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Apr. 17th, 2009 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI still have so many sets of pictures to go through and edit and post. But life has been busy, and I've been dealing with car stuff and more and haven't done it. But I'm really missing getting pictures out there, so here's a picture-post that I could cobble together without the hours of investment that the rest of them deserve; cars that I have known.
I was never a boy who was really into cars. I didn't even get my driver's license 'till 20 or so. I just wasn't interested. Still, as I've had my own vehicles through the years, I've found that I really do get personally attached to them. All the cars and trucks I've driven through my life served me well, and went through so many periods of change in my life that they've become inextricably tied to. I do miss them all.
So let's begin at the beginning, shall we?
My first vehicle was a 1979 F100 Custom pick up that I bought for $100 from a gaming friend. He was a mechanic on a destroyer in the Navy and had liberally applied his extremely high level in jury-rig to his vehicle.
This truck was a Frankenstein. It's engine was from a Falcon, and it's transmission and carburetor were from a Mustang. The shift linkage to connect the column mounted shifter to the trans didn't fit, of course, so Brad, the previous owner, welded together his own. I have no idea how many miles were on the various parts, or even on the body. The odometer had obviously rolled once or twice.
When I bought it, it needed a new head gasket. Brad helped me install it and that was my first experience with any real car repair. I enjoyed it, even though we had to disassemble and reseal the gasket after putting it together the first time and finding a leak.
After that there was a vacuum leak at the carburetor gasket that my uncle, a professional Ford mechanic, helped me out with. But the next big problem was when I drove![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
foreignlegion down to Chicago to help a friend out with some moving. The drive killed the transmission.
So I got it towed back home and, over the next few months, bought a rebuilt transmission and, with Brad's help, and huge amounts of toil and swearing, swapped it in. It didn't fit. Or more accurately, it bolted right on, but the studs on the torque converter weren't long enough to reach the flywheel on the engine.
I gave up and took it to a shop, using up just about all the money I was making at my job working overnights at a homeless shelter. Turns out that the transmission was fine, but the bell housing was wrong because it was intended for the engine that was supposed to be in the truck, instead of the one that was actually in it.
I had a working truck again, but not for long. The exhaust system fell apart on me. I got it hanging with gaffer's tape, to work on later (it was at least drivable), but it wasn't too long after that that I met my dear one,moiracoon and moved to Michigan, leaving Clif-ford at my parents house. I hoped that I'd have money to move it out to Michigan and work on it more, but I never did. After a year or two, I gave my parents the ok to have it junked.
I miss my first car. It was big and scary and ugly and I loved it. When I was working on the 302 V8 engine, there was so much room in the engine compartment that I could sit on the wheelwell with my feet inside and work on it. There was no headliner and it clanged like thunder when I closed the door. When I drove up behind people at an intersection and stopped, they creeped up a foot or two, just in case. Rest well Clif-ford.
My second vehicle was a 1983 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale. The odometer had been intermittantly failing to register distance, so I don't know exactly how many miles were on it, but my parents, and their friend Evil Bob who was the prior owner, and his dad before that, indicated it rolled over 100,000 least two, possibly three times while it was working, and the car may have had over 400,000 miles on her.
The Blue Beast was custom ordered by Evil Bob's dad for hauling a 22 foot solid-wall trailer. She had a 5 liter V8, reinforced towing frame and tow package, and an overdrive transmission. I used to drive her down to Chicago to visitdaveqat and jimcyl back when I first knew them; this was a car that just loved the highway; cruising along and eating up the miles is what she was built for.
The Blue Beast almost ended its life before coming into my hands when her transmission died. The mechanic that my parents use, by amazing chance, had another car of the same model and year with a blown engine on site that the owner was scrapping. They swapped the transmission in for cost of labor. No more overdrive, but that's ok.
Though the engine on the Olds was rock-solid, other items had begun to have problems over the life of the car. By the time I was regularly driving it in Michigan, there were several things that I like to refer fondly to as 'quirks' that a driver might have to be aware of.
