Vehicles

The current two

A 2008 Ford F-250 and a 2019 Subaru Forester. Compared with everything below they have been boring, which is the point. The truck hauls the things a house in the woods needs hauled, and the Forester is the car that opens the garage door when it gets home.

The ones before

I’ll forget some. This is the list as best I can reconstruct it, in order.

1994 Mercury Tracer. The steering column lock jammed about a month after I got it, so I broke the wheel lock and hotwired it, and eventually wired a set of toggle switches under the dash to turn it on and start it. Right after that I wrecked it. I spent a year learning bodywork on the result: new grille, headlights and tail lights, body panels hammered back into shape, the bumper patched and reshaped with fiberglass, everything filled smooth with Bondo and painted from spray cans. I drove it a couple more years, until I wrecked it again.

1981 Subaru DL. The car that started the mechanical education, because something was always wrong with it. Every few months it stripped the splines out of a front wheel hub and could not move under its own power. The first time, my mechanic friend had me lock a pair of Vise-Grips onto the axle on the stripped side. The handles hit the frame, that side of the axle stopped turning, the differential sent everything to the other wheel, and I drove it to his house. His brother lived next door with a yard full of Subaru parts and would trade any of them for a case of Old Milwaukee. The clutch cable needed constant adjustment and broke at least once, so I learned to drive without a clutch: start the car in first gear on the starter motor, lurch along until it catches, then shift up and down by matching engine speed to road speed.

1994 Pontiac Sunbird. The car that taught me to distrust mechanics. The engine blew, and a shop diagnosed a cracked head, had me buy a used head they said they had pressure tested, and rebuilt the top end. A few months later it blew again, and the shop had gone out of business. The next mechanic told me most of the parts on the original bill had never been new. I eventually wrecked it.

1985 Oldsmobile, model long forgotten. A gift from the same mechanic friend. Getting it running took a rear main seal, front ball joints, a fuel pump and probably more I have forgotten. It had every kind of problem and I did not keep it long.

1989 Jeep Comanche. I loved this little truck. The starter died in Chicago while I was living in West Virginia, so I push-started it for the rest of that trip and for a couple of months after until I could afford a starter. I even lent it to the man I bought it from, and he push-started it all the way to North Carolina to see family. After a head gasket problem I replaced the engine.

1981 Volvo 240. Despite its age it needed very little, because I bought it from a mechanic who specialized in Volvos.

1990 Subaru. The gear that spins the distributor shaft stripped, and the car was not worth the fix.

1992 Ford Escort. Bought for $200 so I could get to Bonnaroo with my sister and her friends. The rear shock mounts had rusted out, so the axle slammed into the frame stops at every pothole. For a while it was stuck in third gear, and I drove it that way for a long time, slipping the clutch to get moving from a stop. I kept it a few months past the festival.

1989 Volvo 240. For a while I had both 240s and swapped parts between them to keep one running.

1994 Volvo 850. Turbocharged and fast, and hard to work on. I paid someone to replace the thermostat because of where it was buried. Someone ran a red light and totaled it in an intersection.

1988 BMW 5 Series. So much wrong with it that I hardly ever drove it.

1991 Nissan Stanza. My grandmother gave it to me around 2008 with only 30,000 miles on it. I treated it like a truck in rural West Virginia, and it declined quickly.

1979 Chevrolet K10, with a wooden bed. A good truck and easy to work on. I gave it away when I no longer had a place to do the work it needed.

1998 Subaru Legacy. Bought with a blown head gasket. I ordered a Japanese-market engine from eBay, which was a terrible idea: on the first drive it leaked every fluid from everywhere, and it turned out to be a hodgepodge of parts from different Subaru engines with cardboard where the gaskets should have been. I paid a good bit to have it put together properly. This was the car I was driving when I started installing car audio for a living, and the first one I built a real sound system into. I took the whole interior apart and lined it with sound-deadening material.

2005 Mazda5. $800 at an auction. Drove it for a couple of years and did little more than replace the coil packs.

2008 Toyota Avalon. A great car until a noise started. I traced it to a differential bearing, but no shop would take a self-made diagnosis seriously enough to confirm it. When the car finally stopped moving, they confirmed it was the differential.

After that came the Forester, and then the F-250.

What it added up to

Every one of these cars broke in a way that the next one didn’t, and each repair stuck. The bodywork year, the clutchless driving, the engine swaps, the diagnosis nobody would believe until the car quit: that is the background to everything on the rest of this site. The printers and the servers are just machines that are easier to roll over.