Where Do You Get the Parts?

A frequently asked question, by friends, visitors, strangers on learning what is being restored, is "Where do you get the parts?" Always in those exact words.
At first I was taken aback by the question and would say "Oh, from wherever.." but slowly learned to explain that parts when needed are one of the following: either you buy then from a hardware shop like Bunnings, a specialist fastener supplier or a motor spares shop like Auto-One, or you make them, or they are provided by friends here or in the UK who have had the foresight to preserve such things from other, derelict, vehicles of the era, or they are made to order by specialist trades, or they are cannibalised from another bus, or they come from my stash of oddments collected over years, bower bird fashion. For 35 years I have compulsively hoarded anything that looked useful. Bits of wood, metal, nuts, bolts, screws, wire, pipe, tube, electrical fiitings you name it, and unbelievably the collection just keeps coming up trumps.
Having just had the task with my brother and sister of clearing out our parents' home in Canberra with its 50 years of accumulated treasure, I am very mindful of what awaits my children when I shuffle off. I don't imagine they will see my hoard as the priceless treasure it is, so the question is how and when to downsize!

A case in point is this:

Under the staircase is a luggage area. Its front wall is the bulkhead to the left in this shot. Out of sight to the right under the stairs is a doorway to the unused space under the first four steps. A look at the TD5 in the collection at Sydney Bus Museum, Tempe revealed that there is a door here, missing from 379. Chances of finding another are zero, so a new one was made from sheet steel, with a half-round swage rolled in it, and so-called wired edges: ie the sharp edges of the steel rolled over 3/16" wire all around the circumference. Brian Mantle told me the trick to this: allow 3x the diameter of the wire, and cut to that depth into a piece of 1/2" steel bar with a hacksaw. Pushing the bar over the cut edge, lift it up to form a lip all the way around the sheet, lay the wire into the lip and tap with a small hammer so that the steel rolls over the wire. Bingo: a wired edge.

In all its red glory this is the door, with wired edge, swaged rib an inch or two in from the edge all around to stiffen it, and to be a bit decorative, and with a DRTT-pattern latch and butterfly hinges taken from an old destination display hatch out of an early underfloor-engined single decker sold for scrap. The other side is painted brown, to fit in with the convention that red is exterior, brown is interior.