and they have things in databases. Those are our biggest sellers because we can just import their database and list their parts with it.

If they have it in some sort of inventory management system, we can adapt that into our system, which is great, and that’s the fastest thing. You can do it on an individual basis. It just takes a little bit of time and I’ve done it and it’s not that hard. It just takes a few minutes to set some pictures and create a listing.

But five minutes or 10 minutes per item, it adds up. If you have a pretty big collection, if you know you have a few boxes of stuff, that’s an easy job. But if [00:14:00] you have a big shelf rack system in the back of your garage, that’s gonna take a lot longer. One thing that we hear people doing is they get their kids, or you know, there’s a guy who runs a, a shop around here.

He has a guy who he pays the cleanest shop and then he said, Hey, I’m gonna put parts over here and you take pictures and list them and I’ll pay you. You know what we earn off of it. And that guy was like, very preneur. Got into it. So what we ultimately want to do is have more of a white glove system where if someone needs some help listing their parts, we can actually help them do it.

We’ll send some people to their. And again, this is a future state, but hey, we can send somebody into your garage or an estate sale or whatever and get all those parts listed and that we can list ’em for sale or we can auction ’em off and then have them go away in one fell swoop. We’re gonna have lots of flexibility in how we sell these parts because our whole mission is however they get sold or need to be listed.

We have a way to do it for anybody in this industry, whether you’ve been around a long time or you’re just [00:15:00] new to it, and however it fits into your life, because newer people are getting into these cars, and I love it when I go to cars and coffee or shows and I see kids running around and kids are into it.

I mean, that really excites me. But by the time they’ve become adult and are really into this hobby, the world will have changed. It’ll have turned over. So to me, I look at what we’re doing as being the future proofing for the hobby. So that actually is a great segue into my next question, which is twofold.

One, you know, we talked about the parts exchange part of the name, but we didn’t define what the definition of collector was. So let’s put a wrap around that. Is there a. Age range or year range for what collector means and to the point that you just made. Let’s talk about the evolution or the EV revolution at the same time and how that’s affecting the collector car world and the collector car market.

You know, just to throw in there, let’s talk about cash for clunkers. I think a lot of people forgot about that and how it rocked to collector car world as well. So let’s, let’s touch on this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let’s, uh, take ’em one [00:16:00] at a time. What you decide is a collector car is a little subjective, right?

But to me, I’ll go with the accepted definition by the insurance companies, by the automobile world, which is essentially cars that are 25 years and older. That’s ultimately the market that I want to serve. All of it from the antiques to the modern classics and everything in between, in all countries, and marks all of it.

However, you can’t boil the ocean. You’ve got to pick a little part and boil that. We’ve narrowed our focus initially. It’s not exclusive to this, but. Our focus anyway, our European sports cars, we’ll say forties through eighties, kind of that range. Again, we’ve got lots of stuff for domestic cars. We’ve got even modern aftermarket wheels and things like that.

So all of those things are acceptable. And even like aftermarket tuner cars, I’m down with that. If that gets somebody excited about a car, I’m all for it. So if we can have C P X serve that motorcycles, anything that, that you want to be, I’m, I’m [00:17:00] good with that. I, I was at the Hershey show this, um, October and you know, I look at all these Model Ts and Model A’s and things like that sitting around and I’ve hung around with some hot rod guys and it’s like, great, I wanna be there.

Because when I was walking that huge show, have you ever been to Hershey? Yep. It’s crazy Mammoth. Yeah, it’s huge. But this year, you know, it was sad because it was the first post covid version and it was more lightly attended. But what caught my attention was it seemed like every fifth or sixth. Seller had something, it’s like, buy all of my parts.

Just make me get it outta here. Yeah. Like I’m not coming back like this is my last rodeo, essentially. So you kind of even see a shift there. But anything that’s in that category of car is great. I think the thing that we also want to offer. Is not just what is defined as collectible, but what we offer in terms of parts, and I use that term loosely in that we’ve had an example where someone was looking for a Ferrari distributor [00:18:00] for a sixties, Ferrari, literally a 10 plus million car, and they reached out to us and and I went and I found them.

An original one that someone had scrounged up in the uk and that was literally a $10,000 part. I found somebody who had a remanufactured version of the original part. It’s a modern construction, but made in the correct style. But you know, again, you’re getting a little, you’re veering a little bit from originality.

What I also want to, I say co-mingle or put on the same shelf or service providers. I know this fellow down in California who can take that exact part. He’s an engineer and he will take it and rebuild it with, you know, more modern magnets and we’ll, he’ll rewire it and do all of the things and it will be the exact part that was in the car originally, and that’s a fraction of the cost.

So I really love this idea of rebuilding, and I just wrote a piece about it where it’s like the radical idea of rebuilding we’re so conditioned that if a part breaks that you need to go find a new one and you’ll spend weeks or months kind of chasing those down when [00:19:00] there’s probably somebody out there who can fix it for you.

And I wanna be able to have people. Look at all of those options in one place and be able to choose the one that’s best for them, whether it’s originality or speed, or they want something that’s more modern cause it’s gonna last longer. It doesn’t matter. It’s like everybody has their own choice, so Well, and to that point, the goal in all three of those use cases is to keep that particular vehicle on the road and keep it running.

Okay? So yes, if you’re the purest, but you have a museum quality car, you want all original matching numbers, parts and accessories. Which by the way, most European cars, they never did a numbers matching like we stress here in America, which is Oh yeah, it’s a truly American thing. Show me 1, 9 11, with numbers matching from any period in time.