Every light in the dashboard instrument cluster was burned out, save the one over the fuel gauge. At least I wouldn't run out of gas. The leak that gave my mom issues when she was driving it to work (water would get in through the windshield seal and drip on her head from the headliner) had developed into water dripping down into and through the dashboard and landing on my feet while I drove.
At one point the taillights stopped coming on when I turned the headlights on. Since I needed to be able to drive to and from work in the dark, and I didn't have money to have an electrician track down a broken wire up inside a twenty year old car, I fixed it myself. I spliced speaker wire into the headlights, ran it down under the car and through holes I drilled in the wheel-well guards, and spliced it into the taillights directly. This beat the few days that I tried to drive with my foot always just barely barely on the brake so the lights would come on, but not enough to actually apply stopping power. (You can see the brakelight wire I installed under the car in the next picture.)
(To tangent, one of the many reasons I miss our mechanic in Micigan is his reaction to that. The first time I brought it to him and embarrassedly explained the wire and what it did, he just asked "Does it work?". "Yes" I said. He nodded. "Ok then.")
Moira got a call from the complex management one day stating that we needed to remove our abandoned car or it would be towed. They were, of course, referring to the Olds, which was my daily driver from Warren to Dearborn and back. It had chosen that day to develop a gas leak from somewhere up at the top of the metal tank. I had a solution for that; only fill the tank to three quarters. Presto; no more leak!
Right to the end, she started right up when you turned the key. I swear she had another fifty-thousand miles in her at least. But on the way back from school one night, the water pump seemed to go out. The engine starting overheating and I limped her back home. I didn't have money for it to be replaced, and our mechanic had already basically told me to put her out of her misery at the next big failure. I didn't have anywhere to work on her to do the water pump myself either. So what could I do with a 20 year old car with hundreds of thousands of miles, a leaking gas tank, and overheating issues? I put her on Freecycle. A couple guys picked her up on a flat bed and told me she was destined for a demolition derby. (The first responders, a mechanic and her girlfriend, were interested, but ended up not having the money or space for it.)
I miss you, Blue Beast. I hope you went out well, and with a big bang!
My third means of transportation was a 1993 Dodge Dakota Sport that I bought from friends of my parents who had just bought a newer truck. Though she had over three hundred thousand miles clocked, they had replaced the engine about a hundred thousand miles ago. Their daughter had used it a lot, mainly for driving back and forth between Madison and Kenosha, so they were mostly highway miles too.
I bought The Trucklet, as Moira named her, while we were in the area for the Stronghold Renaissance Faire, and I drove her home afterward. Trucklet was a wonderful, reliable vehicle with plenty of cargo space and served me well for a long time. She got me through the months I was in Michigan prior to moving back to Wisconsin, and then was my commuter for going back and forth from Kenosha to Libertyville every day for a couple of years. By that point, I had put on sixy or seventy thousand miles and the odometer was creeping up toward the 400,000 mark. I was so excited; I was going to take a picture of the odometer and post it in LJ and maybe even send a copy to the manufacturer!
But as Trucklet got older, things started to go wrong; primarily, the transmission. At first it was just that it seemed to be shifting a little oddly, but it was getting worse. I brought it to a transmission place who said, essentially, that it was going to need to be rebuilt, and that it would probably cost about a grand. But, it would be drivable for an undetermined period of time into the future. First gear wasn't working and it would start in second, then skip right over third into fourth (explaining the hard shifting I was seeing), but it would work. So I kept driving.
And in fact, as long as I wasn't doing a lot of stop and go driving, it was ok. But the last straw finally hit, literally, on a cold winter day at an intersection in Libertyville. I was turning left across a lane of traffic and someone coming at me too fast to stop in time and clipped the far rear end of the truck, all the way back behind the rear tire. It knocked the bed cover off, and broke the exhaust piping. I kind of piled the cover into the bed itself and went back to work, after dealing with the police at the station. It was very busy day for them; conditions were awful everywhere.
