Finding parts

Even the "newest" Festiva is now over 25 years old and parts are getting increasingly harder to find.  The local franchise parts stores are hit and miss on most parts but RockAuto continues to be a fairly good source. 

 

One owner '91 Ford Festiva GL. Picture taken July '18

Automobile manufacturers have been equipping their offerings with larger and larger tires. Econoboxes from the 80's and 90's were sold with mostly 13" tires and some, including all years of Festiva in the North American market, were shod with 12" diameter wheels and tires!!
Those smaller tires are becoming harder and harder to source... try ordering a set of 155-80r12's from Costco and you'll see what I mean! A number of owners have upgraded to 13" wheels but even decent tires in that size are getting hard to find.

The on-line Festiva community has become quite resourceful in sourcing parts. A number of years ago someone discovered Fourgreen.com  where we could find lots of "obsolete" parts. Being more of a Hyundai/Kia parts site we had to learn the equivalent Kia numbers for the Festiva parts. That was solved by the discovery of a site that had an archive of a Kia Pride parts list.

A number of community members have made an effort to find and hoard, I mean keep inventory of, desirable and/or necessary parts. I have an alert setup that lets me know when a Festiva shows up at the local Pick N Pull yards or up for sale on Kijiji, an online marketplace . Others, such as Ben Williams and his Festiva Store, have literally scoured the world for some of these parts to make them available to the rest of us.

Where do you get parts for you 80's and 90's econobox? Let us know in the comment section below! See you next week.