View From the Bushes

Back in the good old days, you didn't have to buy a van once you hit the three children mark. You just tossed them all in the car, without regard to whether the number of seat belts bore any similiarity to the number of passangers. I remember, with some fondness, riding all over creation perched on a wheel well in the bed of a tiny Ford Courier with a dilapidated shell. Sure, if we had been in a major accident we all would have died, but we weren't and didn't, so everything's okay right? Before the third kid, we had a dilapidated (see a trend here) Buick Skylark. Besides the fact that its surface was more rust and primer than actual paint, it was a pretty good car, with one big problem: even though there were three seatbelts in the rear seat, there was no way to fit three car seats. So in a move which was to begin my descent into madness, we bought a van.

It was a '95 Ford Windstar, which had been owned by a 70+ year old relative of mine. As such, we got a good deal on nicely cared for, well-maintained car... too well-maintained as it turns out. What I did not know at the time was that this van had a problem with its head gaskets, a failure common to that model, common enough that Ford had extended the warranty on any head gasket problem to 7 years or 100,000 miles. I guarantee that if I had owned the car for its entire life that those gaskets would have blown at 75,000 miles, if not earlier; as it was they didn't fail until 7 years four months and 105,000 miles. The previous owner had just been too nice. So then I was faced with a decision: replace the head gaskets, replace the engine or replace the car. The transmission was already going quirky and a lot of people told me I should just buy a whole new car, but I decided to replace the head gaskets.

I have this real problem when it comes to car repair. If something is going to cost me 100 dollars (most of it labor), I'll have the mechanic do it. But if something is going to cost over about $500, I'll try and do it myself. Such was the case with the head gaskets. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my dad is a great auto mechanic so after playing on what little paternal affection he still posesses I convinced him to come down and help me with this project. In the olden days (back when my dad actually made a living as a mechanic) replacing a head gasket was a simple as taking the head off. These days, everything but the kitchen sink is on top of the engine, and it took us the better part of a day just getting all of the accessories off. Once all that was taken care of, the head came off pretty easy. What we saw at that point filled our souls with dread. The gasket had blown in more than one place, the engine compression was all over the place there was grit in the cylinders. We'd spent at least a day and a half and the conclusion we came to was that this engine could not be saved.

To be continued....

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Ross