T3h demise of t3h wag00n

I have many words that I live by. One set is "Never turn down a free car, especially if it runs." So somewhere around the late 1990's my boss offered me his 1991 Subaru Legacy wagon for free, I jumped on the offer. Within a week I had it insured and had plates and drove it home.

At the time it had over 125,000 miles on it and the transmission was slipping. No biggie. I didn't put too many miles on my cars back then anyway. But over the years to come all sorts of maladies appeared. The tranny failed. The front and read differentials both burned out. Two timing belts. By the time 2005 rolled around, I was spending HUNDREDS each and every single month to keep the car road worthy. The car passed 200,000 miles and every worn out part was failing. By the summer of 2005 I thought about it good and hard. The amount of time of money I'm putting into this car, I can buy myself that foxy new Sonic Blue Ford Focus I have always wanted. On July 17, 2005 I came home with the Ford of my dreams and put t3h wag00n up for sale.

Needless to say, no one was breaking down my door for a 14 tear old car with over 200,000 miles on it, despite the fact that I had it running perfectly, and I had solved all of it's illnesses. Soon enough I found a home for the car. My sister had just killed her low mileage Buick and was ready to kill again. I didn't want to do it, but I gave her the car. A year had elapsed and I heard nothing from her about it. When I did see her, she said the car was perfect. The only thing that caught my attention was when her boyfriend said he was going to have a new exhaust put on the car. The loud and efficient one that I put on the car annoyed him too much. I had a bad feeling about that. Anytime you did anything to hinder the breathing ease on that car it caused it to run hot. I suggested that they should save their money, but they had a muffler put on.

That was clearly the beginning of the end.

Two weeks later NY suffered a terrible Arctic blast. Even my new car didn't like starting in that weather, certainly an old and worn out Subaru wasn't going to put up with it either. They got it running and took it out for a LONG road trip. Another big mistake. For some reason that car NEVER liked the cold weather. It ran hotter in the cold weather. And so it did. It got hot and vomited all the antifreeze out all over the road. They waited for the car to cool, put in more antifreeze and took it straight to Matt's mechanic.

Here's on thing I must say about Subaru, they have a logic all their own. If you aren't fluent in Subaru, it does strange things that no other car does. This car, for instance, cannot have a thermostat. I tried a dozen different thermostats in that car by all brands out there. Finally i fit it what a "flow restricter" which is a ring in place of the thermostat which keeps the water from moving through the system too quickly, so it can cool. It's a trick used in race cars and has it's applications in daily drivers too. This mechanic declared this was clearly a thermostat issue. When he pulled out my flow resticter, he showed Matt about the shoddy previous upkeep of the car. Matt was furious that I would even dare hand over a car with such a thing in it. Well, this was the first nail in the coffin of this car. Now fitted with a thermostat, and likely NOT bled properly, the car overheated almost instantly. At this point the mechanic decided to dismantle the front of the engine. Why? I have no clue. But when her removed the crank pulley, he lost the crank tap that keeps the dampener in place. The fucking jerk had the nerve to put this on my sister and her boyfriend, "The car needs a new dampener, crankshaft, and head gaskets, and it's not worth it to fix." He laid it on thick and they agreed. They donated the car to charity, (which will be another scam I expose on another day) but I still believe the car probably could've run again if the jerk didn't start taking things apart he didn't know anything about.

So the car was picked up by charity last weekend and was likely put through the crusher shortly thereafter. I'm a little sad. While I had it, t3h wag00n served me pretty well. We took it to Myrtle Beach once, and all over the tri-state area many times. But in the end, I will always know that it met it's demise when taken to a bad mechanic.