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Pics: Finally visited the annual Portland Auto Swap Meet this year

There is everything you could possibly imagine for sale - from restored cars to projects, incredibly hard-to-find parts and just a ton of vintage auto memorabilia.

BHPian AKTransAM recently shared this with other enthusiasts.

Figured folks would enjoy this visit to the Portland Auto Swap Meet. I and a car friend have been hearing about this for meet for years but had never made it there. We finally made it there this year in April.

It's held every year, and the 2022 meet was the 1st one post-Covid. It's been held every year for decades as far as I know and is a legendary meet.

It's spread out over two locations- the Portland International Raceway (where vendors are spread out all over the raceway itself), and the Expo Center.

You can walk all over for an entire day, and not even cover one of the locations completely. We spent 2 days there, walking each day for around 7 hours, and still couldn't check out all the vendors in each location. There's everything you could possibly imagine for sale, from restored cars to projects, incredibly hard-to-find parts, and just a ton of vintage auto memorabilia. All of the vehicles in the pics were for sale. And that's barely 1% of the vehicles that were there for sale.

Additionally, there are tons of vendors with just tables of parts/memorabilia spilling over that you go over, not knowing what you'll find. And did I mention, tons of car parts-both used and new (but meant for vintage vehicles, i.e., carbs, intakes, axles etc)?

Mostly old American, from extinct makes to Ford, GM, and Mopar, but you also find cool old Japanese models too. Since I'm a Pontiac fan, I was on the lookout for any Pontiac memorabilia. I was lucky enough to find an incredibly rare and still completely intact amber backlit Chief Pontiac hood ornament from a 1954 Pontiac Star Chief on a table of knick-knacks of a vendor in a far corner of the meet, which I finally mounted on a stand and backlit (the very last pic).

Next year we figured we'd go prepared and rent a truck so that we could load up the bed with parts and ship them back to Alaska, and maybe find a really cool project car or cars, and tow them back to get shipped.

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