My Wife Dodged A Bullet Getting Her Car Fixed

Yeah remembering co worker used car for sale 86k miles, Have brakes ever been done? “NO I TOLD YOU CAR WAS IN PERFECT SHAPE, NOTHING HAS EVER BEEN DONE”

The check engine light can come in handy if you are working in the engine compartment & accidentally leave something disconnected, like the MAP sensor electrical connector. Ask me how I know this? … lol … Beyond that the CEL codes offer up good clues, but they can easily be misinterpreted.

Good job there MM on suss-ing out the proper fix in short order. Good for you :slight_smile:

man i hate new cars. they cost as much as a small house, last about 4 to 5 years. before you get expensive problems even good mechanic can’t figure them out and lf they do its some $500 dollar (BS) module bring down the corrupt(EPA) and bring back the carburetor, mechanical fuel pump.

Sorry, I find almost none of that to be true for me. I love newer cars. the old ones were a maintenance headache PITA and did not last.
CSA

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You can take just about any new car and with normal maintenance drive it for 100K miles without much trouble. In my experience anyway.

You have made that statement before and it is still wrong. Bring back the carburetor , you can’t be serious.

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Had a 2004 PT Cruiser 7 1/2 years. Besides maintenance, had one repair, LF wheel bearing. Now have 2012 Camry 5 1/2 years maintenance only, no repairs, gets the EPA rated mileage 26 City, 35 Highway. Never had old cars do that. Old cars were easier to work on, good thing, they needed it so often. I do wish new cars had grease fitting and repackable bearings but I understand why they eliminated them, most people just didn’t do the maintenance

Several things regarding older cars I have to respectfully disagree with.

One is the premise that a contact point’/carbureted car needs a tune=up once a month. It’s been stated by several people on this forum that contact points have to be replaced every 2000 miles. That is absolutely not true unless someone is botching the points installation. A set of points properly gapped and with the distributor cam lubed should easily go 25k miles without touching them again.

Two is the premise that older cars did not and could not attain high miles without an overhaul. Again, not true. What’s not mentioned or thought of is that older engines back in the day did not wear out prematurely because of poor construction or shoddy materials. It was due to lead in the gasoline. Nothing more.

There’s other fallacies but you get the point.

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If your cars are only lasting 4 or 5 years before they develop expensive problems, and if your “good” mechanic can’t figure out what is wrong with them, then I have to conclude that you are buying the wrong makes and/or models, and that your mechanic is not very good.

My experience runs totally counter to yours.

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CSA…my wife shut the Vue off because the CEL was flashing and the car was bucking badly. They left the car at the shop and my wife’s friend called her daughter to pick them up. I don’t like the CEL system but I won’t let that keep me from getting a new gadget (scanner) to play with.

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Yes! Back in the day odometers were routinely rolled back on used cars, some even legally! People also had it in their head that NO car would go much past 100,000 miles and so they quit doing maintenance on cars as they approached that milestone. And they rusted, Oh My, did they RUST!

Stuff a 2-barrel 455 V8 that never sees more than 4000 RPM into a large car with 2.73 gears and it will run 200K with little more than a water pump and a timing chain.

As late as the early '50s, it was SOP for Cadillac dealers to roll the odometer back to zero on Caddys that were traded-in. In fact, GM used to advertise that practice with a line something like…
A pre-owned Cadillac is as good as a new car of any other make

I remember we traded in our 58 Chevy wagon for a 61 at the Chevy dealership. It had 60 some thousand miles on it, mostly highway. A week later it appeared on the OK used car lot with the front of the hood repainted to get rid of the sand blasting, and the odometer reading 28,000.

Sometimes this is the easy solution. I am a fan of the keep it simple stupid (KISS). For some modern motors they make aftermarket parts to convert. The ford modular motor has a kit to add a distributor and aftermarket intake that will take a carburetor. Many 90’s engines have available retro kits as well. I am planning on a car project using the ford 2.3. These are popular dirt track cars and they make everything aftermarket to run one just on the basics.

I do have older motorcycles with 4 carburetors. While they work just fine most of the time, there is tinkering that needs to happen periodically. Fuel injected is pretty nice.

My dad has a fuel injected boat engine. It has had nothing but problems since he has had it. I think he is about to go backwards and get a carburetor boat engine.

You need to buy more reliable vehicles. What you’re saying is absurd. Cars today are far more reliable then when cars of the era you’re talking about. We typically get 10+ years on our vehicles with HUNDREDS of thousands of miles before any major repair. What you’re saying doesn’t match reality.

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I’m moving in the opposite direction. Been messing with carb’d OBs a lot lately and fed up. The new gas formulations are super tough on them. Not to mention the oil injection setups. What a royal PITA.

I’m actually looking into converting to electric propulsion. With some high power units fetching close to $24k, I’m inclined to tinker. Lots of videos out there of people making home brew systems, some quite impressive.

If your engine has oil injection, you should be able to do a propane conversion. never have issues with leaky of fouled carburetors again.

I have owned vehicles ranging from a 1947 Pontiac to my present vehicle–a 2011 Toyota Sienna. One of my past vehicles was a 1954 Buick I bought from my parents. It had 160,000 miles when I sold it and the neither the heads nor the pan were ever off the engine. Another vehicle, a 1978 Oldsmobile had 240,000 when I sold it, had no major engine work and even the carburetor had never been touched. Our neighbor bought the car in 2011 and got a year before the car was overcome by rust.
Today’s cars require fewer repairs, but the repairs are often expensive. For example, my 1978 Olds had to have the water pump replaced. I bought a new pump for about $25 and was able to replace the pump myself–about 2 hours labor and 3 beers. On the other hand, I had to have the water pump replaced on my 2011 Sienna and it was a $975 job. I’m not saying that all maintenance was easier in the old days. The distributor in my 1954 Buick was back against the firewall. I had to stand on a stool to change the ignition points, which I did about every 25,000 miles.
I remember once when I was in the road and my 1947 Pontiac quit running. I figured out that the condenser had shorted out. I took the condenser off the generator that suppresses radio noise and rigged it up outside the distributor, scraped the points with my pocket knife, set the gap with a thin dime and was on my way. That type of emergency repair isn’t possible in a modern car.

Mrs Triedaq wasn’t nearly as charitable when describing your Olds, IIRC. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I can buy a 2017 Accord EX-L for about $25,000. That is a whole lot less than any small house around here goes for.

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