The order comes together

After auditing my Heinkel against the "erstzteilliste" or spare parts list from Heinkel-Club I was able to prepare a pretty comprehensive list of parts required. I must admit I was just a little shocked when I tallied up the total price of the order. It was well over 1800 Euro, which at current exchange rates meant A$3600! F*ck! I can't pretend I was expecting this to be a cheap exercise, but given that most of the machine was there the cost seemed just a little hard to swallow. I thought to myself, perhaps I'm being just a little over cautious and ordering things that I don't actually need? I went back and re-reviewed. Sure enough I convinced myself to drop a few 'surplus' items, like the complete 103-a1 indicator set, which would have set me back a couple of hundred euros. I'll find some other 'after market' set up for the indicators. Indeed, problems with dodgy original indicators have been one of my main complaints with both the Vespa and Troll.

Eventually I sent the order, neatly tabled in an Excel spreadsheet to the Heinkel-Club, highlighting (colour coded!) with a series of questions and clarifications for them to review. Spare parts meister Wolfgang responded to my queries extremely promptly, noting which parts he thought I should have ordered and which were surplus. I was very impressed. One concern was the requirement for exchange parts. Wherever possible Heinkel-Club seek to exchange and repair critical and hard to find parts. These included all the brake parts, parts of the transmission and the internal engine parts (rocker arms). I was however missing all of the exchange parts - clearly they'd been salvaged by the previous owners for this very reason. Fortunately they did agree to supply the parts, but at a premium.

Although I was dreading the outcome, I was very pleasantly surprised. The end cost was way under what I'd expected. 1200 euro including shipping. Comparing the price charged for each item against their list price in the catalogue, it seems clear that there is a membership discount or something at play.