Well it has been a long day. I've spent the last few weeks watching Craigslist trying to find a good donor car. I came close to some great buys, but everyone knows that takes perfect timing.
Well there was one car that I kept being drawn back to. It was a salvaged car about 3 hours away. It was $500 more than I was wanting to spend. I kept watching it through the week and decided if it was still around by Friday that I'd start making offers. Well after some haggling, I got the price dropped another $300. I put together a plan to drive down at 6am with a friend to go pick it up. Then I found out that with it's salvage title that it was illegal for it to be on the road and that it needed to be towed. Ouch. A 3 hour drive to tow something back sight-unseen. That's a little bit of a risk at the last minute. I found a Uhaul dealer to pick up a car hauler, but that meant spending more money. Top this also off with the fact that I wanted to be back for my daughter's soccer game. Things weren't falling into place and my wife recommended that I might pass on this. I told the guy that I couldn't do it right now and he said to let him know if things change.
I searched the internet more that night and just couldn't find anything I liked. The more I thought about it, the more I felt I should keep trying. So I decided that I'd post something on Facebook to see if any of my friends had a trailer I could borrow. Then I decided to just rent a trailer here and drive down after the soccer games. It was half the price to rent up here and I could pick it up later.
Well we got out of the soccer game earlier than expected so we thought we were getting a jump on our trip. But picking up the trailer killed that. Our 15 minute gain in time was chewed up by a 45 minute pickup. First Uhaul doesn't list if the trailer uses 4 wire or 7 wire connections. So I needed to stop next door to Autozone to pick up an adapter. Then Uhaul's server was down, so he had to re-enter all the info I already did with my reservation. We finally got on the road at 4pm.
It was nice to do a long father-son road trip. It gave us some time to talk and some time to talk over some Boy Scout merit badges he was working on. Being 11 years old, its hard for him to find time to slow down. He had three merit badges that just needed little things to finish. So the trip was productive.
We made it down there about 7pm. So much for seeing it in the daylight. When we got there, it wasn't in as great of shape as I hoped, but it wasn't too bad. The battery was dead, so it needed a jump. It fired right up. That's when we found out that someone cut the catalytic converter out. My son loved the "straight pipe" sound and smell. We threw some tags on it and took off down a back road to see how it drove. Oh how I miss having a 5 speed. My son loved us peeling out in this loud little machine. It went through the gears without issue. Yeah, we're starting out with a good engine, clutch, and transmission. The rest of the car is gravy.
So we load it up, grab some supper and head back home. We hit rain/fog off and on both ways. We still made good time and got home safe. We let my son "drive" the car off the trailer as we pushed. I think he enjoyed it.
Once we got home, we found out the rip next to the back window was worse than we thought. It's my understanding this rip is common if someone tries to put the top down without unzipping the back window. Someone started to fix it, but did a poor job. I'm thinking about sewing a patch to it before I try to sell the top. I'm thinking this little bit of effort may help bring some extra money. We shall see.
Tomorrow we will take the family for a spin up and down the road. It's a shame it's going to be dismantled, but I'm looking forward to eventually moving to the building stage. We'll pull it into the driveway and throw a tarp over it. It's going to be a couple of weeks before I'm going to have the time to start dismantling. We have a little bit of work to do in the garage before we can pull it in. Still insulating the garage walls to get rid of the drywall I've been storing in one bay for about six years. That will also give us room for our 46 Chevy Truck cab that's for a project we are putting on the back burner.
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