What Do You Fix?

[clean]

Maybe we should start an 'antique car thread'! 

mine is 22 years old now.  (And it is more reliable than the students it takes me to visit)
The old fora had a 'high mileage thread' but mine is not high mileage. It has about 67000 miles I think.  I purchased it from an estate.  It was the departed's wife's car before she predeceased him.  It was garage kept and well maintained!  I purchased it for $2000 but then put in another $2000 on deferred maintenance.  It had about 48000 miles when I bought it.  So it got its 60000 mile tune up done about 12000 miles early and about 10 years late!!  I figured that I would spend the money to get all the fluids and other things handled to head off other potential problems.
I wont say that it hasnt been problem free, but I needed a car and this was far, far cheaper, even after paying to fix it, than what I would have spent otherwise! 

it is a Grand Marquis.  My parents had several just like it!  In their experience, they are/were great cars until they hit about 100,000 miles and then there were some small issues that were more expensive to fix than the problem.  (I dont have any examples, but as a comparison, my former High Mileage car (Toyota Avalon) needed a water pump (about $200 for the part), but it needed another $1000 for labor!  IF I could have fixed it for up to $700 I would have fixed it!  I sold it for $600 to a high school person's parents (who had a relative in the repair business!) 

So what is your car, and for what it is worth, the thermostat and radiator fan clutch are relatively inexpensive, easy fixes to try!  After that, the water pump would be worth checking.  AFTER THAT you have exceeded my capabilities, so hopefully those do the trick!

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Thanks clean. Actually, I realized that my car is 21 years old. Ha! It's legal.

Anyway, we replaced the thermostat, checked the radiator cap (we replaced the radiator 3 years ago- that was a bitch! Rusted parts), checked the hoses, fans, reservoir, etc.

No dice.

So, I drove it up to my local mechanic and they get to play with it. Could be a switch. I had the timing belt and water pump replaced 9 months ago, so they are both under warranty. They also flushed the radiator last year. Could be the water pump. They just don't make parts like they used to anymore. My mechanic friends said that they have replaced things up to 3 times because the parts were crap. :(

Anyway. We'll see what happens. Oh, and I currently have about 288k miles on it. :D I put about 99.9% of those miles on it too (drove across the country and back a couple of times).

Edit: I forgot to mention that it is quite impressive that your car has such low mileage for its age! Somewhat of an inverse relationship, though that won't last forever as you continue to drive it. ;)

[clean]

Edit: I forgot to mention that it is quite impressive that your car has such low mileage for its age! Somewhat of an inverse relationship, though that won't last forever as you continue to drive it. ;)

Yes, it was a rare find.
I had said before (when I taught money management classes for the Bankruptcy Trustee) that the best place to find a car was the obituaries!  The cars found there were often older, but very well kept.

Mine was garage kept (not now, though!!), and regularly maintained, for the most part.  In fact, one of the worries I had was that I feared that the tires would be in good shape, but had aged out.  Instead, I found that the tires were only 4 years old and had less than 5000 miles of actual wear!  The deceased had 2 other cars, and this one was 'his wife's' so he just really didnt put much use on it as he really didnt need it! 

I nearly bought another faculty member's estate vehicle (it was her dad's) but it was 'too new' so the 'fair price' was more than I wanted to spend, and at that time, my car (the Avalon) was still going strong.  This one though, was old enough that even with the low mileage, the value just didnt keep up.

So the moral of the story is that IF you can find someone with a recently departed relative, that is trying to get the estate through probate, you may both come out ahead! 

[mamselle]

I'd be interested in such a thread.

My dad had all the parts for a 1936 something-or-other (it was never clear what) in their garage, which he never did reconstitute as he'd intended.

He'd had a Chevy called "Nylon" (because it never ran) in college and when he saw this in one of the "Trading Times" kinds of papers, he had to have it.

They ended up building an overhanging 1/2 garage for the 'real car(s)' they used after that, but it might have been fun to have been able to drive the older one, at least once.

Meanwhile, where I am now, I've been seeing a fellow on Saturday AMs who each week is driving around a different vintage vehicle (very old Cooper Austin? Verifiable Model T Ford, etc.) to give each one of them an airing, presumably, in their turn.

A couple times I've been able to walk by while he's at a stop light and ask what year and make--that's how I know about the Ford--and wave as he goes by. I take it he has a collection (and a sizeable garage, somewhere...) and probably rides them in parades and such.

