napaguy, My hat is off to you. The insane parts situation is caused by three things. First, the car companys are on a tear to eliminate the aftermarket. Care sales are a break even effort. All the profit comes from the service bay. The dealers can answer all of those hard questions, but they will never tell the aftermarket.
Second, outfits like the one you work for are getting worse too. NAPA is a small cog in a company called Genuine Parts Company. They also own Motion Industries and a few other operations. I have had to bypass my NAPA jobber, and Motion too, for several years because common parts are just no longer available.
Finally, I never call my local NAPA jobber with a parts request. I call them with a list of numbers. My blood pressure rises when I call up and ask for twenty #CS1504, a case of #1115 filters, and one #IC5500 coil. The standard response is "What does that fit?" I get the third degree on my parts needs.
Almost all of the old timers that once manned the counter are gone. One person now owns all of the NAPAs for a hundred miles, in any direction. If you are still dealing with this mess after thirty years; I would have tossed in the towel long ago. The biggest problem is above you. Have you ever dealt with Gates, Wix, or Echlin? All of the suppliers are run by MBAs that do not even know what they produce. I want to buy product by the case but they do not even know that they produce what I want. They are all just bone headed and they try to squeeze the maximum profit from every angle. Echlin makes almost all of those Ford electrical products and they also sell them to NAPA. They try to keep it quiet so they can move product in the most profitable manner.
When you go home; forget about those idiots as soon as you walk to your car. Life is too short to bother with lawyers, MBAs, politicians, and other assorted thieves.
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Today's Featured Article - Third Brush Generators - by Chris Pratt. While I love straightening sheet metal, cleaning, and painting old tractors, I use every excuse to avoid working on the on the electrics. I find the whole process sheer mystery. I have picked up and attempted to read every auto and farm electrics book with no improvement in the situation. They all seem to start with a chapter entitled "Theory of Electricity". After a few paragraphs I usually close the book and go back to banging out dents. A good friend and I were recently discussing our tractor electrical systems when he stated "I figure it all comes back to applying Ohms Law". At this point
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