Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Fixing up the Beater

Fixing up the Beater

Yesterday I didn’t get to fixing the running board. One of the things about fixing up an old vehicle is that it had many users and life experiences before you got it. I could make a cute analogy to life but won’t. One thing with an old car that is different, is that with a little work you can make it look like it just came off the show room floor. Many look even better than they did new.

A really exotic restoration is very expensive but you can do a pretty good one in the garage one for a fraction of that. On the body work I am talking of $200 vs. $10,000. What you do is this. Get some stripper, the goopy stuff that they use on furniture and apply it to one of the panels. That’s right just one panel. You will do the job one panel at a time. It is best to start with the roof and work down. If you start with the roof begin by dividing it it into four equal sectors. Buy three bags of steel wool, coarse medium and fine. Just a note on safety...use laytex gloves when working with chemicals and a mask using the spray can.

Take a cheap K-Mart medium paint brush ($1) shake up the can of stripper and pour it into a container. If this is the first time go to the salvage yard and buy an old fender or hood or use something laying around. Then paint it on the piece. Let the stripper do the work and watch the old finish bubble up and blister. After about fifteen minutes take a pad of the coarse steel wool and dip it into some mineral spirits from a second container. Work the old finish down to bare metal. This might take several applications. When the metal is shiny you are ready for phase 2. If the metal beneath is pitted and badly rusted, through and through you will have to make recourse to more draconian measures…or find something that isn’t all rusted out…I will talk more about rust later and how to fix it. For now get the body panel you are working down to bare metal. When you finish with that take a can of spray primer and spray it lightly with a couple/several layers at about half hour intervals.

Let’s say a vehicle for discussion purposes costs $30,000 new. It has a design service life of 100,000 miles. You pay ten percent interest which is $1800 over the life of the loan. Keep in mind that as you make payements the interest rate does not go down…it stays fixed. This means that the sixtyth (60th) payment carrys the same interest penalty as the first…It does not get smaller as you pay the vehicle off... Is that a bummer or what? What is it with these bankers anyway?

So you pay 30K for the vehicle plus interest… 31,800 over sixty months for a payment of $530 a month. That comes to over thirty two cents a mile just to own a new car. This doesn't include, taxes, gas, insurance and scheduled maintenance. Every time you drive to Wall Mart and back (assuming 5 miles each way) that’s three dollars and twenty cents you could have in your pocket. Add in the other costs and it's probably twice that. Assume that at end of five years you sell your car for $1800. This means you had the use of the car for five years and at the end you paid the full $30,000, sold it and have nothing to show.

Is that dumb or what? Now I said the vehicle had a design service life of 100K miles. Actually in order to achieve that, the car has to be built for a teenager who fancies himself a budding NASCAR driver. This means that under ideal conditions it could potentially have a service life of 250K or more miles. All you have to do is figure out is who owned the car for the first five years and sold it for the ridiculous sum of $1800. (Check the Blue Book.)

If there are service records that show the 3K maintenance was performed and it was driven by an adult, then $1800 is a steal. You can buy that car for the cash you would have had to fork over for a down payment on a new one…and guess what…no car payment! Take that money and put it in the bank and in five years you made yourself 30K…drive it ten years and you have 60K.

People who are not affluent, do it all the time and the quality of their lives does not suffer that much. As a matter of fact it stays about the same…probably about the same as yours! After two weeks nobody notices what your're driving, yourself included. The difference is that the less well heeled are being forced to avoid 30K in costs over a five year period because they can’t afford it. Some of them drive older but very self respectable vehicles.

I bought a Dodge Ram, 1993 diesel truck for $1800. It had 220K miles. I checked the service records…it had been owned by a plumbing company and they did all the maintenance services. It had in my estimation been driven by adult plumbers to and from the job. I put on new tires, had the steering serviced, the breaks done and am currently doing the body work…It runs like a Swiss watch…that same vehicle sells new today for 50K.

Sorry for the lecture…but it leads into fixing up your car and using what you save to take a well earned vacation.