I agree with most of the things you said Mark but parts are a very precious commodity and many of us have put in years worth of hard work, time, money and energy searching them out and not depending on other collectors for them. I personally believe that parts should not be sold or given away on a whim; I’ve learned my lesson about that years ago, unless you have quite a bit of any one part, more than you could possibly ever need. Kelivnator boots are a perfect example, I have two extra Kelvinator boots in my parts stash, but I also have two washers that use those boots and eventually they will need two boots to replace them, these machines aren’t getting any younger and I want to be able use them for the rest of my life. Now I did recently find a third boot and I did give that boot away to a member who needed it for his Kelvinator, but will I be giving away any more Kelvinator boots when I down to only two left??? Of course not that would be ridiculous. If I had 20 boots in my parts stash, I certainly would have sold or given away 15 of them, but its extremely rare that someone has an “overstock” of any one particular part. The fact that you couldn’t find any boots caused you to do a very smart and honorable thing, you went out and have new ones made, that was just ingenious and the best possible scenario to this whole situation. Now you have enough Kelvinator boots forever and will never have to worry about those again, a lot of us were very impressed when you did that.
My point here is and it’s just my personal opinion through experience, but I’m sure other old time collectors would agree, there are a lot of options out there to finding parts, none of them are easy and it takes lots of time and dedication. Depending on other collectors for getting your parts should be used only as an absolute LAST resort.