I limped back home in the snow, stopping every half a mile or so to push the bed cover around so it wouldn't fall off, and parked the truck in the driveway. She was drivable, but the exhaust was pretty much toast, and the transmission seemed to be worse too. We let the Trucklet sit 'till warmer weather and I bought a replacement car. Finally, when we wouldn't have to deal with snow and cold, we drove her down to the Pick 'N Pull, nursing the ailing transmission, and sold her, to be used to help other trucks get a few more miles out of their lives.
I have a lot of fond memories of this truck indeed, particularly one involving that first trip to Stronghold Faire, and Moira and Kuma and I went a lot of places and racked up a lot of miles in her. Thanks Trucklet; you were a good and faithful companion.
So as The Trucklet rested through its winter repose, Moira and I picked out my fourth vehicle. The Dog Star was a 2004 Chevy Aveo (really a rebadged Daewoo Kalos, which made me happy; I trust Asian cars over American ones) with about seventy thousand miles on her.
This was by far the newest vehicle I've ever owned. I finally decided that we were in a good enough financial position to buy something that not only was newer, but had an actual warranty! I figured it was a smart move and would save me downtime, repair bills, and stress over car problems. Seems reasonable, right?
I loved my Aveo so much. Her purchase synched with me really getting into hypermiling, and I used her semi-automatic transmission continually to try to save gas. Two bolts let me remove the backseat entirely and not only save weight, but gave me a whopping amount of cargo space for such a small car. Plus, the back end made a perfect dog pit for Kuma! She was also the first car that I had the luxury of picking from a field of contenders rather than going with the first thing that was in decent shape and affordable. I had exactly the kind of car I wanted; small, cute, gas-efficient, different-looking, and fun!
I took the Dog Star to the UP with Kuma and slept in her for two nights under the stars of northern Wisconsin and on the the Lake Superior shore. Moira and I took her to the Dells for the LAFF camping trip and careful driving coaxed over 46 miles to the gallon out of her 1.6 liter engine! I was excited to no end about using the Dog Star to do all sorts of low cost photo road trips to everywhere! I was excited about getting into my car in the morning, and had so many grand plans of places to go and things to see in a car that I finally didn't have to worry about dying on me.
Alas, poor Dog Star. I hardly knew ye. On the way home from a trip to Kettle Moraine park, Moira hit the brakes at an intersection as a police car, sirens and lights ablaze, crossed the road ahead of us. A careful and judicious driver always, she avoided any problems and stopped safely. The person driving the ginormous GMC penis-compensator mobile behind us did not.
The accident was ruled entirely not our fault. But enough damage was done to the Aveo that she was totalled out. Even though she was completely drivable, the back end was kind of smushed, the tailgate wouldn't open, and there was frame damage. The Trucklet was already gone to the Pick 'N Pull. I was without a car. I'd made three payments on her. Goodbye Dog Star. I hope someone bought you and rebuilt you and you're enjoying the ten or fifteen more years on the road that you deserve.
Even better, since I only got blue book value for her, I still owed over a thousand dollars on her, even after getting a refund for the unused portion of the warranty. Neither the dealer nor my car insurance company offered gap coverage, so I didn't get it. Now I know. But hindsight is 20/20, and it didn't help with the situation I found myself in. I posted a plea in Livejournal. "I need a car right now," I said, "and I don't really care what it is as long as it gets at least 20MPG and I can afford to buy it from you."sabrinageek came through.
My fifth and current car is a 1995 Plymouth Neon Sport Coupe. Though he has an automatic transmission, which is kind of silly for a sport model, he's got a 2.0 dual overhead cam engine that puts out 150 horsepower. Not too shabby. Neons were actually really big on the stock car circuit when they came out. With currently a little over one light second on the odometer, he isn't as new and shiny as the Aveo, but it's oddly comfortable getting back to a car that's more of an age with what I'm used to driving.