It doesn’t exist. That being said, I get it. The purist wants it a certain way. For guys like myself, I frequent machine shops and fabricators all the time. I’m like, I don’t care what it looks like. It needs to be functional. Most of my stuff is race cars. There are better options than the original. The reason that original part failed cause it probably wasn’t great to begin with.

You know, so something to consider depending on [00:20:00] if you wanna love and enjoy the car and drive it as like a daily driver versus, you know, a life size model car. Right. So there’s, there’s something for everybody in that statement. Let me see, there were two other parts of that conversation. Yeah, there was.

There was. And so it was cash for clunkers and how it affected the collector car world because there were a lot of folks turning in by Turbo Maseratis and you are Cuatros and all the stuff say I can get more money for this car than it’s worth today. Which now we fast forward, you know, 10 or 15 years and the used car market is through the roof.

And the other side of that is, now that we are in 2022, how does the evolution or the EV revolution change the collector car landscape as well? Yeah. You know, I think cash for clinkers, I hadn’t really thought about that for a while, but yeah, you’re right. That did kind of move the needle. And I’d say the thing that’s really moved the needle more recently is bring a trailer Chaos online.

Yeah. . Yeah. Well, I, I think what it’s done is. Make collecting cars like fun and cool again and [00:21:00] accessible to a new generation of buyers. I think ultimately that’s what bring a trailer’s gift to the car community is it’s, but there’s also, there’s a dark side to it, and I joke and we joke about bring a trailer a lot.

I, I love it. We’re all addicted to it, but the problem is it feels like how far can we push the envelope on these prices sometimes. Right, right. And, and you know that these, some of these deals don’t end at the value that they, you know, that they closed at. I’m like, this is making it worse for people that are trying to sell a more, you know, local venues like, you know, Facebook marketplace, suddenly they go, well, I saw an E 30 BMW sell ’em, bring a trailer for a quarter million dollars.

So obviously mine is worth 125 . It definitely is. I think that’ll all correct out eventually. You know, I I, it’s like the housing bubble, right? Little bit of a bubble. And as you well know, like the collector car hobby was counter pandemic. Like it was one of those hobbies that soared in the pandemic because it was something that we could all do by ourselves.

Let’s talk about EVs [00:22:00] cuz I love EVs. I’m excited about EVs and I actually Haggerty in December, put. Their bull market list for 2022. And on that list was the Tesla Roadster, which is for those of you who may recall, it was a Lotus Elise body that they put batteries in and electrified, and that was the very first kind of mainstream Tesla product.

They look cool. They are great cars. I have a friend who has one and, and I just, I had dinner with him last night and I said, if you’re ever thinking about getting rid of that, let me know because I want it, I, I want it really bad. It’s a six figure valuation now because Tesla has become something more, it’s like the Model T of the EV world in some ways.

So I think they’re exciting cars and they’re gonna be collectible, and we all know that back in the early. There were lots of electric cars. So it’s kind of back to the future, you know, in, in the early days of cars, there was petrol, there was electric, and there was steam for a while. They were all equal.

And women for a reason liked the [00:23:00] electric vehicles because they didn’t require a starter. So when they were in their fancy dresses, they didn’t have to get out and kind of like go crank the little crank arm, uh, to turn the motor over. So I, I think there’s two vectors where we’re going in the future.

Which is autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles and I’m excited for both. I think they’re both important. I believe that you can’t stop progress. Progress is going to happen. So you kind of just do with it what you can. It will have a downstream impact on the collector car hobby as we get more el electrified because we’re not a generational away from not being able to get gas, but like some of my cars, I wanna run on race fuel.

Well, it’s like there’s a couple pumps in my area where you can get that easily. I think that’s gonna be at some point, and I’m talking at 40 years from now where that’s gonna be hard. That’s gonna be right. A bit more challenging to find. And I think when we have autonomous vehicles where it’s pretty easy to imagine the interstate highway system getting to a point.

Take your car on the interstate and [00:24:00] it’s just running autopilot. So people who don’t have those types of cars are gonna be excluded from those because one dope in a Ford Mustang cutting off an EV car or an autonomous car is gonna coming out of a cars and coffee, but, you know, whatever. Yeah, it’s gonna, it’s gonna break everything, right?

All of a sudden it’s just gonna be trash, so you’re gonna be excluded. So I think at some point it’ll be like national parks for driving roads. Like you’ll have to go out into the country and, you know, have like certain kind of beacons and technology to help make sure that you don’t mess up. And accidentally clash with an autonomous thing, but we’ll see how all that plays out.

More to your point, EVs are exciting. I think it’s great. No problems. It’s just gonna make gas harder to come by ultimately, but it’s the right thing to do. I’m an environmentalist. I want, I think we need to make some changes and, and I’m all for it. What exception to that rule? Do not take your collector car and turn it into an electric vehicle.

I, I was wondering if we were gonna get there, . Cause that’s, that’s the other side of that conversation. It’s an [00:25:00] abomination. , . We talk about that quite a bit. It comes up almost every month on the drive-through. Yet another British company that’s converting classic Aston Martin or Lotus or whatever have you to an ev.

Obviously ev West out in California has been doing Volkswagens and Porsches for years now using Tesla power plants and things like that. It’s gaining popularity. I sort of like the idea, I see it both ways in terms of now I can be ecologically friendly and still drive a 1950s, 3 56 and be super cool and, and it’s retro and it’s hip.

