National Parts Depot - GTO/LeMans Parts

Well in the garage for me today, I got my good friend Rick Schmidt from national parts of depot Rick. Good to see you again, man. Good to see you again, too. You know, from the tail lights all the arrowheads and that badge right there. I gotta believe we're talking GTO today?

Which I didn't think you guys did. We've been working on this project, I'm proud to say proud to say. Proud to say. And I'm slightly embarrassed to say that our GTO LeMans Tempest catalog and product line is finally launched and in business and it's been a long journey We've been working on that for a long time. You Know, we constantly get emails, people requesting us saying why don't you sell parts for my car for my Nova, for my GTO, for my Cutlass.

And we wanna, we wanna offer all these product lines but it takes us a long time to get a product line out because we do it a little bit differently. There's lots of stuff's out there, right? Right. But a lot of product lines are reverse engineered kind of is the key. They just go out to the aftermarket and say, Hey, what do you have for GTO Tempest LeMans?

And they bring it in and they take all the application information as gospel and run with it. What we do first, what is very time consuming is we go to the original Pontiac parts techs and build from scratch a database of every single part that went into the cars originally including all the original application information. Then as we reach out to source all the different parts you're going to carry what you've got with NPD correct to the text research, the GTO One of the best examples of that and we were talking earlier is, is these two pieces here which they don't even look very different. These aren't the sexiest reproductive pieces in the world, but these are the little firewall covers that go beneath the steering column. and these are NPD exclusive reproductions.

In the past before I did this reproductions, this is all you would find. It's kind of a poor version of this with this V right here. What happened was that in 1967 the A body platform GM moved to a collapsible steering column and there was a little band clamp that the firewall that they had to make this V to clearance the clamp, and what GM did was that they replaced this piece that had run from 1964 to 1966 with this piece. Nobody recognized that or even knew it because in later parts books this is the only part they show If you had a '65 this is what you got if you ordered it? This is what you got which is technically incorrect so I went out and fixed that, found the original '64 to '66 ones and this is how we worked through all of our stuff when we find things that have been historically thought to be correct but we find out are not we try to fix them.

well you guys are fairly obsessive about that stuff which is good, but I'm sure that carries through all of the pieces that you've now sourced for the GTO1. We've done everything we can do to make it as correct as possible and sometimes you know beggars can't be choosers and sometimes there's only a certain part available out there but we do our best to describe and tell the customer, this is not Conquers correct but it is what's available, make your choice. Like this tri-power pan right here that's a pan for under the bottom side of the air cleaner for a '65 three eighty nine tri-power. It's steel, they're hand made and they cost four hundred bucks, it's not a cheap piece. So if you're doing a restore mod or you just don't care about the originality that much I've got a hundred dollar plastic piece.

That does the same thing. So we do offer customers choices between hyper original and a will work service part. We try to cover the entire ray of the hobby not just turn your nose up at the guys who are abit restoring on a budget and only carry the high end stuff. We collect it all and we try to represent it honestly as the best way we know it Well I think you use a term that really describes you, hyper original hyper correct. Yes.

That's NPD Yes. And now GTO? And now GTO Tempest LeMans, finally. The euro head guys are gonna love you.