Welcome to Parts Hunting, where FuelCult scours the web for the most interesting, odd and valuable collector-car parts on the Internet. Think of this as a digital swap meet without all the walking, and only featuring the stuff you’d actually stop to see.

Age-Old Tradition Now

Searching for parts online is something hobbyists have done for nearly 30 years.

Folks didn’t have to chase rumors and ghosts by traipsing through junkyards and peering into old sheds looking for a distinctive intake runner or certain valve covers by hopping online. You still can, and I’m not looking to diminish that sort of fun, but you just don’t have to as often now. Listings from far, far away with photos and serial numbers became accessible to anyone with a dial-up connection.

It also brought some trouble, too. Ask my mother and she’ll tell you about a random Chevy V8 showing up on the cargo hold of a delivery truck to the house back in the early 2000s. It was a ’99 5.3-L LM7 out of some wrecked 1500.

Oh, the Places You’ll Go

Not only is there still the tried-and-true grand pappy of them all, eBay Motors, even if you have to separate the wheat from the increasing chaff, but Bring a Trailer has an impressive number of rare and desirable parts up for sale regularly.

Some of the marque-specific sites, PCARMARKET comes to mind, will have important-to-them pieces pop up from time to time. Those sorts of sites and related forums can be tremendous resources when trying to figure out up from down in their respective worlds. But each can also be just another place to keep an eye on for whatever part you’re after.

On the junkyard front, Car-Part.com has been a huge digital leap for contributing wrecking outfits.

I don’t know what to say about Marketplace that hasn’t already been said by everybody else. It’s there, almost everyone uses it, and it’s a damn frustrating endeavor.

Useful Tool

When in the planning stages of a project — and I do sincerely hope that you have a planning stage for your project, as I didn’t when I bought that engine in high school — parts hunting on the Internet is especially helpful with figuring out budgets. If those B18 swap pieces are averaging $6k and you’ve only got $3k dedicated to spend for that, you’ll need to rethink your plan or keep shopping for a discount that might not be out there.

Parts Hunting is not all about engines, but they’re an obvious topic for entry into this discussion.

Plenty of YouTube builders have chapters in videos or whole videos dedicated to the sourcing of parts for that particular project. Often enough those monologues include reasoning for why they picked that path. Sure, there are plenty of times where the person presenting just pans along a table full of new, shiny goodies straight from the donating supplier. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there just are not many vintage parts going into cars that way.

Parts Hunting Focus

FuelCult is focused on automotive intelligence for old cars and their owners, but that doesn’t mean we’re all about plugging fuel-injected engines into classic rides. Rebuilding and updating old parts in your project counts towards the overall goal of using the cars.

Parts Hunting will look at vintage, rare and/or interesting parts for sale and that have sold — ranging from a 427-ci SOHC Ford V8 to a ZF 8HP90 transmission to an Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint body shell to a Porsche 5-speed transaxle and beyond. We will highlight what pieces are bringing what prices, and we’ll offer up analysis of the sale and occasionally why something didn’t sell.

From time to time we’ll do a deep dive covering everything you’ll need to know when searching for a specific part — whether you’re looking for a factory-correct ’68 400 H.O. GTO head or the 13B-REW twin-rotor, twin-turbo rotary engine out of an RX-7 FD.

Okay, let’s go check out this endless digital swap meet. Up first is a look at this JDM Honda B16A package sold on eBay Motors.