But there’s the dark side of that equation, which somebody actually brought up in a recent conversation, which was, yes, it’s an abomination to your point, but also you paid a million bucks to turn a vintage DB six into an ev. and now that guy’s left with this classic petrol power plant and it’s sitting on a shelf in a crate for years and years and years, and then suddenly it becomes cool again to have a petrol car.

You’re gonna pay for this conversion like 12 times by the [00:26:00] time it’s all said and done. Yeah. To me it doesn’t make sense and. I get the appeal and I will put limits on it. If it’s a mass produced car, a VW Beetle, hey, there were millions of those made and they, they were made up until the eighties in Mexico and 2003.

Yeah, 2003 E. Even better, right? It’s like I’m cool, like if it’s a mass produced vehicle, no problem. Committed to an ev, but taking something. Somewhat rare and turning it into an ev. To me, it takes the whole spirit of the car away. It’s like that part of the experience of a car is leaving it in its proper state so that you can hear the sounds, you can have the correct gear shifts, and all of those experiences.

It’s not just the look of the car, in my opinion, it’s the car in Toto that is really important to preserve. I look at them as historical objects and you wouldn’t take other antiquities and try and change them. I’m not saying that they’re worth. That, but to me it’s really important to keep [00:27:00] them as they are.

And that’s just my opinion. I know other people have different opinions and no, and, and you’re not wrong because it, it’s been said before that vehicles, if you kind of stand back and look at them in their parts and not as a whole, first of all, you’re right, they’re time capsules. They are signs of the time in which they were created and, and some of those cars were created earlier than when they were sold as well.

So you gotta kind of put that in perspective. But you take something like one of the cars, I absolutely can’t stand the CI one Ds. A lot of people love that thing, but it is also quintessential French and also quintessential sixties. It is a sign of the time, but when you take that vehicle apart, you have to look at it for its pieces and to, to be punny, I suppose, in.

The science, the engineering, the aerodynamics, the fluid dynamics, every person that was involved in that. A car is not created in a vacuum, nor is it just an appliance. It is a culmination of a team of people and their imagination to create this thing. And as I’ve dove [00:28:00] into and worked on vintage vehicles, first question sometimes comes across your mind is why in the hell did they do it that way?

And then you realize this was cutting edge technology in 1961. And so you have to be somewhat respectful of what you’re being presented with. And so looking at those time capitals for what they are and preserving them to your point, is super important. And it’s also really kind of cool. And so there’s a lot to be learned from that.

But you also start to realize that some ideas that are presented as new, even today, were invented many, many years ago. Yeah, that’s the best part of it, in my opinion, is and, and I loved how you described that. It’s like they are these. Things, but they’re also visceral experiences. Like hearing a inline four in my alpha is a cool experience.

That’s just part of it, and I get the environmental impact, but I truly believe that we use these cars so little. The average collector car is driven. About 2000 miles a year, maybe 22 miles or something like that, I [00:29:00] think is what I read. That’s negligible because I, my lawnmower admits more than the classic car does.

You know what I mean? Exactly. They have a reason to exist, and that reason gets harmed if you tamper with them and kind of change them from fundamentally what they are were created to be. Right. It’s a philosophy. It’s just something that I, I don’t like when I see people take really nice cars and turn ’em into D EVs like a DB six for example, that really gets my goat

That’s a legit thing. And it’s been of, of recent news too, that that is Oh, I saw. I saw it and I, it’s like, eh, db fours, fives, and sixes. I was like, just, uh, shook my head at all of it. But you know, this actually gives me a great opportunity to ask you two pit stop style questions while we’re at it. One of which I’ve never asked somebody on our show, which is what’s the best sounding engine?

The one that I imprinted on is the Kuta. Oh, the P 12 Kuta. I think the Lamborghini engines sound better than the Ferrari V 12 s and [00:30:00] maybe an Aston Martin V12 sounds as good, but I imprinted on it in watching the opening scene of Cannonball Run that scene the first five minutes of that movie where they’re running that white Lamborghini down those, I think Nevada Highway.

I never saw a car that looked like that, and I never heard a car that sounded anything close to that. As I’m talking about, I can hear that in my mind. Like that noise, just that throaty growl and yeah, it’s gotta be a v12 and specifically a Lamborghini v12. I, I wanna remind our listeners yet again that petrolheads of a certain age, the answer is always Lamborghini kuta

No, it’s funny cause I, I didn’t really like V8 s for a long time, but now I’ve really come around and a great v8 Sounds amazing. But shoot, I’ve got people with, I don’t know the boxer fours. I’ve owned Porsches. You know, those boxer sixes are pretty great. I don’t know. They [00:31:00] all, they, they’re all. Good in their own way.

But if I had to pick one, yes, it would have to be the Lamborghini Kuta. And you are exactly right. There’s a whole generation of cannonball run heads that, like I said, imprinting is real. And that was the first like mass market exotic car that was, yeah, it was even like James Bond movies didn’t quite make the impact that that exact movie did.

But uh, yeah, the test Rosas weren’t nearly as popular as Z Kuta, you know, in comparison. And they came out at the same time. So think about it that way. Which actually leads into my other more famous, more normal pit stop question, which is, maybe the answer is the same, the sexiest car of all time in your opinion.

