Now that I own a vintage airplane nothing sounds like music to my ears more than the phrase "new old stock". Sounds like an oxymoron, but the term refers to old surplus parts that have sat on the shelf for years and years and never been used. Thus they are new in the sense that they haven't been used, but old stock having been manufactured decades ago. Fortunately, the TwinBonanza was used in military service and the military would always keep 3-4 spare parts for every part flying, resulting in plentiful parts availability for my old bird. Most of the stock was bought up by various parts warehouses and you can call them up if you need something specific, or do a parts search, or monitor eBay. So far I haven't had any issues finding things. There are a few items I'm always keeping an eye out for, for example exhaust pipes and augmenter tubes. Recently I saw a set of "NOS" fuel caps and since one of mine was a bit sticky, I bought the lot.
Beauty. I love the gunmetal grey look, vs the old ones that had been painted over a few times. I had seen caps before, but they usually had gallon markings engraved that didn't match my fuel tanks, and I didn't want that. Here are the old caps.
Used ones seem to fetch 60-75$ each so hopefully that will offset the pain of $200 each for the NOS ones!
