My history of buying a cheap ass car, running it for a couple years has continued. I picked up another crappy $600 car last month after my last $250 car died.
As the weather got colder I noticed my heater was really crappy. I sighed an prepared myself for the weekend long ordeal of ripping out the dash and replacing the heater core.
I was heading out out the door to go to the local Napa, it suddenly dawned on me, I had done no investigative work at all :smack:. Just because it’s a crappy car I know nothing about, don’t pessimistically assume it’s the worse thing possible.
It might must need a coolant flush. So I drove past the NAPA and headed toward a jiffy lube. I was pulling into their parking lot for a flush, the second level of my stupidity hit me.
I never even checked the fluid level after I bought the damn thing, :smack: :smack:
So I went right through the Jiffy Lube lot and went to the advance auto across the street. Sure enough The reservoir was bone dry. A half gallon of the blue stuff plus a half gallon of hose water, and my heater is singing right along now.
Getting into the habit of not thinking about my car is very worrisome to me. What an idiotic almost waste of time and money.
Here’s as good a place as any to share one of the most valuable lessons I ever learned from working on my own car: when you’re replacing an alternator, stop and make sure the electrical connection fits before you go to all the trouble of bolting it up to the mount and getting the belt tensioned. :smack:
First car, 66 Dodge Charger $85.00. Cheap because the oil pump was “No good”.
Drop the pan, install new pump, add oil, fire it up, still no oil pressure… gage was bad.
Had a '78 Caddy which took a long time to start, and sometimes wouldn’t start at all when it’s cold. All my friends (except one) said it must be the ignition switch itself, and I should replace it.
Paid $60 or so for the switch itself, plus $100 for specialized tools to disassemble the steering wheel (I’m guesstimating prices, it was a very long time ago.) Spend six hours fixing, cussing, injuring myself, and broke the cruise control in the process (never did fix it) until finally, at last, I’d changed the damn switch. Guess what…didn’t fix the starting problem one iota.
Finally, I heeded a friend’s suggestion (the one holdout from above) to replace the starter. Whaddaya know, it fixed the problem…all that extra work for nothing!
(Did I mention, that one friend was also a professional mechanic?)
I had a similar probelm with a car that would not hold oil pressure. Mechanical fuel pump was leaking gas into the oil somehow thinning it out to the point of too thin to effectively pump.
( as I understand it some part of the pump is lubricated by engine oil, leak was in there)
