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KeithP=> either the parts are overpriced => or the whole cars themselves are => underpriced. IMHO: Supply/demand is skewed because they have always been obscure in the States, and that's where the largest number of them survive. Low knowledge means low demand -- no one seeks a car they don't know about. Further, the few people who know anything about them are VW people, who are generally used to dealing with relatively easy and plentiful parts supply and relatively low-cost restorations. Doing a 34 is not especially expensive relative to other cars of similar age and rarity, but it's substantially different from doing other VWs. (What's my scale? I'm also working on a '59 BMW 600, one of about 6,000 made, and a '58 Studebaker Golden Hawk, one of exactly 878.) Low demand for a rare car also means that parts for sale only trickle out, so why should anyone serious bother with carrying them? Remaining parts then gather in the hands of the it's-rare-so-it-must-be-golden crowd, who'll sit on a part for decades rather than sell it for its real worth. And a few of us who really want that part will eventually pay the goldplated price just to get the thing on the road. So what happens very often is that a VW aficionado picks one up, gradually learns that there's a lot of necessary knowledge for restoring the car that is generally unknown in the VW world, and that good parts can be relatively difficult to acquire and priced more like Porsche than VW, often worse. At that point the project is easily shelved or abandoned, putting another half-done car on the market with no one to buy it. I know, it happened to me, too, with my first 34. None of this has anything to do with the actual value of the car in terms of style, substance or fahrvergnugen. All I can tell you there is that having borne the pain of restoring a badly abused car, paying out the ass for parts sometimes and other times getting stuff free just because no one else wanted it, dealing with some weirdness in Type 34 lala land (any Ford Model A drivers out there? How about *those* guys?) as well as a lot of extremely helpful, dedicated and cool people at the same time, I *love* driving my 34, and without reservation I encourage anyone with an interest to check these cars out more closely and see whether VW's top of the line might not fit you, too. Steven Ayres, Prescott AZ '66 KG1600 ------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <type3-off@vwtype3.org> For more help, see http://vwtype3.org/list/