Thread: Dogs i have bought

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In another thread, people are discussing the worth of an older Camaro that "the pictures look good." I thought I would start a thread so people could tell their story of a real dog that they purchased.

Perro Plato (silver dog) was a 1985 Chevy Blazer that I first saw late one night sitting at a gas station....it was dark but the bright self-serve station lights reflected nicely in the silver paint. The Blazer was a 4 speed 350 with no big dents and a good price of $4300 on the windshield. I called the phone number and the guy came right away. The test drive showed that it was a bit loose, but it was 15 years old....and the new silver paint looked really good. I told the guy I'd take it....he wanted cash and said he had a clear title. We agreed to meet the next day to seal the deal. RULE 1: Never buy a car at night.

The next day, I had cash and he drove up to our meeting place. Funny, the silver paint looked lumpy some places around the wheel wells and rocker panels...could it be rust? I asked where he bought the Blazer....Ohio, he said. We exchanged cash for title and keys and I drove away.

RULE 2: If you buy a car at night, at least have a flashlight. Well, the next morning she sure didnt look as good as she did the night before....in fact, she looked really bad. The rear window motor was bad (the seller told me it didnt work) so I went to the Chevy dealer and bought one. I took the tailgate apart and found the existing motor unplugged...changed out the motor and tried to close the tail gate....oops! The rear floor of the Blazer was rusted away and the hinges connected to air. The only thing holding the tailgate in position was the latch. Then, I did my pre-purchase inspection (two days late). The truck had a fresh paint job over rust....a lot of rust.....too much rust to fix.

I felt screwed. What do you do when you get hosed on a vehicle? Sell it to someone paying less attention that you did. I promptly parked it near the high traffic area with a SI VENDE (For sale) sign in the window. About 1 am on Saturday night, my phone rang. It was a nice police officer that asked "do you own a silver blazer?" Yes "do you know where it is?" Yes "no you dont", he said. Someone stole it and took it off roading in the desert....with the windows down, with lots and lots of cactus in the desert. They must have been jumping the truck and over reved it.....it had a really bad rod knock when i went to the police pound to look at it.

The insurance lady wanted to total it....she said they would reimburse me $5200 for the loss. I told her that I only paid $4300 for it.....she said "shut up and take the check"
Adios, silver dog.

Well the guys that stole your dog did you a big favour and you certainly won that time.
I purchased a GM Holden once that was cheap as it had a real bad timing chain rattle. Before the purchase,I had checked out the cost of the new timing chain,gaskets etc to repair the motor and it was very cheap so purchased the car. I searched around the carshops to buy a workshop manual for the car to aid me in doing the repair to find that to replace the timing chain,the manual stated that one must remove the bonnet,remore the cylinder head, drop the sump to be able to remove the front cover just to replace the timing chain. Well,after reading that I thought,no wonder the car dealer had sold the car so cheap!!!
After talking to a mechanic friend, he told me to stop panicking,he new how to do the job by just loosen up the head and sump.wedging them apart with large screwdrivers until you can remove the front cover. It worked a treat and for once I made money on a car.

I tried to think of any dogs I have bought over the years, and really can't remember any that ended up burning me. The worst car I ever owned though was a brand new 85 Cougar. Right from the start stuff was breaking on it. On the way home from the dealer the turn signal lever snapped off in my hand, the wiper blade flew off at the first rain storm, the arm rest broke, etc. People also kept running into it, even though it was bright red. A kid on a motorcycle plowed into the side at a grocery store, and an old lady backed right into it at a party.

Finally, at 20,000 miles the engine (3.8 crap motor ) ate itself up. The last straw was when the vibration dampening weight on the bottom of the transmission broke off going down the highway and stabbed a hole in the bottom of the gas tank. If there was ever a Christine, that car was it, except it never healed itself.

Don

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

1975 Ford Granada, nuff' said.

Okay Mike, with those two stories I've got a signature line for you:

If I'd had sex as often as I've been screwed, I'd be one happy guy!

But Uncle Bob....I made a profit both times??? Does that make me a Wh_re?

I have found that there is no such thing as a car that cant be sold.

Traded a '69 Chevy 4x4 pickup for a '69 Dodge A-100 short van when our first kid was coming along; needed some space inside. O'course, I can't leave anything alone, so I replaced the stock 2 barrel on the 318 with an Offy and a Holley, and added some headers and pipes, and American style spoke mags and wide tires. I can't say it was a dog, 'cause it ran like a striped a**ed ape; but it was hard to handle on anything but a very smooth, dry road - he**, it was a terror in the rain, especially if the road was bumpy or wavy as well, or the wind was blowing.
Sold it outright for about what the value of the trade was, and we got along with one car for a while. That's about the closest thing I think I ever had to a "dog".

Three Ford Areostars.Yeah on that one I guess price for a mini van was the determining factor because they are cheaper to buy than a Astro.But all three suffered from v6 weak head gaskets or a cracked head.One of Ford's not finer designs.I would run the one I had at the moment until it failed and then replace it with the next one being very aware of what to look for.If you ever look at one ,you will clearly see how tight it is to work on them and that was the main reason why I didn't fix any of them.I had two 5 speeds sticks and one automatic.I did really like the stick shift ones.Great gas mileage.