The licensing is the thing I wonder about, though--at what point does a car qualify as "historic," and is that an issue for very-much-older collected/estate-related vehicles?

M.

[clean]

I had to look it up!  I thought I may have been onto something...

"n order to qualify for MY STATE antique vehicle registration, your vehicle must be at least 25 years old, and can only be used on a limited basis such as car shows, exhibitions, parades, and travel to and from repair and maintenance facilities."

IF I had a car that could only travel to and from repair and maintenance facilities, it would not long be in my 'stable' of vehicles!  Those are the kinds of cars that deserve to be parted out!

So I will not be owing an officially Antique Vehicle

[apl68]

Edit: I forgot to mention that it is quite impressive that your car has such low mileage for its age! Somewhat of an inverse relationship, though that won't last forever as you continue to drive it. ;)

Yes, it was a rare find.

I don't know--it was a Lincoln, and Lincoln's customers of the 1950s-1960s essentially remained their customers from that point on.  Which means that late-model Lincolns are almost always some senior citizen's little-driven final car.  I remember some years back checking our state paper's vehicle classifieds out of curiosity now and then.  I virtually always saw at least a couple of Lincolns, and they were nearly always very low-mileage cars.  Clean's find does sound like an especially good one, though.

Once Dad and I had a whimsical discussion about whether a cash-strapped police department could buy one of those inexpensive low-mileage Lincolns and turn it into a roomy police cruiser.  Maybe put in a nitrous oxide injector (plenty of room under the hood there) to boost its speed?  Dad commented that it might work as long as the pursuit didn't cover more than a quarter mile.

[apl68]

I had to look it up!  I thought I may have been onto something...

"n order to qualify for MY STATE antique vehicle registration, your vehicle must be at least 25 years old, and can only be used on a limited basis such as car shows, exhibitions, parades, and travel to and from repair and maintenance facilities."

IF I had a car that could only travel to and from repair and maintenance facilities, it would not long be in my 'stable' of vehicles!  Those are the kinds of cars that deserve to be parted out!

So I will not be owing an officially Antique Vehicle

I think in our state the only requirement for antique plates is that the vehicle be over 25 years old, period.  As Dad once pointed out, there are whole counties here where half the local vehicles would qualify.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

My mechanic friends think the radiator just needed to be 'burped.' Apparently, they ran it for a good minute and it didn't overheat after that.

Of course, when I drove it in to work today and got off the highway and idled at a light, the needle started to creep upward. Ugh!!!

We think there's a leak in the thermostat, or the hose near it. SO noticed a drip. I'm wondering if the temp gauge sensor is going out, or the fan switch. We'll bring it back in tomorrow and see what my mechanic friends say. :(

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

The car saga continues and hopefully ends with this...

it was the thermostat, well, the gasket was damaged, which we think allowed coolant to drop through and caused the car to run hotter than usual. We had a better thermostat and gasket installed by the mechanic friends.

We took it for a 20 mile test drive in stop and go traffic and it performed well. Fingers crossed that we're good. Now, we have another problem. It appears that the heating element may have gone out on our oven. Ugh.

[mamselle]

Too bad you couldn't save all that extra heat from the car and....

No.

Guess not...

M.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Too bad you couldn't save all that extra heat from the car and....

No.

Guess not...

M.

I wish it were that easy, but then again I may violate some laws of thermodynamics...

I'll just do a continuity test on the heating element and hope that I just need a replacement part.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

We took the heating element out of the oven and did a continuity test. It failed. We really didn't need to since it looked like the element had an accident and leaked/exploded a little. Ordered a new one for about $30. Fingers crossed that it's good.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Update!

We replaced the heating element in the oven and it works! :D And just in time for Pi Day!!!

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

Update: The oven still works. ;)

Today, I took apart my steam cleaner and cleaned it. Sounds odd. Not really a fix, but maintenance. There was so.much.animal.hair.

I put it back together and used it. Works just fine for a 20+ year old steam cleaner. :D

[FishProf]

I spent multiple hours over the last two weeks troubleshooting our dishwasher.  I concluded it was the sprayer arms not turning, and the heating element being end of life. 

BUT, I know my limits.  I called in the pro, who spent 2 hours futzing with the thing, and concluded I was right on both counts.  Parts ordered, fix scheduled for next week.

Does getting it fixed count?