The '95, as 'Brina told me, is a first model year and it's innards are kind of a mix-up sometimes. Replacing sensors and parts in the engine often involves cutting the 1995-only connector and replacing it with a new one that all other model years use.
When I first drove out to Rockford to pick him up, we had to disassemble a couple of brakes to fix one collapsed line in the front, and one rusted-to-hell and fallen-apart drum in the back. I replaced the other ones a couple days later on general principles. I want matching hardware on driver's and passenger's side when it comes to brakes. A new caliper was required on the front just because the cursed bleeder valve was frozen solid. Perhaps it's appropriate that my picture of the Neon is one ofposicat under it, fixing a wire.
>
He's running great right now, except for some slight transmission slippage that's concerning me. The transmission shop says it may be the solenoid pack by the symptoms I describe, and they'll diagnose for free then let me decide what to do. I'm going to bring it in after next week when Serin is back from vacation and we can car pool. In the meantime, the wheel bearing that sounds like a squadron of B-52s needs to be done this weekend, so that's my plan for tomorrow morning.
I miss my Aveo. I miss a car that I can just about always count on to not leave me stranded a hundred miles from home. But I do like the Neon a lot too. He's cute, and peppy, and easy to work on. He has a name too! Since the hood has a bump in it to make room for the air intake over the DOCH engine, I thought another character with a hump would be an appropriate namesake. Thanks to inspiration from Mel Brooks, my newest car is Igor (that's a long 'I' thank you very much).
Right now, I'll just be happy if he can get me through to June when I start doing a lot of working from home and taking the train. Maybe then I can afford to save a chunk of money for a car downpayment again and get Moira (after all, it's her turn after the Aveo) something newer and more reliable, I can drive her '01 KIA, and I can keep Igor as a spare. We shall see.
For the moment, Igor gets me where I need to go, and that makes me a reasonably happy dog.
So tell me a story. What cars have you owned? Which have been your favorites? Do you have any good stories about them that you want to (or can? *grins*) share? I'm all ears on a quiet Friday afternoon at work as I finish up a rebuild or two.
I was never a boy who was really into cars. I didn't even get my driver's license 'till 20 or so. I just wasn't interested. Still, as I've had my own vehicles through the years, I've found that I really do get personally attached to them. All the cars and trucks I've driven through my life served me well, and went through so many periods of change in my life that they've become inextricably tied to. I do miss them all.
So let's begin at the beginning, shall we?
My first vehicle was a 1979 F100 Custom pick up that I bought for $100 from a gaming friend. He was a mechanic on a destroyer in the Navy and had liberally applied his extremely high level in jury-rig to his vehicle.
This truck was a Frankenstein. It's engine was from a Falcon, and it's transmission and carburetor were from a Mustang. The shift linkage to connect the column mounted shifter to the trans didn't fit, of course, so Brad, the previous owner, welded together his own. I have no idea how many miles were on the various parts, or even on the body. The odometer had obviously rolled once or twice.
When I bought it, it needed a new head gasket. Brad helped me install it and that was my first experience with any real car repair. I enjoyed it, even though we had to disassemble and reseal the gasket after putting it together the first time and finding a leak.
After that there was a vacuum leak at the carburetor gasket that my uncle, a professional Ford mechanic, helped me out with. But the next big problem was when I drove
foreignlegion down to Chicago to help a friend out with some moving. The drive killed the transmission.So I got it towed back home and, over the next few months, bought a rebuilt transmission and, with Brad's help, and huge amounts of toil and swearing, swapped it in. It didn't fit. Or more accurately, it bolted right on, but the studs on the torque converter weren't long enough to reach the flywheel on the engine.
I gave up and took it to a shop, using up just about all the money I was making at my job working overnights at a homeless shelter. Turns out that the transmission was fine, but the bell housing was wrong because it was intended for the engine that was supposed to be in the truck, instead of the one that was actually in it.