Oh, it’s similar, but it’s not the same. Oh, okay. Um, I have two and they’re kind of similar. One is, The Lamborghini Murra. I went to a car show when I was a kid. My, I don’t come from a family of car people, so I kind of was like forging my own path. So I had my driver’s license and I saw that a car show was coming [00:32:00] and there was gonna be a Lamborghini Kuta there.

So it’s like I’d never seen one. So I went to this car show and I saw it and I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but it didn’t look exactly how I imagined it. It was smaller, it was a little more tiny and, oh, I thought you were gonna say the opposite. The first time I stood next to an F 40 i I wept a little bit.

You know ? Yeah. Well, , Lamborghini Kuta. It’s kinda, the proportion in the wheel sizes and stuff kinda like didn’t totally hit me. But part of the reason was it was right next to a Lamborghini Murra on that I was. It was crazy. Low to the ground. It was swoopy, it was, man, I did. It was wider, you know, the stance, just everything about it I thought was great.

So if I had to pick one, I’d probably say that. But an Alpha Romeo Tepo 33 STR is arguably the most beautiful car of, of my preference, you know? But now I’m gonna change one more time, which is, I love 50 sports cars like Maseratis and those open top road racing cars, like the [00:33:00] original Tes and Maserati, 300 S’s and four 50 S’s, and those sorts of things are just, I will stick by my answer.

I’ll go with the Lamborghini Mira, but I think ultimately, if I had to pick, they’re far, far less common, but the TPO 33 stra is right up there. Before we get back to our main thought here, I do have one more pit stop question I want to ask you. And I think it’s important because, you know, you came from the, the IT world, from the startup world.

You’re used to being in the boardroom and obviously decisions have to get made and you’re the last one and it rides on you. And you have to pick between the legendary Porsche 9 59 and the F 40. Which one is it? F 40

Sorry. I’m an Italian car guy if you haven’t deduced that. Although I’ve earned own Porsches of course, but uh, they’re both great cars. To me. I think that those are perfect cars to put side by side and I think it’s. It’s a head [00:34:00] versus heart thing in many ways. Like you look at the the 9 59 and it’s like, what an amazing piece of technology that was.

And the F 40, it wasn’t that level of technology. They used F1 technology and it, it was important, but it wasn’t like as innovative or cutting edge as the 9 59. They’re both cool. They’re both beautiful, but the sounds, and oh man, that F 40 is just crazy. So I guess we should probably get back to talking about C P X.

What we’re here. Head stop questions. Come on, . So why don’t we dive into some of maybe the more technical details about the site. So obviously we talked about the year ranges, so you’re talking about anything from the turn of the 20th century. Up through 1997 at this point. I mean, that was 25 years ago, folks, 1997, which means all of my Mark four VWs still are not old enough to be on the collective parts exchange, but you know, a couple more years will be okay.

Which actually brings up a great point. If a car is within a [00:35:00] generation and the generation begins within that year range, does that qualify? Can you go up through Okay. And again, we don’t really police it. What we don’t want are people coming onto the site and selling what you could get at Napa. We have no desire to be in that commoditized business where it’s just like moving parts along.

We wanna be the place where you go for the hard to find, not exclusively, but. . We’ve got a seller who sells launcher parts. You know, not a popular mark, but he’s got a following and there’s plenty of ’em around. Sure. If you need a water pump for it, it’s not an exciting part, but it’s a specific water pump.

So I want you to be able to find that here. But if it’s something that you could just go anywhere and get at any time, eh, it’s not as exciting or not as interesting. Right. I’d rather have it be a, a more curated experience for people where they come in and they find the hard to find. Maybe something even rare though, it could be modern.

Like for instance, in my generation of Volkswagens that everybody knows I’m in love with. You know, there’s some Benson parts that were created, very limited numbers, you know, things like that. I could see finding [00:36:00] their way onto something like C P X because they were such limited quantity. You know, that’s important kind of stuff to have out there for somebody that’s trying to recreate the period or trying to get that novelty part a little bit more about what you mentioned earlier.

Obviously it’s free to list. There’s a 5% commission if something sales, you know, based on the value of the sale itself. So it kind of sounds a little bit like the brokering on eBay, but the simplicity of listing reminds me of some other sites. First, take the picture, do your listing on your phone, submit it.

but what I’m wondering is, is everybody getting a personalized storefront like an eBay, or are they connecting to their back ends On a more technical note, how is all this orchestrated for folks that already have something in place versus somebody that’s coming at this for the first time going, man, I just want to clear out all this junk out of my garage.

Well, we’ll take the second case there. Just the individual folks. You know, it’s super simple to list. We’ve tried to make it as streamlined the user experience or UI in the, in the jargon of the tech world. We’re trying to replicate the jitterbug cell phone, , you know, I want it to be built [00:37:00] for your 85 year old grandmother could, uh, list parts on this site and not really have a problem doing it.

We don’t always achieve that, but for the most part, we want it to be as simple as as it can be from that standpoint to sell a part. You register on the. and then you do have to create a store and it takes five minutes to set up. Just have to connect it to your bank account. So we use on the backend Stripe, which is a very popular payment system, fastest growing one, super secure.

They’re great to work with. You just connect your bank account to Stripe and then you’re good to go. And if you put a bunch of parts on there, if you wanted to win for gtm, you could create a store for yourself on our site. You could point people directly to that store if you want, or all of your stuff is just kind of generally available in this big mishmash of parts that are within the system.

