Author’s note: This is part 1 of the story. Part 2 will follow in the next few days.
After so many frustrating dead ends and one false start approaching nervous breakdown proportions earlier this year, I never thought I would see the day my RX-7 finally looked like this:
Look ma, no rear seats!
False start, you may ask? Turns out the “seller” of the rear conversion parts I “purchased” at the end of last year (see this blog post) turned out to be nothing more than a conman, and I ended up $250 poorer as a result of his swindling. (in a nutshell: he claimed that the parts were “lost” by UPS yet couldn’t provide any tracking info once probed, and UPS couldn’t help me, as only the seller can lodge claims in such circumstances, leaving me neatly trapped in the middle with no recourse).
Fortunately in the end PayPal came to my rescue by refunding $200 (75%) of my transaction amount, and with confidence somewhat restored I resumed the hunt for the parts I so badly needed.
Around halfway through April, after asking around a couple more forums and ringing a bunch of rotary wreckers in the United States, one of the latter companies finally managed to put me on to a private collector/restorer/hoarder in Michigan who also runs his own eBay store as a side business. A flurry of emails were exchanged, and hey presto:
A nice pair of rear boot panels.
A nice pair of storage bins and frames. Perfect.
A quick skim through the seller’s eBay history quickly established him as a legitimate trader and a price for the parts was agreed upon, with monies duly transferred. I then commissioned the help of Chucks Restoration Services to forward these items from the USA to Auckland in one of their regular containers – thanks to oldschool.co.nz forum user andy for the recommendation!
So with the conversion bits and pieces on their way to Chucks’ freight forwarding depot in Orange County, LA, the only thing left to do was wait. Roll on part two of the story!
