Better Beaters - Building Cars and Daily Drivers

Working on the "new car",

"Alloy" is the name of this color. The Pony package provided the 17 in. wheels, grille mounted driving lights. and black leather interior. 200 hp V/6 provides 28 mpg. through the five speed auto transmission. ABS was still on the option sheet this year, mine has it. This is not my car, but a look alike. These are really very good cars.

photo source: all Ford Mustangs. com

When does a car you purchased new, stop being the "new' car?

In 2007 I did the outrageous, (for me) act of purchasing two brand new vehicles, a 2007 Ford F150 pick up and a 2007 Mustang coupe. Fast forward ten years and the truck is displaying 123,000 miles on the odometer and the Mustang has rolled up 143,000 miles. I've purchased many late model used cars with less mileage. The Mustang served as my Wife's car and was used for family excursions. My then, teen age children shared the rear seat on these family journeys, luckily neither is very tall! My Chrysler minivan suffered from several mechanical maladies along this time period and it became too unreliable to trust on long runs.

Like most new vehicles my truck was used extensively during the early years of ownership while I was trying to develop my business. Plus, I just liked driving a new vehicle.  As my children are now grown my Wife and I find ourselves taking many empty nest trips together and we find that the truck is ideal for these activities. (Lot's of room for flea market and antique store finds!) We have gone to Las Vegas, The Oregon Coast, and a two week trip that took us to Oregon, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and back to California. While I did use it for our last vacation to Oregon I now kind of use it just for hauling stuff. During these years my Wife has never driven my truck, not that I wouldn't let her, it's just that she doesn't want to drive something so big,

After my Daughter finally got her license at age 18 we passed the Mustang over to her use. She did pretty good getting a seven year old car as her first car but there was a selfish motive for me involved. When my oldest Daughter got her license I bought her the car she wanted, an older VW bug, with a manual transmission.  These old bugs are great for teaching a new driver how to drive a stick. They are pretty hard to stall no matter how suddenly you let out the clutch. However I always worried about the reliability, of driving an older car. There were a few times that I got the call out responding with my tool bag to see why the car had stalled out  or wouldn't start, usually at inconvenient times, for me!


My youngest seems quite busy now, running all over at all times so I seldom drive the Mustang. In fact the car is seldom parked long enough for me to take a look at it! So my access to the car is limited. Just getting the oil changed somewhere near the recommended intervals is a struggle. Out of sight out of mind. So true. I don't get the opportunity to drive the car enough to see if it's developing any problems. I'm quite busy trying to manage the rest of my fleet, and besides it was the "new" car.  Not any more. I was kind of surprised by the accrued mileage.

I had bought new tires for the car some time ago and even with the 70,000 mile wear guarantee are getting near replacement. It was the air bag recall that really brought home the need for service. While they had the car, the Ford service center provided their analysis of desperately needed services and their cost estimates. As if I would pay to have the dealer do them! I've got a good indie shop that I would rather send some business.

One thing that it needed was new brakes. I had already replaced the rear brake pads several years ago. My Daughter had recently been mentioning that the car was squealing once in a while. I figured that a squeal is better than a scrape, so I hadn't paid too much attention, even after I heard the sound myself. They also recommended a brake fluid change which sounded okay since the car is ten years old.

Cheap and disposable. This way you wont contaminate the fluid during the next use.
 I added a short length of hose to the end.

I decided to do the brake job myself. I bought new pads, rotors and fluid, One of the pads was almost worn down to the metal. I drained the fluid from the master cylinder with an infant snot bulb. I added a length of rubber hose and this worked great. It was cheap, less than four dollars and I could discard it after use. Then I bled the brakes to get the rest of the old fluid out of the system. Luckily my Daughter showed up and helped, which made a hard job merely tedious. I had been doing it very slowly on my own. I gotta learn how to use my Mityvac! That brake fluid sure was dirty!

It is kind of funny that I have put new fluid in many of my old hobby cars, in the last few years. My '70 Mustang was changed when I totally rebuilt the brake system. I had replaced the fluid when I rebuilt the brakes in my old Riviera. This was also a total brake rebuild including new brake lines. I had changed the brake fluid on my F250 while rebuilding the brakes, and even on my '96 Mustang. I just didn't think about doing it on one my "new" cars. Which is the real root of the problem, they just aren't new anymore. I've got to think of them like I think of my hobby cars, always in need of something!

I performed the brake job, replacing the pads, rotors and fluid. I also rotated the tires which should be good until next Spring. I'll just drain and refill the power steering fluid, using one of those bulbs and a transmission fluid and filter service is on the schedule. Oh, also a belt, hose and coolant change. Spark plugs would probably be a good idea too. So much to do. If I bought a new car every six or seven years I could avoid all these headaches and just make a monthly payment, if that isn't a headache of it's own.

My truck is also in the same situation. I did change the front brake pads a while back, but didn't have the rotors turned at the time. The rotor is held on with a big non reusable nut, that had to be torqued down to 150 lbs./feet of torque. I don't have a torque wrench that can register that high and besides I don't have the wrench to do the job. There is a tell tale pulsation in the pedal while braking that tells me that the rotors are warped. Hoses, belts, transmission service and more are on the agenda also.

While maintaining a fleet of vehicles does reduce the mileage accumulated on each vehicle, it just increases the amount of maintenance that has to be done by someone. That would be me.

Does it ever end?