Westy Parts Service Germany

jamescook

Member
Good news for all owners of an Airstream Westfalia (aka James Cook in Germany)

Hi,
my name is Peter Krone and I am the owner of the German James Cook Forum. Many of you asked me if I could help in acquiring parts in Germany. Now I can offer you a 50% solution. I convinced my favorite Westy shop to offer a new service for locating parts.

„Manfred Ermel Freizeitmobile“ is run by Manfred, a former Westfalia employee how knows the James Cook like nobody else. I use his service since 2012. He has many parts on stock and knows people at Westfalia and other resources. If anybody can locate parts, it’s him. Here is a link to his website https://www.ermel-freizeitmobile.de/aktuelles/ (scroll down and you see a video of 58 James Cooks, shot by me :)

Manfred installed a new email address just for your parts requests and his son Marius will answer your emails in English. So far this service is just about the information about those parts. What exactly you might need and where to buy it.

westy@ermel-freizeitmobile.de is the new address.

The remaining 50% of the solution is all about shipping. Manfred cannot provide a shipping service. Not for the parts, he as on stock and certainly not for others. He is busy fixing Westies ;-)

Your help is needed!

Do you know a way to pick up parts in Germany? Can you order DHL, UPS etc. to ship parts from Germany to the US? Shipping inside Germany (and maybe inside the European Union) should be possible if you know somebody who can cover the rest.

Please reply to me and tell me what you think about this approach.

Thanks
Peter

PS: I sent this text via email to you, if I had your address. If you didn't get an email from me in the last 48 hours, please contact me at admin [at) james-cook-freunde.de
We are going to ship our Westy to the states again. Maybe we can meet (again) :thumbup:
 

Riptide

Active member
Big thanks on the new e-mail address. I have conversed with Manfred a few times over the years, using Google Translate. Pretty clunky, but we got our points across...
 

jamescook

Member
This is what the first westy owners answered to my request

Shipping can be complicated, I sent a pallet of personal goods to Australia and with packing, shipping costs, customs, etc. it cost $1000. I will look into smaller shipments to the US from Germany using UPS, Fed Ex and DHL. The cost will be driven by size and weight, so I could get some estimates.

A couple of years ago I had some parts I found delivered to a hotel where a friend of mine was staying in England and he checked them with his luggage as an extra bag - cost was $50 US.
I think DHL is the best carrier but I don't know if they provide packing services. Maybe an enterprising Westy enthusiast in Germany could have a side business as a middle-man in these transactions. At the least, VAT may not need to be collected on overseas shipments, providing a boost to profits.
I checked with my friend in the auto PR business who ships things all the time. He says the best thing would be to do bulk shipments periodically (perhaps 4x/year?) and have Kuehne + Nagel or an airline do the logistics. You would need a U.S. entity to do the shipping (for a small fee). Perhaps GoWesty.com would be interested?
I have a friend that visits Spain every year that may be able to pick parts up and ship them.
There has to be a way to deal with this issue. I’ll also talk to some of my car friends because the Porsche and BMW collectors may have encountered similar challenges.
...there definitely is a way to ship from Germany - so I think we need to recruit a James Cook owner near this guy’s shop who can assist us with shipping.
I created an account with UPS (free) and plugged in the numbers (HxWxD weight - from/to) and realized the cost would be $600. I think that is the crux of the problem - IE: COST!!!
It appears that UPS can do the pick up in Germany if you schedule it through their international calling center. 1-800-782-7892.
I do have a friend that is an engineer for Lufthansa in Tulsa. He told me he could arrange shipping of the glass if someone found some in Germany. I will ask him if he knows anyone in your area that might be interested in filling in the shipping gap from Germany.
On a personal level, I probably have people who can forward ship for me. But on a group/public level, that won’t work. So maybe a company that does ship-forwarding like this can solve the other 50%: https://mygermany.com/
In my experience, as long as the parts are not too large, DHL is very affordable option, but once you exceed their max package size, it becomes very (very!) costly. In those cases, what may be required is for parts to be clustered and shipped to a single address in the US from which they can then get distributed. As for the packaging of the smaller individual parts, I would think that whoever the seller is would take car of the packaging and the shipping. Again, it's the larger parts order where there will be an issue.
to be continued
Peter
 

grozier

Active member
Big thanks on the new e-mail address. I have conversed with Manfred a few times over the years, using Google Translate. Pretty clunky, but we got our points across...
On a side note, Google Translate is okay, but https://www.deepl.com/translator is much better. When you cut-and-paste, just be sure to leave their tag below your text so that the recipient knows it's machine-translated. I have no affiliation with them but found the service to be very useful.
 

jamescook

Member
on more reply

For shipping, I think DHL covers both US & Germany pretty well. I'm not certain about importing. That's probably where the big issue is. It is straightforward to get parts shipped, but getting them through customs is the harder part. I did find this page that had many of the answers.
https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/internet-purchases
They say if the parts are being imported for non-commercial activities (personal use), then these are given more leeway. I think that's where we are.
There is a form that the shipper would need to fill out. And then the buyer is responsible for the customs paperwork & charges. I think that is the case.
It may be possible to have paperwork filled out, and bill be paid by the buyer. But I don't have all those details yet. I think this can be similar to when you go through customs at the airport. You would just have to pay for importing the "Auto Part".

When I looked into this, I found it was not all that simple. See here: https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/2016-Apr/icp015_3.pdf
It may be that there's an easy way, but I don't have it yet.
 

jamescook

Member
another thought

I have tried to find a cost-effective means of shipping parts from Germany to the US, I did look up a couple of freight forwarders located in Germany and they only ship using DHL or Fed Ex.
Using their online cost estimate system I used a few typical size and weight examples to get an idea of the cost. In my opinion, the costs are too expensive to use for normal parts we would need.
It may be possible to ship parts directly through DHL or FedEx which would reduce the overhead cost added by the freight forwarder? As a starting point, I would contact both companies that have offices in Germany and look into consolidated shipments as the price per item will drop significantly for bulk shipments.
 

Wasaabi

Sprinter Westfalia #133
I researched more options and found this company, which seems to have couriers as well as shipping options.

www.parcelmonkey.com

I used their quick shipping calculator to see price options from shipping a 10 lb. part from Germany with pickup and drop-off. Results ranged from $96.02 with DHL Express International to $470.56 with UPS Express Plus. There were also what seem to be courier options. One takes only 1-2 days for $246.95. With certain sizes/weights, I wonder if the courier system could end up being cheaper.

The value of shipping all depends on how important/hard to get the part is. Like if it was an upper wing window. But I could also see it working for small parts (specialized latches etc) which would presumably be much cheaper to ship. Overall we are fortunate between wide US parts availability for the Sprinter van plus having many RV parts that are US or Dometic-sourced, and then filling some gaps with VW Westy parts. For certain things though, especially as our Westies age, this new resource is much appreciated (thanks Peter!).
 

Top Bottom