The dead car in my friends driveway
At the time (March 2021) I was kickin’ in a 2007 Honda Civic (no real VTEC or anything fun like that). I was fine with what I had–except for the fact I tried to take out the rear passenger seats for weight reduction. (Parents didn’t love that)
Anyways, I was over at my friends house and I noticed this old Audi had been sitting in their driveway for quite some time. I asked about it, they asked their dad, and soon enough I gave him $200 and we were towing it down the street with a tow strap on our 2003 Honda Pilot that had no coolant (we didn’t know that at the time–how many parentheticals am I going to use?) Work began.
First, I thought it had no oil as there was none on the dipstick. I quickly found the oil when it was on the garage floor after I taking the oil pan off. This marked the start of a long, long, *long*, journey. A journey that progressed across probably a year, and a litany of repairs and many “well-I’m-here-I might-as-well-just-replace-my-entire-engine”s.
Pt. presented with not starting
That was the first thing to tackle: not starting. Hence the whole, needing to tow it over situation. If I recall correctly, the jist of this was the alternator was seized up. So obviously there wasn’t going to be much engine turning action let alone charging action. In hindsight, I should’ve just started with that. But, evidently I had big plans and decided fuck it, lets just remove my entire front end and go from there. I think I had already set my mind on replacing head gaskets because “wHeRE dID aLl ThAT oiL gO??” when in reality it probably just leaked out the crank and camshaft gaskets like any other German car in existence. So, I dove DEEP. All in all, across many months, I completed about 51 different repairs/modifications. One of the biggest, being a hackjob conversion from the absolute idiotic PNEUMATIC CENTRAL LOCKING (literally wtf) to electronic locking with solenoids I got from DigiKey and coat hangers.
The central locking system
This was probably the most passionate fury this project took on. I still, cannot get over the absolute idiocy that went into the design of that system. For those of you fortunate enough to not be familiar with it, let me ruin you with a quick run down. Basically, it was a pneumatic system that relied on a vacuum pump. A vacuum pump with a *graphite rotor*. Yes, a vacuum pump made out a *very brittle material*. Not only did we design the pump with the most asinine material, but now there’s fun little plastic hoses that run to each door. With each plastic hose running into a joint that has a now very hard, ineffective rubber gasket in it. These then ran to each door, met another useless gasket as it transitioned into a pneumatic piston that actuated the lock. So, where’s the problem if that hasn’t been made clear enough? Literally, everywhere. The pumps rotor was shattered into quarters and even if it wasn’t there was no way in hell it was going to pull enough of a vacuum with each gasket leaking to actuate the locks. So, unsurprisingly, something had to be done. At first, we tried to go to the junkyard but surprise surprise, all of their rotors were also shattered into a billion pieces. So then, I said fuck it, I’ll just make my own locking system.
Now, was it perfect? No. I had to go in sometimes and refit something sometimes. But, did it work most of the time? Hell yea it did.
The point of no return
When I had gotten to the head gaskets, I knew I was in deep. When you are literally looking at the tops of your pistons and the garage is strewn about with various metallic objects that went somewhere(?) things can get freaky. But somehow, I pulled through. Armed with video after video of me pointing out what went where and how x+y=z, I pulled through. I continued on to replacing all 4 shocks at least once with the front ones probably being replaced twice and literally crying over how much money I, and my parents at this point, had dumped into this shithole.
The downfall: the wheel bearings
To be honest, the biggest problem with this entire project was my fault. Turns out, things are expensive and RockAuto is very tempting with the very low prices in the Economy category. Well, unsurprisingly cheapest isn’t the best and this presented most strongly with the wheel bearings. I want to say I replaced the front ones twice, and the rear ones maybe even 3 times? Granted, this was one of the things that had to happen as one of them was completely shot when I first got the vehicle. But not only was the quality shit, but the design was wrong with at least one set I had gotten causing the bearing to push apart on installation.
So, was it worth it?
Economically? I think I would have made more money from selling tickets for people to see me throw money into a pit of fire than the return I got out of this car in terms of life. After all this, I want to say it lasted probably about a year before the power steering pump completely shat itself. On top of that, the cheapo struts in the front would still click, the left upstream O2 sensor would still get angry occasionally, the transmission was questionable, blah blah blah. The problem was, I was shooting myself in the foot by replacing something that while it may (or more likely got caught up in the “while I’m here” thinking) or may not have had a problem, I was replacing it with something of lower quality. But, grit? Hands-on knowledge? Life skills? Determination? These are all things that are invaluable to me now. By essentially throwing myself in the deep end, I’ve now done countless repairs on my current car (1995 Lexus LS400), my family’s cars and my friends’ cars. Not to mention the problem solving skills I’ve developed through the process.
Where is she now? Probably scrapped. At one point I was on vacation and my parents called me saying some guy wanted to buy it off of us for $500. I said sure since that would mostly recoup the $600 I spent on black powder coated tires. What did it end up being? $100. I came back, the dead car in our driveway was gone, and I had a $100 bucks.
I know the scrap value was at least $250. Fuckers profited off us.