I had a working truck again, but not for long. The exhaust system fell apart on me. I got it hanging with gaffer's tape, to work on later (it was at least drivable), but it wasn't too long after that that I met my dear one,
moiracoon and moved to Michigan, leaving Clif-ford at my parents house. I hoped that I'd have money to move it out to Michigan and work on it more, but I never did. After a year or two, I gave my parents the ok to have it junked. I miss my first car. It was big and scary and ugly and I loved it. When I was working on the 302 V8 engine, there was so much room in the engine compartment that I could sit on the wheelwell with my feet inside and work on it. There was no headliner and it clanged like thunder when I closed the door. When I drove up behind people at an intersection and stopped, they creeped up a foot or two, just in case. Rest well Clif-ford.
My second vehicle was a 1983 Oldsmobile Delta 88 Royale. The odometer had been intermittantly failing to register distance, so I don't know exactly how many miles were on it, but my parents, and their friend Evil Bob who was the prior owner, and his dad before that, indicated it rolled over 100,000 least two, possibly three times while it was working, and the car may have had over 400,000 miles on her.
The Blue Beast was custom ordered by Evil Bob's dad for hauling a 22 foot solid-wall trailer. She had a 5 liter V8, reinforced towing frame and tow package, and an overdrive transmission. I used to drive her down to Chicago to visit
daveqat and jimcyl back when I first knew them; this was a car that just loved the highway; cruising along and eating up the miles is what she was built for.The Blue Beast almost ended its life before coming into my hands when her transmission died. The mechanic that my parents use, by amazing chance, had another car of the same model and year with a blown engine on site that the owner was scrapping. They swapped the transmission in for cost of labor. No more overdrive, but that's ok.
Though the engine on the Olds was rock-solid, other items had begun to have problems over the life of the car. By the time I was regularly driving it in Michigan, there were several things that I like to refer fondly to as 'quirks' that a driver might have to be aware of.
Every light in the dashboard instrument cluster was burned out, save the one over the fuel gauge. At least I wouldn't run out of gas. The leak that gave my mom issues when she was driving it to work (water would get in through the windshield seal and drip on her head from the headliner) had developed into water dripping down into and through the dashboard and landing on my feet while I drove.
At one point the taillights stopped coming on when I turned the headlights on. Since I needed to be able to drive to and from work in the dark, and I didn't have money to have an electrician track down a broken wire up inside a twenty year old car, I fixed it myself. I spliced speaker wire into the headlights, ran it down under the car and through holes I drilled in the wheel-well guards, and spliced it into the taillights directly. This beat the few days that I tried to drive with my foot always just barely barely on the brake so the lights would come on, but not enough to actually apply stopping power. (You can see the brakelight wire I installed under the car in the next picture.)
(To tangent, one of the many reasons I miss our mechanic in Micigan is his reaction to that. The first time I brought it to him and embarrassedly explained the wire and what it did, he just asked "Does it work?". "Yes" I said. He nodded. "Ok then.")
Moira got a call from the complex management one day stating that we needed to remove our abandoned car or it would be towed. They were, of course, referring to the Olds, which was my daily driver from Warren to Dearborn and back. It had chosen that day to develop a gas leak from somewhere up at the top of the metal tank. I had a solution for that; only fill the tank to three quarters. Presto; no more leak!
Right to the end, she started right up when you turned the key. I swear she had another fifty-thousand miles in her at least. But on the way back from school one night, the water pump seemed to go out. The engine starting overheating and I limped her back home. I didn't have money for it to be replaced, and our mechanic had already basically told me to put her out of her misery at the next big failure. I didn't have anywhere to work on her to do the water pump myself either. So what could I do with a 20 year old car with hundreds of thousands of miles, a leaking gas tank, and overheating issues? I put her on Freecycle. A couple guys picked her up on a flat bed and told me she was destined for a demolition derby. (The first responders, a mechanic and her girlfriend, were interested, but ended up not having the money or space for it.)