And then on this buyer side, we’ve put a lot of investment into making you be able to find what you’re looking for. With the least amount of effort. So we’ve got for tech people, natural language search built into the [00:38:00] system itself. And we’ve also architected the site to have the proper structure so that web callers like Google and Bing and all of those other places can find what’s in our site quite easily.

So if you go and search for a part in Google, we want you to find it, but it’ll probably be listed on our site. We’ve engineered the site, so it’s got all of those properties just inherently built into it. But getting back to the selling part, yeah, you set up the store and then you can take your cell phone in and just go out in your garage and take some pictures and you can start listing ’em piece by piece.

And if someone is interested in it, they can buy it and you work out what the shipping would be. The problem with car parts is oftentimes they’re odd size. And they’re heavy. Yeah. When someone bought a transmission or bought a a car door, you’re not able to just go down to the local FedEx stop and like chuck that across the counter at ’em.

It takes a little more effort to time, or people might be overseas or they might be in a hurry, so you just work out what the shipping is and off it goes. [00:39:00] That’s the most streamlined way to get things done. One of the thing that I’d like to mention is we encourage open communication between buyer and seller, like eBay.

One of the things that they do that annoys people is you can’t just say, Hey, call me. If you even try and send somebody your email address, they intercept it and scrape it out or phone number, like they just disallow it and car parts do not work that way. It requires a high. Amount of communication to make sure that you’re getting the exact part that you need, because you don’t want to go to the effort of shipping something out and having somebody get it and have it not be the right thing.

And, and then you have to either return it or figure out some way to figure out how to resolve that issue. You can talk to people openly. So if you, there’s a part, if you look anywhere on our site, there’s a button that says, send the buyer a message. And you can just, like, it’s basically like chat. They’ll get a message and you’ll start talking to each other and figuring out what you need or call ’em.

You know, e everybody’s name is exposed. So it’s like when you’re on our site, you [00:40:00] can go in and you’ll know that, oh well that’s, um, Lanta down in California. You know, if you want you can reach out to them. We’re pretty much trusting the universe cuz there’s some people will take advantage of that and just go around it.

But we really believe that the 5% commission and all of those sorts of things really make the bar quite low and doesn’t discourage people from going around. It’s not like if we were charging 20%, people would be going all over the place and we’d have to put in guidelines to make sure that they don’t leak around our system versus going direct.

And if you’re a bigger system and a bigger company, this is more than just a hobby. If you have an eBay store, we can take all of your eBay inventory and replicate it on our site and you can sell on both side by side. And when we outperform eBay, uh, you can take your eBay store down right. And , we’ve got guys who are like wishing for that because eBay is really hard to deal.

Especially with car parts, they have a standard policy where they side with the buyer. So if a [00:41:00] buyer goes, oh, they shipped that car door to me and it wasn’t as described, it had more scratches on it. eBay will almost, without even talking to the seller, just like refund their money and take the money out of your account.

I mean, I’ve heard numerous horror stories where things are happening like that and they’re quite expensive. They’re more than probably in real dollars, like 15 or 20% or even more to sell on eBay, whereas we’re, I was obviously quite low. But we’re small. We’re lean, we’re mean, and we can get it done because we’ve tried to build some efficiencies into the system so we can sync up if you have it in eBay, if you have it on your own site, we can take all of your inventory and replicate it on our site.

The advantage of that is what I already alluded to, which is the search engine stuff. And then we promote our items in Google Marketplace and other type of areas. So people find things. It’s funny, I had a, a seller who sells British parts out of Tennessee. He was starting to see a fair amount of sales coming through collector, [00:42:00] part exchange.

So he looked and he only had like a few dozen parts listed and it’s like, wow, that’s like an unusually high volume given the amount of inventory that I have on there. So he started looking and he started searching for his own parts in Google. His parts were coming up on our site, not on his own site, but he’s had it established for years because search engines.

Are goofy. It’s a black art as you well know. Trying to deal with that is not something that a car person wants to deal with. And I think that’s one of the fundamental reasons, like all of these car guys don’t have e-commerce sites cuz there’s a lot of trickery and expense and just stuff that you don’t want to necessarily deal with.

So you just kind of stick with your old ways and deal with your normal customers and off you go. And that’s been good enough, but I think that’s not gonna be good enough going into the future. Yeah. What’s that saying about good enough is the enemy of greatness and Yeah. . Yeah. And all that. So that actually makes me think of two different questions.

One of ’em I wanna have to. Sized word part yet again. So I’m assuming it’s not just water pumps and [00:43:00] radiators and headlights. It could also include memorabilia, shop manuals, original things like that, badges and things like that you see at these swap meets, like you said. So that’s something else cuz I’ve looked for that myself, like some original documentation going back in time and that’s also difficult to get your hands on.

It also makes me think, how often do parts or new parts get listed on the site? And I can imagine that’s very ad hoc unless there’s some sort of gating system where you guys are verifying the part before it gets listed. We’re on the honor system, we’re, we’re kind of, if someone misrepresents or puts junky parts in, we’ll kind of see it, but we’ll deactivated like we’ve been approached by companies in other parts of the world.

I won’t name names, but you can probably deduce it and uh, it’s like, Nope, we we’re good. We don’t need that. Like, that isn’t, Interesting to us. You know, essentially there’s parts getting added all the time and you know, it comes in fits and starts, but there’s always something changing on the site every single day.

