Tag Archives: car shopping

Introducing project Beat(er) Box, the $1000 Scion xB

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The ever-patient girlfriend recently decided she wanted to sell her two cars and get one all-around car. She likes my xB, so I decided to start looking there. I immediately lucked into a 2004 5-speed model about 2.5 hours away going for $1200. The ad said the check engine light was on and it needed some work, but since xBs book for around $4500 I figured it was worth a look.

Drove up through sleet & rain to find a somewhat ratty looking xB that a college kid was selling as he bought a newer Golf. Despite having 237K miles and having sat all summer, it started & ran fine. I pulled the code, which turned out to be an evap leak code that usually results from not tightening the gas cap all the way.

Took it for a test drive and other than slightly mushy brakes and noise from the front pads having rusted to the rotors it drove & handled fine. The body was rough, but didn’t have any real rust, and everything seemed to work as it should.

Talked him down to $1000, cleared the check engine light(hasn’t come back on), and headed home in a 2 xB convoy. The weather had shifted to combined rain & thick wet snow, but our new box trucked home without missing a beat.

The plan is to do some maintenance & clean it up some so she can start using it. Then over time make some aesthetic & mechanical improvements.

Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you get REALLY lucky…

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After the discovery of major hacked repairs on the truck cab(found it a couple weeks ago, only just posted it), I’ve been trying to find a better replacement cab to avoid having to deal with all that. I found a Craigslist ad for a “Junk 1962 Truck” That was abandoned by a tenant. I asked what make it was and was told it was a “1960 Chev”. I figured it might have a few useable parts, so after work I drove over to the house where it was sitting.

This is what I found there…

I’m not sure of the year but it is definitely a ’64-’66 truck. Short bed, custom cab, big back window, deluxe seat, deluxe dash, deluxe wheel, 6-cyl, 3-spd and clearly the subject of a halfway decent amateur restoration at some point. There are no keys as of yet, and the battery is missing so drivetrain status is a complete mystery.

Story I got from the seller was his tenant bought it 2+ years ago and drove it home, parked it in the driveway and never touched it again. A little over a year ago the tenant moved out and left it behind.

 

 

He says he filed all the proper abandoned property paperwork at the time to make it his, but it currently trying to track it down as in addition to selling the rental house, he personally is moving to a new house.

 

 

But I don’t care about any of that, because I bought it for all of $500.

Paid a local garage $60 to drag it home this morning. I had to grind the rivet off one of the vent windows to get it open and be able to open the door(after I got a slim-jim stuck in the door).

It is currently sitting in my driveway awaiting a very thorough scrubbing and then a look at the drivetrain & brakes. Even if I can’t get the paperwork I need to be able to register it, in parts alone this is hands down the best score of my life.

A new addition to the fleet

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Well, the fleet here just got bigger by one.

I bough her home yesterday, but the story starts last week. I saw an ad for this 1964 Chevy C10 on Craigslist. It listed it as running & driving well and all original. However it was 2.5 hours away, and there was no way to cram a 5+ hour round trip into my schedule that week. So I sent the guy an email saying I was interested in looking at it the next week, and tried to put it out of my mind, figuring if it was as advertised it would be gone by the time I could see it.

I loaded up the newly upgraded Wee Trailer(more on that in another post) and went away to PiCon(a scifi con) for the weekend. I returned home late on Sunday, and monday morning gave him a call only to discover the truck was still available.

This caused me to leave work on monday, pick up the ever patient girlfriend, and drive to New Hampshire.

Upon arrival I was greeted by the most basic truck I have ever encountered. Inline six, three speed on the column, no radio, no power steering, no A/C, no power brakes, no passenger mirror, no passenger sunvisor, no center mirror, no passenger key lock. This thing is the platonic ideal of truck. Only the things you need in a truck, and nothing more.

However when he turned the key the engine instantly sprang to life, and ran well. And the transmission shifted well once I figured out the quirks of the column-shifted three speed. And everything on it worked like it was supposed to. And inspection of the body revealed rust on several locations, but nothing terminal or structural, meaning it could be repaired at my own pace. The only big issue was the ancient bias-ply tires.

After a test drive and some negotiations I put down a deposit and headed back home, planning to return Thursday to pay it off and take it home.