I miss you, Blue Beast. I hope you went out well, and with a big bang!
My third means of transportation was a 1993 Dodge Dakota Sport that I bought from friends of my parents who had just bought a newer truck. Though she had over three hundred thousand miles clocked, they had replaced the engine about a hundred thousand miles ago. Their daughter had used it a lot, mainly for driving back and forth between Madison and Kenosha, so they were mostly highway miles too.
I bought The Trucklet, as Moira named her, while we were in the area for the Stronghold Renaissance Faire, and I drove her home afterward. Trucklet was a wonderful, reliable vehicle with plenty of cargo space and served me well for a long time. She got me through the months I was in Michigan prior to moving back to Wisconsin, and then was my commuter for going back and forth from Kenosha to Libertyville every day for a couple of years. By that point, I had put on sixy or seventy thousand miles and the odometer was creeping up toward the 400,000 mark. I was so excited; I was going to take a picture of the odometer and post it in LJ and maybe even send a copy to the manufacturer!
But as Trucklet got older, things started to go wrong; primarily, the transmission. At first it was just that it seemed to be shifting a little oddly, but it was getting worse. I brought it to a transmission place who said, essentially, that it was going to need to be rebuilt, and that it would probably cost about a grand. But, it would be drivable for an undetermined period of time into the future. First gear wasn't working and it would start in second, then skip right over third into fourth (explaining the hard shifting I was seeing), but it would work. So I kept driving.
And in fact, as long as I wasn't doing a lot of stop and go driving, it was ok. But the last straw finally hit, literally, on a cold winter day at an intersection in Libertyville. I was turning left across a lane of traffic and someone coming at me too fast to stop in time and clipped the far rear end of the truck, all the way back behind the rear tire. It knocked the bed cover off, and broke the exhaust piping. I kind of piled the cover into the bed itself and went back to work, after dealing with the police at the station. It was very busy day for them; conditions were awful everywhere.
I limped back home in the snow, stopping every half a mile or so to push the bed cover around so it wouldn't fall off, and parked the truck in the driveway. She was drivable, but the exhaust was pretty much toast, and the transmission seemed to be worse too. We let the Trucklet sit 'till warmer weather and I bought a replacement car. Finally, when we wouldn't have to deal with snow and cold, we drove her down to the Pick 'N Pull, nursing the ailing transmission, and sold her, to be used to help other trucks get a few more miles out of their lives.
I have a lot of fond memories of this truck indeed, particularly one involving that first trip to Stronghold Faire, and Moira and Kuma and I went a lot of places and racked up a lot of miles in her. Thanks Trucklet; you were a good and faithful companion.
So as The Trucklet rested through its winter repose, Moira and I picked out my fourth vehicle. The Dog Star was a 2004 Chevy Aveo (really a rebadged Daewoo Kalos, which made me happy; I trust Asian cars over American ones) with about seventy thousand miles on her.
This was by far the newest vehicle I've ever owned. I finally decided that we were in a good enough financial position to buy something that not only was newer, but had an actual warranty! I figured it was a smart move and would save me downtime, repair bills, and stress over car problems. Seems reasonable, right?
I loved my Aveo so much. Her purchase synched with me really getting into hypermiling, and I used her semi-automatic transmission continually to try to save gas. Two bolts let me remove the backseat entirely and not only save weight, but gave me a whopping amount of cargo space for such a small car. Plus, the back end made a perfect dog pit for Kuma! She was also the first car that I had the luxury of picking from a field of contenders rather than going with the first thing that was in decent shape and affordable. I had exactly the kind of car I wanted; small, cute, gas-efficient, different-looking, and fun!
I took the Dog Star to the UP with Kuma and slept in her for two nights under the stars of northern Wisconsin and on the the Lake Superior shore. Moira and I took her to the Dells for the LAFF camping trip and careful driving coaxed over 46 miles to the gallon out of her 1.6 liter engine! I was excited to no end about using the Dog Star to do all sorts of low cost photo road trips to everywhere! I was excited about getting into my car in the morning, and had so many grand plans of places to go and things to see in a car that I finally didn't have to worry about dying on me.
