[T3] What are SP Parts kits?

[Jim Adney]

Occasionally I run across a small kit of parts which has, sometimes in 
addition to a VW part number, and SP number. Example: SP 137A. I always 
assumed that SP stood for "Service Parts" but that's nothing more than a 
guess.

These numbers sometimes appear on official VW kits and sometimes on 
aftermarket kits. The kits always consist of a collection of parts that would be 
needed for a particular repair.

When I got my parts book a few years ago, I expected to find SP kits listed in 
there somewhere, but they are nowhere to be found. In general, VW assigns 
98 as the subgroup for repair parts for each main group, so, for example, 
brake parts (main group 6) would have repair kits with middle digits 698. So 
brake repair kits for our cars would tend to look like 311 698 xxx.

I've seen SP kits from VW and aftermarket suppliers that are the same as 
"98" kits available from VW, but I've also seen SP kits from VW for which 
there was no "98" kit.

So what are these SP numbers? Where do they come from? Who assigned 
those numbers? Where can I find a listing?

One of you guys must know all about this.

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Jim Adney, jadney at vwtype3.org
Madison, Wisconsin, USA
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