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View Full Version : Ding, Dong the Chevy's dead.


VinylHanger
08-23-2005, 12:58 AM
Well, as I wrote in a earlier post, I have been unsuccessfully trying to revive my good buddy with 278,000 on it, and 90,000 on the motor. Well, after spending 1,500 bucks to pay it off and it going tits up, I decided to put another 500 or so into it to get it going again. This truck has been a runner, beat and bruised but always going.
Well, this weekend I finally realized it was time to put it out to pasture. I spent 10 hours on it saturday, between turning a wrench and hitting the net for help, I came to the realization it would be another 400 bucks for ignition and control parts to get it to run reliably. Of course I then would have a truck with 270,000 miles that had 400 bucks worth of new parts at a minimum that is. I am gratefull I've got my money out of it, and I am going to keep it. I've told my wife it will become a planter to keep on bugging the local complaining busy-body old lady. I'm going to put a handful of big-assed trees in buckets in the back till I decide to get it going again.
Anyway, the upshot is that I had to spend Sunday looking for a new rig. As I said before, it ain't easy running a construction company out of a Cherokee.
So Sunday I started to look. Did you know it is impossible to find a decent rig for under 5 grand. I was able to find a sweet 95 F250 4x4 Supercab Longbed with the mighty 460 big block, oh, yeah baby. :banana: :banana:
Downside is I now have the payments I was trying to avoid. Oh, well, guess that is why I work :cry:

Anyway, I just thought I'd let ya'll know what was happening. I figure this way I will get lots of "You dumbass, shoulda gotta Chevy, Dodge, Toyota, Nissan, smaller motor, bigger motor........... Oh, yeah, they don't make a bigger motor :D

Oh, there really wasn't much point to this post, just up late and felt like typing. If tomorrow goes well, I'll post pics. Of course I'll need to take out another loan to fill the tank to get it home. But it does get a whole 10 mpg. <------ this is my way of telling the eco freaks to pound sand, if I wanna use a lot of gas, I will. :yes:

OvenMaster
08-23-2005, 03:25 AM
278k on one vehicle is a heck of an accomplishment, VH. Getting rid of an old friend that's done nearly everything for you and with you is tough, I know ('79 Impala wagon bought new, 180k, 23 solid years, dead due to irreparable frame rot). Anything under $5k is gonna be totally beat to $hit... used vehicle prices are insane. Congrats on the find.

Tom

VinylHanger
08-23-2005, 09:31 AM
We had to step up to the 6500 dollar range to get this one. But I needed a full sized beast of a rig. I'll be keeping the Chevy, I brought my daughter home from the hospital in it. I figure it will make a good project truck...... eventually. The coolest thing about this new rig, besides the 405 foot pounds of torque, is that it has a cd player. That's quite a step up for us. Our Jeep only picks up FM, and the old truck only has a radio that works, but sounds pretty bad. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to turn the cd player off, too much fancy stuff for this mug.

THOR
08-24-2005, 06:13 PM
Wow man that sucks after all that money and work to fix it :( Congrats on the new one tho ;)

VinylHanger
08-24-2005, 09:26 PM
Well, it ended up sucking a bit less. I nixed the idea on the big block Ford. The dealer ticked me off. The old I got you financed but they need more down crap. Then they made me play phone tag, which I hate. So today I went and found a creampuff '88 Chevy 1 ton with a 350, new heads and an RV cam, tonnou(sp) cover, very clean interior, runs better than new, 2 wheel drive, and she runs out like a freakin' raped ape. 124,000 on it for a whopping 26 hundert bucks. 15 hundred under retail and even a few under trade in. Hopefully tomorrow she comes home. :banana:

Better be tomorrow, 'cause without a truck the last month, I have a jobsite full of construction debris to clean up. You can only make so many small piles of crap, before the whole thing looks like one big pile of junk.

OvenMaster
08-25-2005, 04:04 AM
Nicely done, VH! :thmbsp: Ten bucks says you'll be happy with the Chevy, as you're used to one already. Switching to another maker (as we did with the family car) can be sometimes quite disorienting. And just for the record, I do believe that it's "tonneau" :)

Tom