Thursday after work found me once again trucking up to New Hampshire, and once arriving I paid him, got a bill of sale and the key in return and headed home. Once I stopped trying to shift quickly and got into the rhythm of the column shift(and thereby stopped getting the linkage jammed up) the drive was pretty uneventful. The truck ran well, and I drove home, though I did curse the terrible tires much of the way as they inspired zero confidence what so ever between the shaking, squealing on turns & tracking of every minor groove in the road.

The only minor issue that came up was when playing with the high beam switch(on the floor) I managed to make the low beams stop working, so I drove home on the high beams which no one seemed to notice as I didn’t get anyone flashing their lights at me.

Once we returned home I re-arranged the cars and was able to get most of the truck into the driveway(though the last foot or so spent the night on the sidewalk). This morning I drove it to work without the slightest problem or issue.

I’ll have another post in the next few days with more pics and a more detailed breakdown of it, but for now I’m just glad to have a classic vehicle that I can actually use and enjoy.

New Yorker, old mess.

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This 1948 Chrysler New Yorker was listed on Craigslist asking for the best offer over $2000. According to the ad the engine was rebuilt 5000 miles ago, and ran and drove well with no rust. I’ve been looking for a replacement for the wagon since I’ve gotten frustrated that I can’t drive and enjoy it.

 

So the girlfriend and I piled into Box and headed out on the 3.5 hour drive to New Paltz NY. Along the way the weather varied randomly between beautiful blue skies and absolutely biblical rainstorms. Eventually we made it out to his house, which turned out to be over a small mountain and down a dirt road.


There sitting in the driveway was eighteen feet of Chrysler’s finest. However it was a long time since this car had been at its best. It was a bit tired and worn everywhere, but honestly looked fairly respectable for a 64 year old car. We met the owner, who was an older gentleman who informed us he’d bough the car 26 years earlier as a project, but gotten distracted by a boat and hardly done anything to it.
 

Turns out that the car’s registration had expired a decade earlier, and hadn’t been touched in that time. He’d decided to sell it and so had the carb rebuilt, added an electric fuel pump and put a new battery in it. According to him it ran great and have driven well the tiny bit he’d driven it up and down the driveway.

Well it did start on the first crank, and settled down into a smooth idle, just as promised. However less than a minute later it sputtered to a stop. He poked and prodded and declared that it was probably out of gas. After he stood there for a bit I asked if he had more, to which he seemed a bit surprised and said he’d have to go get some. After he just stood there some more I asked if he could do that. Looking a bit surprised by my request he got a gas can out of the tiny garage, climbed into his van and headed off to wherever the nearest gas station was.

This at least gave us a chance to look over the car very thoroughly. The body was fairly rust free, though not without its share of dings & scrapes. There was some rust underneath, but not much given the age and all in fairly easy to fix areas. The interior was by and large nice, however mice had gotten into the headliner and both eaten holes in it, and left behind nest that gave the inside a certain miasma. All in all I declared that if, once he returned with gas, it ran/drove/stopped I was very interested in buying it. The girlfriend was pretty much on board with this idea, and we discussed various ways of getting it home and whether we could do it that day or would need to make a second trip to retrieve it.

Well the seller returned and poured five gallons of gas in the tank ,we once again fired it up. This time it ran for a moment then sputtered to a stop the moment I gave it gas. Thus followed an hour and a half of various fiddling, blowing out of filters, checking of hoses, priming of carb and checking of the float. Eventually it was discovered that when he changed the fuel line he’d managed to put the needle in the carb backwards so when it tried to draw fuel it instead blocked the flow. With this fixed it was now running like a champ, and it was now time for a test drive.

I decided not to bring my camera, which turned out to be an error. But I was so enthused to try driving this monster to think clearly. However the seller climbed into the driver’s seat, so I grudgingly piled into the passenger side. At the end of his driveway he hit the gas, and was met with a lot of revving from the engine, and not much forward motion. He commented that it had never done that before, and how odd it was because he’d just refilled the Fluid Drive(a torque converter on the transmission). I asked him what he’d filled it with, and he replied “Dexron of course”, which from my limited research beforehand was exactly the wrong fluid to use.

Despite the badly slipping transmission he plowed on ahead, at the first intersection he commented on how the brakes felt odd, even though (as was being a common refrain) it had never done that before. I made a comment about turning back, but he continued on regardless. About a mile down the road smoke was visibly leaking in through the dash vents, when I commented he seemed to act like he didn’t hear me. As we started up the road over the mountain the car bucked a bit, and he commented on how maybe we should turn around.

