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One big problem with continuing to fix a car in wear out mode is that you never know what will fail next.
I had a friend with a 16 year old car who paid $900 to get the blown head gasket fixed. Two weeks later the transmission blew up. That was going to cost over $2K.
The car was worth about $900. With the transmission fixed it would still be worth just $900.
So he donated it to Goodwill. That $900 repair for the head gasket was money down the toilet.
At $900 this car owes you nothing. One thing to keep in mind with old cars, is they are more like aircraft or vessels. The purchase cost is a small amount of the overall cost of ownership. That is how I view my '95. To keep repair costs down I went out and bought another car just like mine with a blown engine. Robbed everything off of that car that I could and sold it for scrap when I was done. Out of pocket around $250 but I got a ton of parts off of it. I actually needed a transmission (that was the main reason I bought it) and swapped that transmission onto my car about a year later. With the car also came a newly installed radiator which I incidentally needed about a week after buying it as it developed a crack. What luck, as the radiator itself was around $250!
The nice thing about older cars is how easy they are to work on, and parts are fairly cheap. If you aren't doing the work yourself you are losing out on a significant cost savings and for the most part see no benefit to owning an older car, just the negatives. I would seriously recommend you sell this while you can and consider the purchase of a low priced new car such as a Hyundai.
MEH, don't sweat throwing some money at your car.......it is NOT an investment, it is a money-pit.
I am cheap as h@11, but I bite the bullet and do what is nece$$ary to keep my piece of junk running......even though its next stop is probably the junkyard.
"Duh!" moment of the year. This may have been the problem all along.
Just to be sure last night I checked the battery posts. The black negative one was attached pretty well, but the red positive one, it was very loose. I tightened it all up with my handy 12mm wrench. I bet that was it all along! (I had installed the new battery myself.)
Something else to keep in mind since you switched out the radiator. You mentioned it still runs hot. It is possible that there is air in the system. Try and bleed out the air.
This for sure you need to run the car with the cap off for quite a while...keep refilling until not air bubbles.
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