There are two kinds of parts stores. This column is about both of them, but it is only a love letter to one.
There is a parts store about twenty minutes from here — independent, same family for thirty-something years, the kind of place where the fluorescent light over the second aisle has been flickering since the first Bush administration and nobody has fixed it because nobody particularly minds — where a man named either Gerald or Gary works the counter on weekdays. We have never been sure which. We have never asked. You do not interrupt a man like that to ask about his name.
What you do is walk in with your problem. Not with a part number, not necessarily with a year and make and model, but with the actual problem, described plainly. The brake feel is soft and it's not the fluid. There's a tick at idle that goes away above three thousand rpm. The bike surges at steady throttle on the highway, not at full load, specifically at cruising speed, like it can't make up its mind. You describe it the way you would describe it to someone who already knows motorcycles, because Gerald-or-Gary already knows motorcycles. You do not have to translate.
He will ask you one or two questions. Not to be thorough — he already knows the answer, he just wants to confirm it. Then he will turn around, walk to a specific location in the shelving that he has clearly never had to look up, and come back with the thing. Sometimes it is the exact part. Sometimes it is a length of fuel line and a specific clamp size and he will tell you how much to cut and why. Once, memorably, he came back with a bolt — just a bolt, loose, from what appeared to be a jar of loose bolts — set it on the counter, and said "that's your problem." It was. We still don't know how he knew from what we described. We didn't ask that either.
"He will turn around, walk to a specific location in the shelving that he has clearly never had to look up, and come back with the thing."
— on Gerald, or possibly Gary
This is a specific and increasingly rare kind of knowledge. It is not book knowledge, or at least not only book knowledge. It is accumulated from years of people walking in with broken things and walking out with fixed things, and from whatever Gerald-or-Gary did before he was behind a parts counter, which based on the specificity of his opinions about points ignition was probably a long time in a garage somewhere. You cannot look this up. You cannot find it in a catalog. It lives in one person, in one building, under one flickering light, and when that person retires the knowledge retires with him unless he has managed to transfer it to someone else, which is not guaranteed and not something we like to think about.
We should talk about the other kind of parts store, because fairness requires it and because most of you have spent more time there than anywhere else.
It is not the fault of the people behind the counter at the big chain store. They are working a retail job, they were trained on a computer system, and the computer system asks for year, make, and model. This is a reasonable place to start if you are buying parts for a 2019 Honda something that shares a platform with eleven other Hondas and for which every part has a tidy SKU attached to it. It is a less useful approach for anything old, anything unusual, anything where the year and make and model are the beginning of the description rather than the end of it.
You walk in with the bolt. The actual bolt, in your hand, the one you need to match. The person behind the counter looks at it briefly, turns to the computer, and asks what year. You say 1981. They type. They look at the screen. They say it doesn't come up. You say the bolt is M8 by 1.25 pitch, about thirty millimeters, you just need a match. They look at the screen again, in case it has changed. It hasn't. They say the system shows no listing for that vehicle. You thank them. You drive to the independent place. Gerald-or-Gary looks at the bolt for about one second, goes to the jar, and hands you two because you might want a spare.
This is not a complaint. The chain stores serve a real purpose and they are open on Sundays and they carry oil filters for things made in the last decade and sometimes that is exactly what you need. But they are not where you go with a problem. They are where you go when you already know the answer and you just need the part to be in a bag with a price on it.
Bring the thing: The old gasket. The bolt. The jet you think is wrong. The physical object carries information that a description doesn't. Gerald-or-Gary can look at a jet and tell you if it's been drilled out. You cannot convey this over the phone.
Describe symptoms, not conclusions: Say "it surges at steady throttle" not "I think it's running lean." He will reach the same conclusion faster than you did and without the wrong turns you took getting there.
Don't pretend to know more than you do: He has seen what happens when people install the wrong thing confidently. He would rather tell you the right thing once than sell you the wrong thing twice.
If he asks what you're working on, tell him the whole story: Not the part number. The bike, the symptoms, what you've already tried. The part number is his job. The story is your job.
The junior editor made the point recently that what Gerald-or-Gary provides is not really a parts service. It is a diagnostic service that happens to result in parts. You come in lost and you leave with a direction. The part is almost incidental — it is just the physical form that the answer takes.
This is right. And it explains why the experience feels so different from any other retail transaction, why you drive past two closer stores to get there, why you feel vaguely better just walking in even before you've said what you need. Most retail tells you what's available. This tells you what's wrong. Those are different things, and only one of them is actually useful when you are standing in a garage at seven in the evening with a bike in pieces and a specific problem you cannot name.
The senior editor has a theory that every person who wrenches on old bikes has a Gerald-or-Gary in their history — one specific person at one specific counter who knew something at a moment when you needed it known, and who handed it over without ceremony, without making you feel like you should have known it yourself. The first time it happens you are just relieved. The second time you start to understand what you're dealing with. By the third time you have rearranged your Saturday to be on that side of town by noon before he takes his lunch break.
We have bought parts from Gerald-or-Gary for going on twelve years. He has never been wrong. He has occasionally been frank in a way that stung a little — there was an incident involving a crankcase repair that he assessed in about four words, none of them encouraging — but he has never been wrong. We have never told him what this column is, or that he's in it, or that we drive past two other stores to get to his. Some things you don't explain. You just show up with your problem, and you let the man work.