“Local pickup only”
By making it local the market gets MUCH smaller. And yeah freight would be expensive and crating it all up would be a pain, but at least then it would be an option for someone that wasn’t local that needed it now and were willing to pay the freight instead of looking all over the place for who knows how long.
I mean there’s lots of members wanting a 4 speed, but how many of them are states away or further? How many are ready to buy or do the swap today? How many are actually serious? Wanting one and actually doing the conversion are two different things.
Large stuff like that is just hard to sell. I sold off the front clip parts from my ‘74 Duster when I swapped it over, I had to crate most of it and ship it. And I didn’t make much money at all doing it, compared to my time to crate and ship all of it.
Plus it’s an unrebuilt 4 speed. I’m not saying it’s not a good price considering it comes with everything, but there’s more work and more expense there for sure. Something completely rebuilt would be worth a lot more, but it would also be more desirable.
Then there’s the market for 5 and 6 speed conversions. Yeah, lots more expensive, but if you’re going to spend thousands on a conversion already a couple thousand more for a modern overdrive transmission is pretty tempting. I 4 speed swapped my Duster before I 6 speed swapped it. The work to do the 6 speed swap was definitely a lot more, but the new 5 speed options are a lot closer to a 4 speed conversion from a fabrication/install difficulty standpoint. And if you’re going to do 70% of the work, and you’re tearing everything down already…