Whether, you know, [00:44:00] there’s parts that have gotten sold out of inventory cuz they only had one of ’em or parts that are getting added. And we’re working really hard to get people more comfortable with listing parts. So we’ve got some changes that I think we’re gonna make on the back end to make it a little bit easier.

For people to just do things in bulk. The problem is like if you think about your own garage, you go, oh yeah, I’ve got six boxes of stuff. How, how many do you think you have in your garage? I have a 24 by 12 container, full Volkswagen parts, so I got quite a bit . Let’s see you as the Guinea pig here. It’s like to go and list those parts, you’d have to take a few weeks off of work.

Pretty much, yeah. It’s one of my winter goals and many winters have gone by . Right, right. No, it, it’s a, but if you can get a process going, so what I want to do is pre tutorials, it’s like, here’s the most efficient way to list, right? 10, here’s the most efficient way to list a thousand parts [00:45:00] and everything in between, and just kinda like have little guidelines for people to go, okay, well here’s a system.

Like if you’re doing a. Go and take pictures. Just do the pictures. Don’t worry about everything else. Just like go out into your container, have a little light box or whatever set up, and you go in, get a part, take five pictures, next part, next part, next part, next part, and do that. Those sorts of things. So there’s just gonna be techniques that we’re gonna have to teach people to do it, but you know, that’s a big job and it’s gonna take you a while to do that.

But we’ve also created something called Part Ping, which is part of C P X, which if you have something that you can’t find on the site, you can put out a little ping for it. What we’ll do is go to people that we know have those types of parts and ask ’em if they’ve got it. Somebody who’s looking for a VW part, and now actually I will just.

Include you. If I find somebody who needs a VW part, someone was just reaching out for Pistons for an 84 shareco. I was like, okay, I might know somebody. So yeah, . Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, I’ll send it to you cause it’ll help you and it’ll help them. So hey, we [00:46:00] just want to connect the dots for you. The point in me bringing that up though is until the point when you actually have everything listed, there’s still ways for you to connect with customers, which is through this process and we’re actually finding some success with it.

So we wanna try and automate it even further where like if someone is looking for parts for Volkswagens from a certain era, or even just like specific submodels, like you could go and pick out, it’s like if somebody’s looking for something, I’ve got things for these models. So I will automatically get notified that somebody’s looking.

Are you able to designate the exact part number that you’re looking for? Because obviously in, in the v a G system, there’s a very logical way that they do all that by part number. And so it’s like, I need oh two j, da da, da, da, you know, whatever. And if somebody’s got that, then it’s easy to look it up, right?

Yes, we, we definitely support that. But for you, you might not know what your part are. Right? Right. , you may not have the books and manuals to be able to do that, which was actually part of my question. When you’re cataloging, are you guys leveraging any OCR [00:47:00] to say, Hey, when I take a picture of this particular part, if the part number is recognizable, that’s being extracted by the software itself, we’re ahead of the game.

But yes, we are definitely thinking about doing all of that, which is optical character recognition for all of those who don’t know what the, the non nerds, I, I get what you’re saying, , you’re just , you’ve got your pinwheel hat on right now. No. Uh, ultimately it’d be great if you could just hold up your phone and point it at something and it would automatically recognize it, but that’s a gonna take a long time to actually evolve.

It may never actually come to be, but what you could do is, oh, if you know what it is, and even if you have a part number or something, or a serial number or something that you can identify it with, you can put it in and then it’ll auto-populate what that part is. It’ll go, oh, well, it’s a marelli. Oh two dash 36 slash b distributor.

Oh, okay. Well here’s one. I’ve already got pictures of that. So you can just like represent these pictures and [00:48:00] we’ll put not the actual part that you’ll be buying. You can put what condition it is. You could add some pictures if it’s got some mods or damage or something like that. And it’ll definitely compress the time it’ll take.

So to me it’s important to realize we are six months old. We have tens of thousands of ideas that we need to execute against, but we’re a very lean and mean team and we’ll get there and do course. So we’re, we welcome these ideas and these brainstorms because we’ve come up with very few of ’em. It’s been ideas of others who have approached us and said, Hey, you could do this or that, or this system does that, you know, over here in, in this other part of my life, you should be able to do that.

And, and you’re right, there are like huge databases. Have catalogs that we’re working to get tapped into. The problem is those things really came into force like in the eighties where the parts were really systematized and had like universal numbering and things like that. Yep. That was a little bit more commonplace.

And it can be [00:49:00] frustrating because in the fifties and sixties and seventies, none of that existed, or very little of the, I think actually in the. Stuff had existed, but, and the Porsche stuff, I know it did. They’ve been using, you know, 9 0 1 for a very long time. . Yeah, exactly. So you kinda, you get, there’s some places it’s not evenly distributed.

Yeah, I can, I can promise you Alpha Romeo was not doing any of that. No, no. Dr. Porsche was ahead of his time, but we’ll leave that where it is. Right. Yeah. reasons. , which actually, you know, we talked about a lot of what C P X is, but I don’t think we’ve touched upon what it isn’t. I’m gonna reframe one of my earlier questions to say what things shouldn’t be.

Or won’t ever be listed on C P X? That’s a great question, but I aspire to have more in it than not in it. Like I was saying earlier, I don’t want to become the, maybe at some point it’ll make sense to do the parts store kind of thing, but I don’t think so. We did [00:50:00] episodes in the past with members of the Classic Car Club of America.