I strongly agreed and once he pulled over to a driveway I hopped out to help stop traffic while he turned the huge car around, by this time the brakes had gone out completely, and he was stopping the car with the emergency brake. He nearly drove off without me until i slapped the side of the car as he came by. He stopped long enough for me to jump in the back seat with my girlfriend before trundling back down the road. The car began sputtering more, and stalled out completely just after a blind corner.

Here we were, in a car that wouldn’t stay running, with a transmission that slipped badly when it did run, and without any brakes to stop it with. Thankfully our salvation came in the form of three guys piled into a Ford pickup. They pulled up along side and asked if we needed a hand, and when we shouted that we did they immediately pulled over. A quick conference was had and they headed off with the seller to his place to get his tow rope.

So now we were sitting on the side of the road with someone else’s dead car, and one of the guys from the truck. This time my girlfriend and I mostly talked about how to get the heck out of here as soon as possible, and joked about what had happened thus far.

Finally our saviors returned, and we hooked the Chrysler to the back of the truck. As the truck was full with it’s occupants we found ourselves once again riding in the Chrysler. What thus followed was about the scariest drive I’ve had under 25 miles per hour. Our erstwhile drive wasn’t correcting for the angle of the tow rope so while the truck was in its lane this massive car was half in the oncoming lane, and he alternated between riding the parking brake and letting us drift close to the truck every time they slowed.

Finally they got us as far as the end of his dirt road, and said they couldn’t pull us any further. They unhooked the car and headed off. I suggested we push the car down the hill so it could coast most of the way to his driveway. The seller said he thought it was a bad idea. I then said we should at least push it out of the middle of the road. He agreed and climbed in the driver’s seat. Shrugging, we gave it a push and once it started rolling he yelled that he was going to coast as far as he could.

Once he’d coasted as far as he could(and we’d walked back to the car) we used his minivan to get it in the driveway, made some hasty goodbyes, and got the hell out of there.

Despite being a complete washout as far as something I might want to buy, the trip at least made for one hell of a story. I did feel a bit sorry for the seller as he was elderly and seemed to be getting confused, also he didn’t seem to quite grasp that the a car that had been sitting for a decade would not be the same car when it left the garage as when it went in.

The siren call of a big truck

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I Will freely admit that I have a weakness for pickup trucks. I also have a weakness for dual rear wheel flatbed trucks. And, thanks to my late father, I have a weakness for ’67-’72 Chevy trucks. Combine these with a habit of surfing craigslist & ebay for cheap old vehicles and it is a recipe for unexpected roadtrips to look at old junk.

A few weeks ago I ran into this particular truck, advertised for the princely sum of $700. It is a 1967 Chevy C30 flatbed with an inline six and 4-speed manual. According to the ad it needed a new radiator, but would run and drive once that had been installed. A brief conversation with the seller ensued where he informed me it had been his buddy’s daily-driver for years until he got something else, then was driven occasionally until the radiator was stolen a few years ago.

Rationalizing to myself that a truck would be handy with the new house, I and my ever-patient girlfriend headed out on a 4-hour round trip to see it. I called the seller when we were an hour out as he had requested, and got no answer. Multiple follow up calls as we got closer met with similar lack of response. We eventually found the truck anyway, parked down a steep asphalt ramp in the basement hole where a building had been and half covered with local flora.

Sitting before me was a truck that had clearly not moved in a long, long time. The flatbed wood was rotted away(something he had warned me of, and a cheap fix). But it was clear after even a cursory inspection that it was going to need far more than a radiator to be ready to hit the road. The muffler was hanging half off, the windshield was cracked, one vent window was a precariously dangling piece of broken glass hanging by rusted metal.

However the green interior was in really good condition, without a tear in the vinyl seat. And the cab seemed free of the rocker & floor rot these trucks are infamous for. So I was willing to at least give it a chance. I had dragged a collection of car-reviving items with me, battery, jumper cables, tools, gas can, carb cleaner/engine start. So out came the battery and over to the truck to pop it in and give it a shot.

