How would you go about searching for car parts

[Aerozord]

Ok so my car got smashed and now my door needs to be replaced, but I have no clue how you would go about finding a specific part for a specific make, model, and year. I tried obvious things like craigslist and ebay but to no luck.

[Aldurin]

There may be a junkyard in your area that allows you to pull parts to purchase, with any luck you may find an intact door for your specific car.

[TDK]

Call a junkyard, scrapyard, bodyshop, repairshop, ask them if they have a door for a year-make-model (or just one that will work. they usually have books showing what range of years for a particular make will use the same part. The headlight on my 97, for instance, is from an 02 of the same model. The door and a few pieces of the engine are from a 98.), then if they have more than one, ask if its the color your car is.

If you can't find a place that has parts for things like that, ask them where you might call if looking for parts. Someone at a shop will have certain guys they call for parts.

Alternatively, look for another car of the same model that doesn't run, but has intact doors, and buy the doors off it if you can, and if not buy the car and keep it for spare parts (my dad once ended up with four different volkswagen jettas just for parts, because between six people, we had three of them on the road. if a car doesn't run and won't within a certain price range, its value is severely limited. The bare minimum you're going to pay is probably $300, because that's around the scrap value of most cars. Maybe less if there's not a scrapyard around.). Or just take the door and scrap the car.


Edit for below:

The dealership will overcharge the hell out of you, and unless your car is a fairly recent year, its really unlikely they're going to have a door that fits it.

[ZARAK]

Have you tried the dealership?

[Magus]

For certain parts you can use autopartswarehouse.com. That's where I've gotten one or two "small" things such as a high-pressure power-steering hose or a tail-light, and you can search by make/model/year. A lot of the parts are not original parts but they are manufactured by a third party to the same specifications (generic parts, basically). I haven't had a problem with part fitting yet.

An entire door though you're probably going to want to contact junk yards, look through the local auto trader/ad bargain paper, etc. for another car that's the same make, model, year (though it doesn't always have to be the same year, mind you, depending on whether they keep the body style). You can often find ads of other people selling a used car that matches yours. Often they will "piece" out the cars if they're sufficiently old.