Alas, poor Dog Star. I hardly knew ye. On the way home from a trip to Kettle Moraine park, Moira hit the brakes at an intersection as a police car, sirens and lights ablaze, crossed the road ahead of us. A careful and judicious driver always, she avoided any problems and stopped safely. The person driving the ginormous GMC penis-compensator mobile behind us did not.
The accident was ruled entirely not our fault. But enough damage was done to the Aveo that she was totalled out. Even though she was completely drivable, the back end was kind of smushed, the tailgate wouldn't open, and there was frame damage. The Trucklet was already gone to the Pick 'N Pull. I was without a car. I'd made three payments on her. Goodbye Dog Star. I hope someone bought you and rebuilt you and you're enjoying the ten or fifteen more years on the road that you deserve.
Even better, since I only got blue book value for her, I still owed over a thousand dollars on her, even after getting a refund for the unused portion of the warranty. Neither the dealer nor my car insurance company offered gap coverage, so I didn't get it. Now I know. But hindsight is 20/20, and it didn't help with the situation I found myself in. I posted a plea in Livejournal. "I need a car right now," I said, "and I don't really care what it is as long as it gets at least 20MPG and I can afford to buy it from you."
sabrinageek came through.My fifth and current car is a 1995 Plymouth Neon Sport Coupe. Though he has an automatic transmission, which is kind of silly for a sport model, he's got a 2.0 dual overhead cam engine that puts out 150 horsepower. Not too shabby. Neons were actually really big on the stock car circuit when they came out. With currently a little over one light second on the odometer, he isn't as new and shiny as the Aveo, but it's oddly comfortable getting back to a car that's more of an age with what I'm used to driving.
The '95, as 'Brina told me, is a first model year and it's innards are kind of a mix-up sometimes. Replacing sensors and parts in the engine often involves cutting the 1995-only connector and replacing it with a new one that all other model years use.
When I first drove out to Rockford to pick him up, we had to disassemble a couple of brakes to fix one collapsed line in the front, and one rusted-to-hell and fallen-apart drum in the back. I replaced the other ones a couple days later on general principles. I want matching hardware on driver's and passenger's side when it comes to brakes. A new caliper was required on the front just because the cursed bleeder valve was frozen solid. Perhaps it's appropriate that my picture of the Neon is one of
posicat under it, fixing a wire.>He's running great right now, except for some slight transmission slippage that's concerning me. The transmission shop says it may be the solenoid pack by the symptoms I describe, and they'll diagnose for free then let me decide what to do. I'm going to bring it in after next week when Serin is back from vacation and we can car pool. In the meantime, the wheel bearing that sounds like a squadron of B-52s needs to be done this weekend, so that's my plan for tomorrow morning.
I miss my Aveo. I miss a car that I can just about always count on to not leave me stranded a hundred miles from home. But I do like the Neon a lot too. He's cute, and peppy, and easy to work on. He has a name too! Since the hood has a bump in it to make room for the air intake over the DOCH engine, I thought another character with a hump would be an appropriate namesake. Thanks to inspiration from Mel Brooks, my newest car is Igor (that's a long 'I' thank you very much).
Right now, I'll just be happy if he can get me through to June when I start doing a lot of working from home and taking the train. Maybe then I can afford to save a chunk of money for a car downpayment again and get Moira (after all, it's her turn after the Aveo) something newer and more reliable, I can drive her '01 KIA, and I can keep Igor as a spare. We shall see.
For the moment, Igor gets me where I need to go, and that makes me a reasonably happy dog.
So tell me a story. What cars have you owned? Which have been your favorites? Do you have any good stories about them that you want to (or can? *grins*) share? I'm all ears on a quiet Friday afternoon at work as I finish up a rebuild or two.