No. Battery. Cables. Whoever had stolen the radiator for the copper scrap had gotten the copper battery cables too. Now I was looking at a truck that would need $20-$50 of parts to see if it cranked over, let alone started. Then a $150-$300 for rad& hoses to see if it ran & drove. Since at this point we were still in frantic house renovation mode to prepare for our upcoming move, the last thing I had time or money for was a truck where I didn’t know if it was a good runner or a paperweight.

So with much regret I called the guy to say I wasn’t interested(he didn’t answer), and headed for home. I was glad I’d walked away before getting sucked into another massive project, but at the same time I was sad to let it go because if I’d found it at a different time it would have made an excellent project truck due to the lack of rot & the good interior. Ah well, maybe next time.

I did find a really neat ghost sign in the parking lot next door, so it wasn’t all a waste.

The history of the Box, part 1

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I’ve mentioned Box in passing here before, but I figured it was a good time to introduce him properly.

Box is a 2004 Scion xB I bought back in November of 2007. I had gotten bored with the ’96 Subaru Outback I had at the time and sold it. I was planning to replace it with something around $3K that got excellent gas mileage. I thought playing with hypermiling would be interesting and I was sharing a house with friends who owned a minivan & pickup so a wagon seemed less vital.

 

After looking at a variety of Civic hatchbacks & Neons without any luck, I found an ad for a used car lot selling an xB for $8500, a pretty good price for the car. My girlfriend and I drove about three hours out to see it on a whim. Despite having 92K miles on it, it drove like a brand new car, had a surprising amount of pep for a 108hp motor and had a flat out ridiculous amount of space inside.

The inside smelled a bit of cigar smoke though, and there was a small scrape on the passenger doors. On a whim I offered the guy $6500. When he asked how I’d gotten to that figure I told him it was what I felt like paying for the car. About then we got back from the test drive, at which point he went in the office and dug out a piece of paper and handed it to me, telling me he would sell it to me for that figure.

It was the invoice from the auction he’d bought it at, for $6828.

Sold!

After a desperate drive to the nearest branch of my bank 30 miles away, I was the proud owner of a 2004 Scion xB, for $6823, because his secretary wrote the invoice wrong, and I didn’t catch it until we’d left. I drove home waffling wildly between maniacal glee and absolute “What have I done?!?” terror. The picture to the right is actually the first one I took, right after I pulled in the driveway.

Next part; I can’t leave well enough alone, some of the (many) modifications I’ve made.

What is better, mostly rusty parts or mostly no parts? Neither…

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(I looked at this truck before I bought the wagon)

I looked at this 1953 GMC the same day I looked at the half-dissolved ’53 Chevy pickup. After how that truck was falling apart but supposedly solid drivetrain-wise I thought if I could find another truck that was more intact I could combine them into one good truck.

 

The seller of this truck was asking $1250, but it was pretty clear even over the phone that he was more desperate to get rid of the truck than to get the most for it. So once again I piled into Box and headed out to look at a truck. Upon arrival I was led out to a dirt-floor garage where there was about 60% of a truck. The frame & drivetrain were complete and it had a cab with a hood & both doors. That was about it.

There was no bed, no seat, no fenders, no grille, no bumpers, most trim was gone. The gauges were in a disassembled pile in a half-rotted box. Worse, the parts that were there were in rough shape. While not anywhere near the scale of the other truck, the cab had its fair share of rust, and everything had been badly spray-painted black.

I made my polite goodbyes and fled back towards home. About ten minutes after I left the guy called me and mentioned he had an LMC truck catalog that had all the things the truck would need in it. I explained to him my worry wasn’t finding all the missing parts, it was affording them.

 

I can’t even imagine how complicated it would be to figure out every single piece that was missing, track it down new or used & put it together never having seen it complete. Fortunately I was smart enough not to buy the truck, so I don’t have to do that.

I found myself joking shortly afterwards tha that after a truck that was mostly rotted and another that was mostly missing, would the next one be on fire when I got there?

 

Tattered luxury is still beautiful

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This 1950 Chrysler Windsor  was found on Craigslist for only $1850. Sadly the photos here(which are from the ad, not mine) were taken a year ago, and the car had been sitting in a field for that intervening time. We drove up to see it and ended up spending at least an hour helping the seller get the car started again due to a dead 6 volt battery and no good jumper cables.

