How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wrench
Doing things with cars in California sucks...
A few years ago, I bought a used 1992 Prelude. It was old and had been worked on, but had all the right little stickers to keep me out of trouble on the road. It wasn’t smogged, but I felt confident to handle that (at the time). Foreshadowing foreshadowing foreshadowing…
I met the guy on a gorgeous summer evening in the back parking lot of my local Carl’s Junior, I assume everyone buys cars from their “uncles” at the Carl’s. My friend and I looked over the car, and nothing of importance could be found in that light which led me to believe $1500 was too much to pay for a running car.
I greased the guy’s palm and we drove it home to the place I rented on the edge of town and got to work.
We found many issues in the better lighting of my home garage. While frustrated, I still didn’t see anything that flew in the face of the $1500 price tag. The thing ran, but needed a radiator, leaked a bit of oil, and featured a suspension and ride that felt more like a carnival lawsuit than the car that revolutionized independent rear suspension.
I poured my heart and soul into that thing. I polished it and cleaned it. We replaced the suspension with a solid set of raceland coilovers. I replaced the stereo. We did it fairly economically, as the local Pick-N-Pull had a few skeletons we could pick through for parts to great avail.
I even got the air conditioner blowing cold again. Might have been one of the few Ludes in its condition with working AC in my area that wasn’t a garage-kept show car.
That’s where the real issues started to rear their heads, but I was too in love to see them as they were.
While I upgraded the headlights (a known issue with the car at the time of purchase), I struggled to get the newly wired lights to turn on. Further inspection showed frayed and broken wiring harnesses at the driver’s side front fender. I pulled out my shop manual and made up the wires according to the schematics. Lights turned on and the AC compressor worked!
The question never came to me: Why were the wires broken? Rats?
A collision?
Meh. I fixed it. No biggie.
Back to replacing crankcase seals, vc gaskets, and finalizing replacements of radiator thermostats. Couldn’t have been a collision.
Foreshadowing.
The smog check was all that remained in my quest to get this thing road legal. I learned a valuable lesson here. Cars made before 1995 (OBD1 standard) are significantly harder to smog in CA. Some guys can take hours to do it because the machines are not being made or serviced anymore, so they break and screw up all the time. This also means it is expensive. It cost me around $200 to convince this guy to even look at my car.
Finally, the machine was back together and ready to take to work. I started driving it a couple of days. I loved it. It was super low to the ground and ate corners like nothing I had ever driven. The stereo was loud and clear. The AC was cold. It was everything that I wanted it to be until I caught a rock under my bumper and lost a chunk of my radiator on the off-ramp.
I limped into work, shut the car off, and got it towed home that evening (ouch $$$).
I was beside myself; I must have missed something, anything. Couldn’t find any reason other than a streak of bad luck. I am not a mechanic, but I have access to people who know engines and subsystems like the backs of their hands. We came up with nothing and decided the time was right to sell it.
I put it back on the FB marketplace and started getting hits on it immediately, the most respectable of them asked me to see a CarFax.
The fricking CarFax. I didn’t even pull one the day I bought the thing. Figured I would cough up the $40 now and find out for myself before I sold someone something I regretted.
And boy did I regret it.
Multiple repairs, title issues, and even a shop reporting an odometer rollback. Who knows how many miles this thing had been driven? The damage I had detected from the frayed wiring and headlight issues could be easily traced to a front left collision in the maintenance record.
I couldn’t sell this thing in good faith in the condition it was. I sent the man the carfax and told him I would renegotiate on the new information we both now had, but the man smartly bowed out, and the car made its way to a junker for a measly $500.
For those keeping score at home, I went in at $1500, put over $600 of parts, labor, and towing into it, and walked away with $500, some potent lessons, and my tail between my legs. Those lessons cost me almost $2000 to learn and put me into an interesting situation with a car dealership to get my wife a car so I could have my Kia Soul back. Man did that hurt.
But you know what?
I’d do it again.
Thanks, to my wife for her undying patience with me as I fumbled through this hilarious comedy of errors, and thanks Chris for erroring with me. I had a great time.