When you own a Studebaker you will eventually need to buy parts for it. Where do you get these parts? That’s the easy part. There are parts vendors all over the US who have new old stock parts, used parts and reproduction parts. How you get the parts to you is sometimes a different matter…
There are several swap meets in the US that deal with Studebaker parts so you can always go to one of those and hopefully find the part you need. If not you can have it shipped. Or there’s the Studebaker way. This is the tale of a Studebaker adventure and (near) world tour taken by one such Studebaker part.
I used to own a 1963 Studebaker Avanti. The car was in great shape but the hood kept getting a bubbled up area in it. This is a fiberglass bodied car and the thought was that there was air trapped in between layers of the fiberglass. The fix for this was to gouge out the surface to release the trapped air then fill it in an repaint it. Not a bad plan and not too hard either. However I knew with my schedule it may take me a while to get it done and I still wanted to be able to drive the car during that period, so I decided to buy an extra hood for the car and get it ready to use.
I found a good used hood near Philadelphia PA and agreed on a price. I paid for it, now it was mine. Now to get it home, which although I live in PA it’s in the other corner, a good 6 to 7 hour trip. Well, if you’ve ever traveled in Pennsylvania you know there is no direct route anywhere. The annual Studebaker swap meet in South Bend Indiana was coming up but the seller was not planning to attend. No problem, he knew someone who was. The hood was taken to New Jersey from where it made the trip to South Bend strapped to the roof of a Rambler Ambassador. I was in South Bend as well but had my ‘59 Lark that the hood wouldn’t fit in. No problem, a fellow club member was there with his truck, a Studebaker tilt bed that he had hauled a 1952 Commander on to the swap meet hoping to sell it. He said he would be happy to take the hood back to his house in eastern Ohio for me. He did sell the Commander but the new owner was going to pick it up at the seller’s home in Ohio, so the car made another trip back on the tilt bed. Before it left we strapped the hood for my Avanti under the Commander.
A week has now passed and the buyer of the Commander went to get his car. He took my hood to his house so now it was only seventy miles from me. A week later he came to my house to get an overdrive transmission for another of his Studebakers and brought the hood right to me.
It’s good to have friends.
But wait! The story doesn’t end there. Before I was able to do anything with the new hood I sold the Avanti so now I didn’t even need the hood. I listed it on ebay and sold it.
A new plan was now hatched. The buyer drove his Avanti to my house after having removed his hood. That part of the plan was brilliant because all we had to do was bolt the hood on where his used to be and he would drive home. A brilliant plan… unless it rained. Yes, you guessed it, it rained, but just the last sixty miles of his journey. I was watching for the hoodless Avanti and when I saw him pulling into my driveway, (at least I thought it was him), it was a downpour at that time, I threw open the garage door so he could drive right in. We bolted the hood on and he headed for home.
Where was home you ask? Why it was right outside of Philly. The hood traveled just over 1500 miles to find a new home ten miles away. This is how you get from point A to point B the Studebaker way.
Can you top this? Send your yarn to the Madd Doodler and we’ll tell your untold story right here.
Contents copyright Madd Doodler Publishing 2010
