[mike in tucson]

Somewhere there is a box with two RH units.

Last summer, on the way to Deuce Days in V, BC, we stopped at the Drake facility. We got a tour from Mr. Drake himself. I will NEVER bash his business or products ever after the tour. He has a small number of employees with few who are old Ford fanatics like his customers are. When he decides there is a need for a particular item, he tries to acquire a representative sample of the item to measure for his patterns. For instance, he may buy two or three of a certain hood ornament original...to find out that the two or three vary considerably....all the automakers had multiple sources for trim stuff...Ford didn't make '54 hood ornaments...they bought them from a couple of vendors. Those vendors didn't always make the tool exactly the same....remember this was before CNC machining centers and SolidWorks CAD. He showed us examples of hood ornaments...visibly they were different...so which one do you copy? If he copies style A and you have a car that had style B, you are pissed that yours doesn't look original to you.

He told us the story about rear fenders....he decides how many he can sell and contracts a stamping plant to run his die. (expensive die) Let's say he orders 750 of a fender. If you are order number 751, you wait until a lot more orders come in to justify another run. You think he backorders on purpose? He has to pay the stamper for a run of xx parts. Running a die for just one part gets really expensive. AND, Kirksite dies only have so many strikes in them....at some point he has to make a decision to remake the die. It's all economics, folks. Mr. Drake is a real car guy but he has to stay in business too. Like I said, I will never criticize his operation again. I wouldn't want his job!