Posted by MoparNorm on Friday, June 01, 2007 at 14:33:13 :
In Reply to: MoparNorm posted by Clint Dixon on Friday, June 01, 2007 at 12:48:59 :
Clint,
I'd like to be able to agree with you, but I see very little support for our vendors, which indicates either a pretty small market, a poverty stricken one, or an indifferent one. The thread about the seats really struck me, since I've been rebuilding my Jeep. There are a plethora of Jeep vendor/suppliers and the prices are NOT cheap, yet I heard here of complaints over a $300 part that is rarer than rare, basically unobtainable.
In the meantime Dodge vendors and parts are disappearing from the face of the earth because of lack of support and frankly these guys could be making a real living if they were selling Ford or GM items. The Dodge vendors are lousy capitalist, but great hobbyists.
Note:I'm not picking on the guys here, they support each other better than any group on the web, but we seem to be a different type of animal from the guys that buff and polish their Chevy all week before going down to the Saturday Night Cruise.
After 2+ years, I don't think that very many on the Dodge websites could be unaware of the Registry(s)?? And yes I agree that there are more than half not active on the Internet. Let's say that there are only 25% here, and that the 400 registered is half of that, so 800 trucks represented here and 3200 total? Not many left. I don't know how the parting of truck enters into this thread, but yes that keeps some trucks alive and removes forever others, but I think your math is back wards there. I'd suspect that it takes 3-5 parted trucks to make one runner since the parts that die are usually dead on nearly all of the trucks.
I know a guy who has purchased at least 6 trucks trying to get enough usable parts to build one good one. Reading this forum I'd say that this is pretty common as that is what most of the non-drivel posts are about, so parting 6,000 truck to make 1,000 runners seems about right.
A successful parts vendor or supplier of replacement or reproduction parts can save a lot of trucks!
The Registry is a valuable tool to get a firm, verifiable number of the survivors and their fate.
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