We’ve had, you know, Sal finale on from Porsche Diesel and we talk about collector market there. But that’s tractors. You know, we recently, uh, saw an article come across our desk about the Ferrari speedboat, things like that. So does this go beyond cars, two boats and aircraft and, and tractors? Yes.

Ultimately, yeah. I love all of those things. I was really hot to trot to get a, a Greyhound mus about a year and a half ago. I was like, actually, Going out and looking at them and it’s like, crap. I want to have bus parts and things like that. Yeah, so I see it as being all of the above as or as much as the above.

That makes sense. What I mean by that, I could even see tires, for example, being sold on our site, but it would be more like those Avon tires or the more specialty tires. We do not want to compete with tire rack or name your tires direct or whatever brand you care to mention. Tire Rack does that great.

Where someone has solved that [00:51:00] problem, I don’t need to go and resolve it and I would even build partnerships. It’s like, oh well if you’re looking for that, hey, we tap into name your big auto parts guy thing and you can tap into their inventory and and do it that way. I’m okay with that. That’s good for everybody.

Essentially. I just want this to be the place where you can go. If you need a new upholstery, you can get new upholstery. You can get buttons remanufactured in the future. I imagine things where we 3D print on demand switches, there’s 3D printers that do metal. People are building printed cars right now. I mean, it’s a big thing that’s happening.

Using source Forage is the mainstream technology that you can buy today to do that. That is amazing. And I think that’s gonna be the lifeline for a lot of these cars because some of those super original parts, they will be non-existent. They just won’t. So you get somebody who has. One, you borrow it from ’em, you laser scan it, you print it out and you’ve got to the mill exact copy.

And maybe even with a better [00:52:00] material that’s gonna be more, you know, suitable. Now that we know better. I really want this to be that proverbial huge swap meet in the cloud where. Anything that you can imagine. And automobile, yes. A million times. Yes. Some people have put some really cool stuff on C P X already.

There’s a guy who has some trophies that Roger Penske won when he was racing and he’s selling those types of things. I mean, that’s super cool. You would think Penske would want those back, right? Yeah, they, I don’t think they were like his really good ones. So , they’re all the third place trophies. Nobody cares about that.

It’s like the trophy and it’s got Roger’s DNA on it somewhere. But no, that’s always fun. The memorabilia, what do we call the auto lista stuff? You know, the lifestyle stuff or even the Petrolia, I mean, all of that, right? It’s part of the larger community. And to see that all in one place and have it accessible, you know, maybe I wanna buy a Sinclair pump along with my Alfa Rome water pump housing and whatever else I need, you know, so one [00:53:00] stop shopping, right?

You’ve got a, a guy who’s. Neon sign on there. So, and books. I’m looking up at my bookshelves in my office and they’re filled with car books and, and models. I love car models. One of the things I was doing some stuff for like vintage racing, old like fifties style stuff and it could not find helmets. Those old fifties helmets, Sterling mos, most people don’t realize this, but his racing helmet, which is pretty iconic, was just a polo helmet.

I mean, the guy was out driving, that was the only helmet that was commercially available in the public at that time. So he races cars in polo helmet, as did a lot of the guys of the day. So, but they’re hard to find and hey, if someone has ’em and they wanna sell ’em in on C P X, I think that’s the thing to do.

And I know you’re into the racing world. I would love to be able. Support the racing community in and of itself too. Just, hey, I could definitely see a connection between you guys and racing junk because what do we do with race cars? We strip ’em down and all those original factory parts, uh, end up somewhere [00:54:00] either in a trash heap or somebody else going, Hey, I got a street car that’ll go on.

You know, that sort of thing. So that’s a great also connection, so we’re not just throwing those harder to find parts in the trash. Your question of what’s excluded? I mean the one big thing that I will say is like, I don’t wanna sell cars. We do have a section that we call project cars. So I was gonna say a rolling chassis are probably okay, right?

We’ve got people who have like midway through some sort of build or whatever and they kind of tap out or whatever. Or people have chased project cars and they aren’t. So we’ve got a few Ferrari, we’ve got a Lamborghini chassis on there. Even a race car, a Maserati race car I think listed on our site. So if I had time and money to do it, I would, I would take on that project myself, but I don’t at this particular moment.

So I look at it and I go, gosh, the reason we started the this businesses, because no one was doing it and the only place that people really had was eBay and eBay. Still probably pretty good for cars, but it’s [00:55:00] pretty rough for collector car parts in my opinion. And the things like when you search for something, you get presented with 20 sponsored items from floor mats to something that has nothing to do with your car whatsoever.

It gets really hard to find exactly what you’re looking for cuz people game the system and it’s annoying. That was part of the reason that we were inspired to do it, was there was no one doing it or if they were doing it, they were doing it in a way that was detrimental to the hobby. And necessity breeds invention.

Right. So I think you guys are, you guys are definitely onto something. Yeah. It’s gonna take a while though. It’s a, it’s a big, nasty, hairy problem and I like all it projects are. Exactly. So I, I’ve always liked the idea of call ’em unsexy projects cuz there’s some people, like even in business, like when people would go, oh man, I don’t wanna.

Do we have to like catalog or clean out that closet or something like that, you know, and you know, we’re a tech company and all that. No, that actually needs to get done. We’re moving offices and we’re, we’ve moved this [00:56:00] pile of stuff 10 times in the in, in the last five years. It’s like someone’s gotta take this on.

