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No nothing like that. My 88 is an RX7 convertible. I got a pleasant surprise yesterday when I looked at the odometer. For some reason I thought I had closer to 300K miles on it. While cranking I saw that it is only 201K Yea!
Love the early RX7s. Such a nice clean design, unlike the gaping fishmobiles of today.
I'd want to keep it going, too.
I order all on amazon,mostly cheaper than the others. If the part is needed asap,
Ill check oreillys online ,match that part on amazon,
go to oreillys and pay the expensive a88 price on the part,
but also order it on amazon,then return it to oreillys.
Worst part - the unpredictability of when something breaks, and the car is out of commission. Could break at home in the driveway... could break on the freeway...
^^^This
I've decided that I will never again keep a car that is in wear out mode. At 67, I no longer want to do car repairs. This old body isn't up to it anymore.
My previous car was 18 years old sitting in my garage up on jack stands waiting for a part to arrive when I finally broke down and decided to replace it with a 1 year old car that had just 12K miles. It is such a relief to eliminate the worry of being stranded.
I don't want to experience the anxiety of wondering if I'll make it home because the old pos has yet another problem.
If your hobby is to restore an old car that you drive on Sunday morning for recreation, fine. Or, if you have multiple cars and a AAA membership for tows, fine.
But if you are actually relying on an old car to get you reliably to where ever you need to go, good luck!
I just went through this a few months ago and these posts are so familiar to my experiences.
We have a 99 Jeep Wrangler that is only used for jaunts to the beach and after letting it sit for a few months with a bad fuel pump I moved it into the garage during my Christmas vacation and proceeded to tear into it.
What I found in my late fifties was......my eyesight sucks, body strength for those really hard to get off those fasteners sucks.........but with that said I pretty much enjoyed saving what would about have been $1000 I would have given a garage for the pump, replacing the shocks, differential fluid and the skid plate holding the gas tank up.
Not much hi tech stuff involved and everything was easy to get to. Unlike my younger years working on cars I now had the ability to shop online. I could comparative shop at all four local auto stores online and review prices and ratings.
Amazon amazed me.....while ordering the fuel filler neck it asked me if I wanted to order the two hoses. First lesson I said no......come to find out I could not get them locally. Lesson learned.
Fasteners along with every nickel and dime part could be found on the Internet.
Second big thing from my earlier years.......the amount of people who are anal enough to put how to videos on the Internet which can be found on You Tube or car specific forums. Thank you to them as they now make me wonder how the dealerships charge so much money for jobs I can do in a shorter time span than they quote
(Example were my Honda Element struts). The struts were quoted at such a labor intensive quote and using You Tube and going at a snails pace we finished a tremendous amount quicker.
So overall if you have the patience and time to work on an older car, technology and innovation has really helped the hobbyist.
Now I have a 98 BMW M3 and while I can work on that I find that with these cars it seems if you are not careful with what you are working on you wind up screwing something else up.
The bad.........man have prices gone up for things and quality has gone down.
Our SIL has a vintage Ford truck that his dad owned--his mom gave it to him after dad died.
The truck is original...at some point his dad had installed a Chevy corvette engine in the truck. The dad apparently was good mechanic and did most of the maintenance on his own but was in bad health for the last 3-4 yrs of his life and truck wasn't used.
When the son got it was not really in good shape--leaking oil and other issues---
He had the original Chevy engine and replaced the Corvette engine w/the original hoping that would cure lot of the problems...
It didn't--
Probably because he used garage that said it could deal with vintage product and really could not---
He is STILL having issues with this truck more than 4 yrs after moving it to his house.
He only has a two car garage--
We own the house next door (2nd home for us) and when we aren't there, he parks the truck in our garage so he can park his car in his garage...
Right now the truck is back in for service of some kind...
Personally I think this is throwing money down the drain...
Our SIL has been out of job for 18 of past 24 months or so--had a contract job for 6 months that played out end of Dec and is out of work since...
He can do only limited amount of work on it himself and apparently he can't find any garage/mechanic that can actually FIX it...
But he can't bring himself to sell it because it is tie with his dad...
Emotional guilt is most costly price humans pay sometimes...
Our SIL has a vintage Ford truck that his dad owned--his mom gave it to him after dad died.
The truck is original...at some point his dad had installed a Chevy corvette engine in the truck. The dad apparently was good mechanic and did most of the maintenance on his own but was in bad health for the last 3-4 yrs of his life and truck wasn't used.
When the son got it was not really in good shape--leaking oil and other issues---
He had the original Chevy engine and replaced the Corvette engine w/the original hoping that would cure lot of the problems...
It didn't--
Probably because he used garage that said it could deal with vintage product and really could not---
He is STILL having issues with this truck more than 4 yrs after moving it to his house.
He only has a two car garage--
We own the house next door (2nd home for us) and when we aren't there, he parks the truck in our garage so he can park his car in his garage...
Right now the truck is back in for service of some kind...
Personally I think this is throwing money down the drain...
Our SIL has been out of job for 18 of past 24 months or so--had a contract job for 6 months that played out end of Dec and is out of work since...
He can do only limited amount of work on it himself and apparently he can't find any garage/mechanic that can actually FIX it...
But he can't bring himself to sell it because it is tie with his dad...
Emotional guilt is most costly price humans pay sometimes...
My personal opinion is that if you are not will to/able to do almost all the work yourself, you are asking for trouble - and it will never be worth it.
My personal opinion is that if you are not will to/able to do almost all the work yourself, you are asking for trouble - and it will never be worth it.
If you have something like the SIL's truck there are three things that can be done.
1. Sell it.
2. Learn how to fix it.
3. Stash it.
If you stash it, it has to be done with the understanding that you are going to have it professionally restored when you have the means.
Otherwise, just get rid of it. The way it's being done now is just throwing good money after bad.
You think waiting on car parts is tough? Try sending your guitar back to the manufacturer,(who by the way is the only one authorized to perform warranty work) and be told "we're backed up two full months". So, I have two options here: be patient and wait my turn,or be impatient and still wait my turn. Either way I ain't getting it back any sooner.
My boss from High School called me up one day at work... had not spoken in many years.
He could no longer drive and his 1967 Cadillac Fleetwood was just sitting in the garage the last couple of years.... he asked me if I would like to have it.
Said 30 years ago I had helped him with some repairs and he never forgot.
I checked fluids, tire pressure and drove it from San Francisco to Seattle because I had room there to store a nearly 21' long car... it was 45 years old and a great road trip except having to stop for gas 3 times... over 13 hours driving plus stops for refueling.
Not sure what I will ultimately do with it but he wanted me to have it.
So for me it has having a proper place to safely store is the worst thing.
Last edited by Ultrarunner; 03-26-2017 at 06:09 PM..
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