Once it did start through the flathead straight six ran nicely and the car drove well around the field. I liked the car a lot, but sadly despite a completely rebuilt engine and little serious rust it was much more of a restoration candidate than something I could drive and enjoy relatively soon. If I had a garage and would have been able to work on it over the winter I would have seriously considered it, but as it was I wasn’t ready to get into it.

It did make me rather fond of Windsors though. The car was a fascinating study in the lap of luxury circa the late-40’s, including things like a heating system that wafts heat out the full width of the dash rather than blowing out a few vents. Also it  had some really amazing art-deco touches, like the fold-away window handles. This era of Chrysler has definitely moved up my list of desirable cars.

A quick couple lessons in selling cars

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A quick tutorial where you, the reader, can learn from the mistakes of the sellers of this 1950 Desoto. Sorry for the single tiny pic, I didn’t take any at the time and it was the only one of the actual car I could find online.

1) Don’t lie about the cars running/non-running status. Mostly because it is kinda easy to tell once I get there. Saying the car ‘runs well’ when you haven’t actually gotten it to start will just piss buyers off.

2) Parts/repairs done before the car say outside under a tree for three years aren’t “new”. If you advertise the car as having ‘new’ brakes and I show up to see the lines/fittings are rusty and you tell me that is just because the car sat for three years I will know that you are, once again, bullshitting me.

3) I REALLY don’t care what the sexual orientation of the guy you got it from was. No, really. It has no bearing on my interest in the car directly, and listening to two guys make gay-bashing comments will ensure I don’t want to buy this, or any, car from them.

A 24 hour rollercoaster of car ownership.

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I found this 1950 Dodge Coronet on ebay. My girlfriend and I almost instantly fell in love with it. It ended up being a short abusive relationship.

We drove up to look at it in the dark, and spent about an hour looking the car over & taking it for a test drive each, all the time rationalizing at top speed. The seller made a big deal of the rebuilt engine, all new brakes and repaired & rust-free floors. So we told ourselves since those were all good we’d have a car we could drive while we dealt with the “minor” issues of the unpainted hood, tattered interior, shoddy wiring, rust on the trunk panel… you get the picture.

After looking it over we headed home to wait for the auction to end. In the end I was the high bidder at $1830, but it didn’t hit reserve. He sent me a second chance offer for $2300 which after some hemming & hawing I accepted. We drove down after work the next day and brought the car home. Taking another closer look when we got home the car looked rougher than I’d remembered, but I was still enthusiastic about it.

The next morning I decided I was going to take it to work, I headed out a bit early started her up and chugged off to work as usual. My commute is mostly back roads with a brief 3-mile highway section in the middle. On that highway section the Dodge felt a bit down on power, but I didn’t think much of it .However as I came off the exit ramp the car’s brakes seemed a bid spongy, and it stalled when I came to a stop. I started it back up, but it was running very roughly. The gas tank was nearly empty so thinking maybe it was getting crud from the tank, I pulled into a gas station and fueled up. It took a few tries to start it again, and still wasn’t running well. Trying to pull out of the lot, I hit the gas and the engine died. I frantically hit the brakes before rolling into traffic, only to have the pedal go to the floor. A short but exciting trip into a flowerbed and the car was stopped.

After getting car started enough to move it out of the way, I called work to say I wouldn’t be in that day, & called AAA. While waiting two hours for a truck I poked around under the hood but found nothing obviously wrong with the motor. However after borrowing a wrench from a Desoto mechanic who happened to be passing by, I discovered the brake reservoir was completely dry. While making that unpleasant discovery I made another, most of the driver’s side floorboard was rotted out(something he’d specifically said he’d fixed). I left a series of increasingly upset messages on the seller’s phone.

Too keep from making a long story any longer, I was able to convince him that the car he had advertised bore no resemblance to the car he had sold me and he agreed to take it back and refund me my money. In the end I ended up out about $100 in various small expenses and a day of work.

However it was a a bit of a wake up call. I’m very prone to buying with my heart and not my head when it comes to cars. I’ve got a long string of terrible cars as a testament to that. So the one good thing to come out of this car is that it made me much more aware of that tendancy in me, and so I’ve been a lot more careful about the cars I look at. Whatever car I do end up buying, I’m still going to be deciding with my heart. After all classic cars are an inherently irrational choice, why buy something decades old and hopelessly outdated & unreliable when compared against a newer car? However now my head is going to also be involved a bit more heavily in the decision.