View From the Bushes

After deciding that the engine of my van could not be saved, I started looking around for the best place to get a new one. Well, the relative who sold me the van recommended me to an even more distant relative who owned the Ford dealership where the van had been purchased. This even more distant relative felt pretty bad about the whole debacle and promised to give me a great deal on a head gasket job, which he did. This is where it gets kind of annoying, because I asked him to replace the engine, but his guys looked at it and decided that all it needed was a head job. Now if he had been right and I had been wrong, which is certainly what you would have expected, it would have saved me nearly two thousand dollars, as it turned out...

Well, I had gotten the van back after the head gasket job and was driving along the freeway when I realized that in an effort to keep my speed around 65 that I had continued to apply gas until the car was floored, and it could still just barely do 65, and the engine wasn't sounding so hot either. The next thing I know the maximum speed has dropped to 60 and then 55 and then 50. As I was trying to get a handle on what was going on, I passed an exit and had to wait a while before the next one. By the time I got to it my maximum speed was 25, and the entire dashboard was lit up with "warning" and "check engine" lights. At that point, it became pretty apparent that my initial assessment had been correct: the engine could not be saved.

So it was back into the dealer (which since I was going through a distant relative was 100+ miles away) for a new engine. In the very beginning before I had done anything, right after the gasket first blew, I called the local dealer and asked him what a new engine would run me. It was in the neighborhood of 3200 dollars. After doing a head job and a new engine, that's close to what I spent at the relative's dealership (lower but close) after all the discounts. With a additional week or so of aggravation, travel time and the like thrown in for good measure. But at the end of it I had a new engine, so that was okay except for the lingering transmission problem I still had, which was the original point of the story.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of Car Repair Theater!

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Ross