Your progress is really coming along! It's always the small things that you discover that takes time to find and replace. Also, I'm real jealous of you. Man.. it must be nice to have junkyards around you that you can go to and just look through "all" of the GMT400s. I have to call around here, or use car-part.com. Most people I talk to over the phone are a-holes and will tell me I need to come see if it's there and check it out myself. Half the time, when I get there, the part is either not there or the condition of the part isn't even close to what's described on the site or over the phone.
I've mostly been doing business over craigslist, marketplace, and Facebook groups. I've been searching for a tailgate for my Tahoe for two years now, and ended up having a guy PM me telling me he has a mint one in Illinois (6 hour round trip for me) that he'll give me for $30. He says he knows what he has and how much it's worth, but he doesn't need to sell it and would prefer to give it to somebody who really needs it. Some people just restore my faith.
I have a decent selection of yards around me. Theres probably 20 yards within 50mi, but I only visit 1 of them. There's even a guy a couple of towns who only buys gmt400s & parts them out, but he wants stupid money for parts, so I haven't done business w/ him. Example, the yard that I go to charges $150 + core for any truck rearend. This guy wants $200+ depending on the type/style of rearend. I prefer self serve yards, I like to be able to pick & choose the part that I'm buying, besides getting misc screws or clips that a full serve yard wont provide. besides the fact that you'll pay more for the parts because they pulled them & may not be to your high standards. The standards will vary from yard to yard & employee to employee. I've seen it 1st hand, I've worked in several yards. The downside to self serve yards is that you get tools who break things to get what they want.
I mostly visit Pick n Pull, they have several sales a year which helps. This past weekend was 40% off card members. Every so many points, you get emailed a $20 off coupon. Every sale weekend , I end up using my card for other to get discounts while I get the points. That all helps me get more bank for the buck.
I can say that from experience, unless its strictly a full serve yard, no one can honestly say what parts are on a vehicle.
I used to work @ Bill's Auto Parts before they were bought out. We did full & self serve. In the self serve side of the yard, we could tell you the following: yr, make, model & lg items like drivetrain, suspension, radio, hvac controller radio, cluster, body, column, window type, lg items under the hood, fuel pump. When we took a part from a vehicle, we used the stock # on the car so it would take the part out of the system. Problem w/ that is the customer or employee would give you the wrong # or not inform you of bad parts so that you could update inventory. So it was always a gamble.
On the full serve side, we inventoried more parts. Still had an employee issue of not informing of bad parts.
Then there was Ebay, my baby, I could tell you if the Audi TT still had the dash vents or gas door on them or not.
We inventoried about 50 on a vehicle in self serve, about 90 in full serve & about 200 parts in ebay. Only I dismantled the Ebay vehicles except when it came to the drivetrain, another person did that part sometimes. He got paid to go slower & pull more under hood parts. All parts went to me for review & additional pics.
Was on our way of getting what the manager & I wanted, no more self serve. Then the owner sold out. The 2nd yr of doing Ebay, I did a 1/3rd of self serve did. I was selling stuff that i was told would never sell.
One of the best was pissing off one of the saleman. We sold ashtrays in self serve for $5. I had a virgin Deville unit on Ebay for $60 shipped. I had already sold 2 @ that price. Salesperson had to sell it for the $60. We split the commission though. She was not very happy about it.
Maybe one day I'll get back into a yard & run it my way.
