At 10:54 PM 6/6/2003 -0400, NSippel wrote:
>The thread re. lack of service at VB rings true.
>
>When I bought my 1980 MGB back in 1993, VB was the first place I ordered
>parts. Found them through an ad somewhere I guess. Then I found Moss, TRF
>& finally Brit-Tek (a Moss dealer).
Although I usually have bad words to say about VB, the one good thing to
say was that they found me. It was maybe 1988 0r 1989. I had traditionally
bought MG parts from local auto part chains like NAPA. What they didn't
have, I would get from the closest dealer but by the late 80s, dealers were
no longer around or hard to find. Junk yards were also hard to find - my
main used car parts supplier, Scotland Yard, in Denver was gone or soon to
be gone. Plus I was living in Price, Utah - the largest city in about a 60
mile radius with a whooping population of 9000.
But the 71BGT was still running without too much for voodoo repairs. Then
one day, this VB catalog came in the mail. I figured maybe they purchased
or obtained a list of registered MG owners in Utah because I couldn't think
of any other way they could have targeted my mailing address. And that
catalog was the coolest thing I had seen in years. Particularly since JC
Whitney was my only source of mail order parts from a catalog. I found TRF
maybe a year or two later and I'm not sure from where - about the time of
my falling out with VB. They were a bit more expensive and further away
though. I'm not sure when I found out about Moss - probably from this list
which I discovered not much later, maybe 1993 or so when I started dabbling
with the Internet.
But the point was that VB, as much as I hate them, were the ones that
brought me out of many years of MG isolation. When I left Denver in 1980, I
lost contact with parts suppliers as well as other owners, followed by a
decade of living in remote, underpopulated areas of the Rocky Mountain
west. Just replacing the rubber steering boots was an ordeal. Now we have a
well developed network of parts suppliers. How things have improved.
David Councill
67 BGT
72 B
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