On auto repair
Several people have commented that I would have been better served to trash the honda and find another car, and that may be altogether right, but those people don’t know a lot about auto repair, and here’s why:
Car shows up. Has a bad head gasket. Head gasket kit costs $70. No big deal. Pull head.
Determine head is warped and needs more than a new gasket. Take head to machine shop for redecking, get valves ground, includes gasket kit. $300.
Clean block, check seals, determine water pump seal is about to fail, and water pump is so difficult to remove that it’s best to do so when the head is off. Replace water pump, $45. Determine alternator is seized, buy new alternator. THe purpose is to have a sound running vehicle when I’m finished, so why not? $149 alternator. New timing belt and tensioner, $45. In for a penny, in for a pound. Left halfshaft CV boot is verfuckled, try to replace it with disastrous results, buy new halfshaft. $58. While there, discover motor mount and suspension bushing have failed. $38 motor mount, $18 suspension bushing. Engine got so hot it melted off the plastic timing belt cover. Junkyard, $32. Four or five feet of melted vacuum hose, $12. Bad distributor cap and wires, $62.
Having dumped this kind of cash into the vehicle, it’s utter stupidity to not go the last mile and repair/replace the trans. But it would have been nice to know this ahead of time, so as to save the agrivation. And what would I have gotten for $600-800 bucks? an old wreck of a car I also know nothing about. Which could take a crap on me at any turn. And leave me right where I am now. So in the end, I’ll be further ahead, but not by miles. Maybe by a little bit.
So, folks, when you’re buying a used car, it makes a LOT OF SENSE to take it to someone who knows their way around a vehicle, and to have them inspect it, for signs of the small and expensive things in need of iminent replacement, lest you end up like Og.
15 comments Og | Shadetree Mechanic
I kept waiting for the “priceless” Hope you’re almost done with the verfuckled thing.
Very good point, Og, and one I’ve tried to make to other folks from time to time. Mostly they look at me as if I suddenly started speaking in tongues, and I let the issue drop. Maybe I just didn’t explain it as well as you did.
Been there, done that. Repeatedly. That’s why I hate having to buy cars or shoes. Like I’ve said a thousand times, there’s no way of knowing for sure either one’s gonna be any good until it’s too late. All you can do is take what precautions you can and try to keep a sense of humor about what goes wrong anyway.
Not to beat the horse, but how much of your time have you spent and what do you value that at? That said, I’m not in any position to bad-mouth anybody’s time and cars. I used the play with Vega’s(shudder) and now I have a Ford Merkur. How’s that for self punishment??
I mnostly consult and do the hardcore shit like valve adjustment. THe nephiew has done the lions share of the work.
Gerry has a good point about the correlation with shoes (boots in my case).
I’ve got a pair of ropers Mom got me for my 18th birthday, 17 years ago (holy crap, just realized I’ve had those boots nearly half my life!).
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had them re-heeled and/or re-soled, ’cause I HATE breaking in new boots.
Now we’re talking something I can understand,shoes!
og,
I’ll assume that I was at least partly responsible for this post. . . :)
Don’t get me wrong – I *TOTALLY* understand why you’re still working on the Honda now. I also completely understand how projects can snowball – frex, I wound up helping a very good friend completely refinish half of his house from a project that started simply to repair a small crack in the plaster in one wall. . .
I guess part of it comes from just not having the background or (more importantly) patience to work on cars (other than the most rudimentary of tasks like batteries or light bulb replacement). Change my own oil? Not when I have to make a MINIMUM of two trips to the store (one to buy the oil, one to return the old stuff) and it takes me > 1 hour to complete everything. Not to save $10 four times a year. . .
(Plus it gives me a reason to walk around the dealership for a while and gawk at all the new cars. . .)
LOL! I understand, Jay. And no, this was not about you at all- but to point out that the cascade of clusterfucks that can turn a $70 repair into a $600 job. Which a lot of people don’t grok.
That car? It hates you. lmao
Probaly hates everybody though.
When it runs again, I will laugh as I hand it off to my sister, legendary destroyer of automobiles. I will leave it to it’s fate in the hands of the Mangler.
“cascade of clusterfucks that can turn a $70 repair into a $600 job”
Pretty much every home improvement project I’ve ever been involved with has wound up doing EXACTLY this. . .
Like the aforementioned friend, where we thought we’d take an afternoon, rip off the wallpaper, replace the cracked plaster with a new chunk of wall board, then re-paper than section of wall. Shouldn’t take more than a couple hours, right? Well. . . Get the affected area ripped apart, and we just kept on finding bad plaster. . . Wound up renovating the living room, dining room, and hallway – all new sheetrock, flooring, and windows. Turned an afternoon project into a three month fiasco. . .
Or my Toyota van when it failed inspection for having rot holes (on a ’80s Toyota! Can you believe it?!?!). I started grinding away at the hole, looking for “good” metal to adhere the Bondo to, and wound up grinding away so much BAD metal that I had to go back to Auto Palace to get some fiberglass. . .
Yes. I know projects that snowball FAR too well. . . :)
(BTW: Your “questionable content” thing has made me realize JUST how much I rely on the ellipses.)
Being not automotively inclined at all, what you’ve said is exactly why I buy new.
Oh, I go down the same road far too often, just saying. I fully agree with you though. Another used car is just someone else’s problems I don’t know about yet. This is why I tend to hold onto and keep repairing old vehicles for a very long time. In the end I pay less.
When it comes to home improvement, I’ve learned it is best not to step back and contemplate the scope of the mountain I have managed to set foot upon. Better to deal with one task at a time. There will be plenty of time to look back and shudder with horror when it is finally all done.
Sometimes these things daisy-chain like that. I’m sitting on the fence of either buying a used car, or doing an in-car engine rebuild on what I have. Except for the engine (bleeding internal gasket that they’d have to disassemble the engine to get to anyway), the car is just fine, condition vouched for by a mechanic. It’s one of those unrustable Saturns, and was still getting 37 mpg (standard trans) before it started its dying process a couple of months ago. That’s why I can’t make myself junk it. But it has 230,000 miles on it, so I don’t know if once I rehab the engine the rest of it will soon go downhill from old age. But I’ve spoken to other Saturn owners who rehabbed their engines and got 600,000+ on the things. But I’ll have to make a decision soon. That Amber Light is on again, and it’s chugging on uphills once more.