Truck parts have been made primarily in high-volume manufacturing facilities to produce parts at the lowest cost. That worked simply because the volumes produced were large and the huge investment in plant and machinery could be justified by gigantic volumes.

As competition increased and volumes from the big automakers dwindled, the result has been bankruptcies and plant closures. There are many factors that contributed to the failure of manufacturers, but the resulting plant closures have many effects.

Replacement parts for the large US auto companies mostly come from high-volume parts plants. These plants were either inside or outside the Big 3 companies. In any case, replacement parts for the older trucks got a free ride, so to speak. The plants were there producing high volumes, and it was easy and inexpensive to maintain the tooling and documentation to make some spare parts in batches. These pieces can even be stocked in small volumes and sold a few at a time.

With plant closures, this cheap source of OEM parts has suddenly disappeared in many cases. It’s not that the parts can’t be made elsewhere. They can. The problem is that the documentation on how to make the parts and even what part it is can easily be lost. And that?

Loss of engineering documentation doesn’t mean the information is gone, it means no one knows where it is. Remember, many of these replacement parts are not documented in computer databases. They exist in drawings on paper and those drawings can be almost anywhere. In many cases, the problem may not be with the product documentation. It may be the manufacturing documentation that is missing.

If the product information exists, manufacturing processes can be reinvented, but only at high cost in many cases.

Cheap truck parts existed because of high volume manufacturing. As it fades, there needs to be a different approach to sourcing parts for older vehicles. I assume that many parts will not be available in the near future and as a result older vehicles will die before their time, simply due to lack of maintenance parts…