Thread: Dogs i have bought

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I've had a couple in my life but I can't take the "credit" for buying them. Once came with the wife.

Car number one was a plymouth volare. The car did not like oxygenated gas, so I got really good at rebuilding carbs. The car went through several starters and I could replace the starter without crawling under the car. lastly, the fenders rusted off the car. You could see the ground through the fender.

Second car was a Dodge Omni. That car broke down every two weeks predicably. Many, Many mechanical problems.

Don, the body style of the 85 Cougar and 'Bird had to be the most flimsy body ever....I married into one and could not wait to dump it. Even the trunk lid was flimsy. The interior barely hung together....sad.

MRJB.....I once worked with a guy who bought a new Omni, they never got it home for more than a week in the first year....it stayed at the dealer's service shop. It had mystery wiring bugs, bad motor, bad transmission, etc. I think he finally got a lawyer and got his money back.....after one year it was an extremely low mileage car.

My bride once had an itch for a sports car of her own.........a BRITISH sports car. I could type out a nice, long story but if you've been around cars for any length of time you've already read about "Lucas, prince of darkness", and heard about the bumper sticker that reads "The parts falling off this car are of the finest British craftsmanship" and so on. All of them are true, and more.

Then there are times when God protects the fool. Many moons back we went shopping for a new (to us) family car. Saw this nice '68 or 9 Malibu wagon on a dealer's used car lot. Went through the initial blah blah and drove out on the test drive, salesman in the back seat. A few miles down the road one of the rear tires blew out......BOOM! Opened the spare tire well, spare was flat, but that didn't matter because the jack was gone too. The salesman found a pay phone (that'll give you an idea how long ago) and got a lot boy to come out with another spare and a jack. We then went on our merry way continuing the test drive. A few miles later the car starts to sputter, pop, then stop running all together. Despite the gauge showing 1/4 tankful, it had run out of gas. Fortunately we had been headed back to the dealership so only had about a 1/2 mile walk. We didn't even stop at their building, just walked straight to our car, with said salesman in tow promising to fix all those "little" things if we bought it, and me punching the throttle to get out of there as fast as I could.

My puppy #2 was a 62 Alfa Romeo Spyder....I reported to a guy who had raced Alfas in SCCA and all he did was worship everything Alfa. He had his old race car stored in his garage and he would spend hours pointing out the features (?) of the car to me. One day, I saw the 62 Spyder advertised in the Dallas paper. The owner was an older lady who had moved to Texas from Maryland....she wanted $600 for the car. It drove OK but the engine didnt rev, very slow to speed. I wrote it off as a bad tune and gave her the $$. It had some minor leaks, etc. so I went to the local Alfa dealer to get parts......WOW, they wanted an arm for a set of points and a leg for a distributor cap....what did I get into?

Buyer's remorse quickly hit....I had to sell that dog before it ate my leg off...besides, the shop manual (very expensive) said that the timing was set at 6000 rpm....ever lean over a
fender and hold the throttle open at 6000 while trying to see the mark?

Another guy at work, named Ray, smoked a pipe (he was probably 28)....perfect Alfa material. I showed it to him for $650 and gave him the Alfa spiel. He bit. Before the sale, I felt sorry about trying to screw him and told him the sale was off....he got pissed at me and said I was backing out of the deal so I could sell it to someone else for more money....so I gave in and let him buy it. Ray spent three years trying to get the thing to run right....I'm sure the Alfa dealer had a resort home paid for by the parts Ray bought....Ray remained my friend but I was always careful around him in case he decided to take a swing at me.

mike in tucson