So going in and like tearing that out and just figuring out what needs to be done. I don’t know. There’s a satisfaction in doing something that is maybe not as interesting, but I find interesting like solving this problem. Is genuinely meaningful to me and I think it’s gonna be meaningful to others over the long haul for this hobby.

And if we can create the one central place when you’re restoring or repairing or maintaining your collector vehicle and the one place you think of to go to when you need something for it, whether it’s advice. A picture, a video or a part or service. I want you to think of C P X first, and that’s where I want you to go.

I couldn’t agree more, and I think what you guys are doing is absolutely awesome because I’ve struggled with this dilemma myself. And you know, to your point, cataloging, this is one of those things that it’s, I I always get issued a round to it if, for our listeners that are of a certain age know what exactly what that is, and you always say you’re gonna get around to it.

And it’s [00:57:00] difficult because every journey starts with a step. Inventorying car parts is one of those things that it’s like, do we start with the nuts and bolts or the fenders and the doors? You know, and, and somewhere you gotta get it all done and it’s difficult. So I’m glad you’re facilitating a way to make it easier to get it out there to other people that need it and hopefully clear out my container full of Volkswagen parts.

So with that being said, Chris, any shout outs, promotions, things you wanna talk about or other services, things that you’re into that you want people to know about before we wrap up this episode? Hey, sign up for our newsletter. We do a weekly newsletter and I produce it myself. It’s all kind of like a, we’re a cottage industry and you know, like I wrote the history of Bosch fuel injections this week.

And you know, there’s lots of information that I think you’ll just find generally interesting and valuable. But go ahead and check out collector part exchange. Find something that you want in there. Create an account, but also think about what’s in your own garage and make a New Year’s resolution. Hey, happy New Year everybody.

It’s [00:58:00] 2022. Let’s get in there and clean out one box of stuff in the back of your garage. Like if you could do that, that would be great for us and great for other people in the car community to make sure that some of the best parts in the world are in boxes in the back of a garage. You know, not all barn fines are cars.

A lot of the barn fines. Parts Staes that people have like hoarded over these years. Something that you’ve got is going to be valuable to someone else, so go and get it back in circulation so it’s not just collecting dust and someone else can have the value of that part that’s probably been created for 50 or 60 years and it needs a new home.

Well, Chris, I know you enjoyed our pit stop question so much, so I figure you know what, how about one last one before we close? Oh yeah. Bonus round May, maybe two. Maybe two. I got two in mind. Hey, lightning round. Nightmare car that you would still own. Ooh, I’ve heard they’re nightmares. In fact, I’ve heard never buy one, but I really, really, really, really want one, which is a Reno R five [00:59:00] t2.

Oh my God, those are so cool. Drove one. Wrote an article about it. It’s one of those never drive your heroes moments. So is it ? I’ll send you the link. How about that? You can read the article. Okay. Yeah. I’ll have to look that up. Cause yeah, it’s one of those things where it’s like, oh gosh, yeah, you can think of lots of crappy cars.

Like that’s an easy way to go. Like I would never own a Pontiac Aztec, you know, it’s like, in my opinion, all time worst car ever created. Oh, I love it. We always go to the Aztec for some reason. , it was horrible the moment it came out. I don’t know what someone was even thinking when they came out with that car.

Uh, yeah, A total nightmare. So if you could have a beer with, or maybe a glass of wine depending, or maybe it’s bourbon with. Clarkson, Hammond or May, who would it be? Hmm? Probably the hamster. You know what? Congratulations. You were the first person to actually select Richard Hammond as the person they would’ve a beer with.

So now I need to [01:00:00] know why. ? No, no. I think he’s an interesting guy. I think he and I share a taste in cars, like Clarkson is a narcissist, and that would get on my nerves. I don’t think I’d want to be around that for too long. And May is, he’s actually a pretty interesting guy, but I don’t know. I, I think the hamster is, I don’t know.

He’s the one who’s crashed the most cars I want to hear about. Like, he’s almost killed himself multiple times on that show. I mean, I, I’m down for that. starts with, what were you thinking? ? Yeah, exactly. Hey guys, watch. Yeah. Hey, hold my beer right, . Well, Chris, this has been an absolute blast, so I wanna summarize our whole conversation here by reminding everybody that Collector Parts Exchange is putting greatly needed parts back into circulation that would otherwise continue to collect dust in someone’s basement or garage and remain unused.

They’re doing their part to help preserve the collector car hobby and its culture. Their goal is to be the hub for all collector car repair and maintenance, where [01:01:00] people can go for information. And networking about parts, service providers, car information, automobile, and more. So if you’re struggling to find the right part for your classic vintage or 25 year or older vehicle, don’t wait.

Be sure to check out www.collectorpartexchange.com as your source for those harder defined items, and why not make it a New Year’s resolution to clean out that garage shed or shop. Upload those parts laying around and turn them into cash to buy parts that you can actually use. Remember, it’s free, it’s easy.

There’s tutorials on the site that’ll help you out and get you started very quickly. And don’t forget to sign up for their weekly C P X newsletter that has interesting stories and newly listed parts as part of the highlight. With that, be sure to follow them on social media at collector part exchange on.

and at C P X guys on Instagram as well as their YouTube channel. So Chris, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show. This [01:02:00] has been an education and I look forward to working with you on future projects and listing some of my own parts on C P X. So thank you for doing this for the community. We wish you the best of success in the coming years.

Thank you and happy New Year to everybody. Have a great 2022.

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