Tuesday, January 3, 2012

The Problems Started on the Way Home

In my previous post, I mentioned how I ended up with a second mustang.  Now I get to tell you why I should have never bought it and some of the tell tale signs I now see in hindsight.



When I test drove the car, I didn't want to beat it since I don't really do that to my own cars, why would I do it to someone elses car right?  Well, in hindsight I should have (more on this later)  Everything appeared normal under normal operating conditions.  Everything seemed to work nothing out of the ordinary was wrong with the car.  I agreed to purchase the car from the seller (the grandfather).

This is where I should have had red flags go up all over the place...  Warning, warning, warning, step away from the purchase... do not proceed.  But I chose to ignore those signs being naive and trusting when I should not have.  The seller had an "As Is" paper to sign.  I thought it was kind of odd, but it is a used car, there were no expressed warranties, so why should I have to sign this right?  I agreed to sign it and wanted to get on my way.  Seriously, why would you require that someone sign something like this if you didn't know something was wrong with the car right?  I should have known something was up.

So I now have the title in hand and I am driving on my way home (about 90 miles).  I get about 1/2 way home and that is when the problems started.  (You should be saying "Uh Oh" at this point)  I come to a stop light and stop and I notice the oil pressure gauge going down to almost nothing.  This freaks me out...  I hit the gas and it goes back up.  When it is in an idle the gauge goes back down.  This draws all kinds of warnings and is making me wonder if it is going to make it home.  The only thing that I had going for me is that it still sounded like it was running good, so I was thinking malfunctioning switch.

Regardless I pull into the next gas station and filled up with gas since I needed it anyway.  I also checked the oil at that point and it was dirty, but it was showing full.  I figured.  Maybe they didn't change the oil enough on i and it was getting worn out.  I'll change it when I get home and see if the problem persists.

Sure enough, I get home, change the oil and no more oil pressure problems.  (or so I thought)

My wife comes home and loves the car.  We drove it a few times, but not a whole lot.  It was a pleasure car after all.  Well i is getting late in the summer and I am thinking at this point, might as well drive it while we can.  It is either that or sell it because we didn't need 4 vehicles.

I start driving it to and from work each day.  It is running well, but I noticed if I got to around 3000-3500 RPM it had some engine noise.  Since I really don't beat my cars, it rarely got up there unless I was trying to get around someone so I was in denial of it being anything serious.

Well after putting about 1000 miles on the car since we purchased it, one day I went out to start it to go home and it didn't want to start right away.  Ok, now I am starting to get paranoid.  Once you mix this with the engine noise, this isn't good.  It can't be right?  Nope, not good.

Once it started it seemed to run fine, but I am paranoid at this time.  I start driving home, and notice the oil pressure problem has now resurfaced.  My heart sank.  At this point I knew that it had a bad oil pump and the engine was going to have to come out to fix it.

I get the car home and check the oil and boom, the oil is pitch black after just under 1000 miles.  This is horrible.  Time to make a decision....  Do I sell it and let someone else figure it out, do I pull the engine and rebuild it, do I put a used engine in it?  What should I do?  Find out in the next post...  "The ultimate decision"

1 comment:

  1. I remember when I test drove the car I eventually ended up buying. It ran fine, drove fine, but when I started to romp on it and give the car a good shake down I missed a 2-3 shift about 2 times. I just shrugged it off as not having driving stick shift in quite some time. When I asked the seller about it, he didn't say anything.

    After I had bought the car I realized that if I did the 2-3 shift any higher than 3K RPM it would just grind the gears. That's when I knew I needed new synchros.... So I feel your pain about getting a car that isn't exactly how you were lead to believe it was.

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