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--- Car adventures (http://www.gatchamania.net/threadid.php?threadid=702)
Posted by meridianday on 11-04-2006 at 18:29:
Car adventures
My car has just had its 8th birthday - I bought it almost exactly 1 year before my daughter was born.
It's not a fancy car, not even remotely. But it's the first car that I bought all by myself, brand new, and I've really enjoyed having it. It's been stunningly reliable, nothing except punctures has stopped it from trundling along. It's been fun to drive. But, having hit the grand old age of 8, it's suddenly developing signs of old age.
A couple of weeks back, me and the child went out for the afternoon and the brakes went. Bit of a surprise (I found that they'd stopped working just as a motorcyclist pulled in very close in front of me at a tight bend) but nobody got hurt and the car got fixed.
This weekend, me and the child went to the local safari park. She got a new camera for her birthday and this was an ideal time to try it out. So we'd got through the wolf enclosure and were in a paddock of big buffalo and giant deer and generally non-biting animals. I'd put my window down so that she could take photos more easily.
But lo, when I tried to put the window back up, it wasn't moving! And the enclosure after the giant deer contains african wild dogs, and the ones after that house lions and tigers. And we can't go back, due to the wolves.
So I'm trying to pinch the window to see if I can pull it back up, and the child presses the window switch and drops it back almost all the way down into the door.
After pointing out to her the trouble we would be in if she did that again, I managed to wangle the window up, slowly, by pulling it up with my fingers and then using the window switch so that the motor would catch up with it. Once I'd got it halfway up, it wound the rest of the way by itself.
So we were ok. No lions, tigers, wild dogs or wolves nibbled us. As it turned out, they were all lying down in the sun on what must have been the warmest day for months, and probably wouldn't have cared if we were hanging out of the sunroof waving bacon at them.
But it was an iffy moment, sitting there wondering how to get out of the safari park with the window open without facing any biting animals. And that window isn't getting wound down again until I find time to get it fixed.
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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny." Posted by Ronin on 11-04-2006 at 19:10:
Isnt it time you got a car with a MANUAL window???
Posted by Metaliant on 11-04-2006 at 20:18:
If the lions, tigers, wolves, etc come to get you and your child, all you could do is throw deadly roseses at them.
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Posted by meridianday on 11-04-2006 at 20:51:
I was in my civvies at the time. No roses available.
One of my father's cars that had manual windows also had a bit of a problem, as I do recall the handle coming off in somebody's hand one time.
I also recall the gear stick coming off in his hand when we were on our way back from Manchester to Birmingham, and the car overheating on a trip back from Blackpool because the car had a temperature gauge, but the needle was an optional extra. Who'd have thought it, eh?
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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny." Posted by Elvin Ruler on 11-04-2006 at 21:38:
I've found with my truck, which is 16 years old, that I need to have everything checked pretty regularly. Fortunately, Dear old Dad can usually do it for me for free instead of having to take it somewhere for a tune up.
Manual windows can have problems, though the electric ones tend to have the motor run out on you (which, odds are, is what happened to you). As time goes by, it will have more and more trouble going back up. You can either replace the motor yourself (if you can), have someone do it for you, or take the control part off and place a thin piece of wood between the button and the contacts to prevent the button from being pushed. I don't quite know how my parents' car's is positioned, but it only affects the window, not the door lock (which is also electric). They got tired of replacing motors, so they just decided not to. It's an idea.
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Posted by meridianday on 12-04-2006 at 07:02:
The motor went on the passenger side 3 years or so ago. However, that was on a saturday between the house and a conveniently located garage, so not half as adventurous as between the wolves and the lions. It also went more badly, since it was impossible to pinch the window back up as it just kept falling back into the door - I am extremely relieved that my side just became reluctant rather than totally broken like that.
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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny." Posted by CricketBeautiful on 12-04-2006 at 13:38:
If you're safari is anything like ours, you're not the first person to need an escape route, and they've got it all planned out. You just have to trust them.
Sit there with the 4-way flashers turned on. (Don't honk unless you want to surprise the animals.) If you've got paper and pen, put a note up : Car broke. Help.
Sooner or later, someone will report you to the people in charge. There's also a phone number posted at the gates, for those with cell phones who actually remember the number.
We saw one rescue in the big cat enclosure. Think the car'd overheated. One truck with bars in the windows off to the side, tranq gun at the ready. Two others, with big wood bar over the bumper (hmmm, think they've done it before?) pushing the car to the safety area. All without anyone getting out of a vehicle.
Yeah, embarassing, but not nearly so embarassing as the guy who got out and tried to flag someone down.
Our park's designed pretty well. Lots of roads in each area, but they're all snakey, so, if you use the service roads, you're never that far from the central area.
As for the car, yep, that first one is pretty special. Only reason I sold my first was MIL was giving us a mini van with air conditioning. My little red car was the trade-in.
And that van lasted a whole year, sucking up $2k in the transmission, $500 in the struts, and another $500 in general maintenance, before Crackers needed the next size car seat. Guess what? None of the car seats fit the 12-year-old van.
The hardest part was seeing how little they were worth. My little red car, couldn't get more than the standard trade-in for it, no matter where we went or what we did. I shopped around for a good price for the van, too, but still only got half of red-book for it -- less than 1/3 of what we'd spent in the previous year.
Ah, well, we enjoyed our time together.
Your car sounds like it's got lots of miles left, just needs a good mechanic who's appropriately suspicious.
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Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
- Viktor E. Frankl
Posted by Ronin on 12-04-2006 at 15:29:
New or nearly new cars are a waste of money unless you are loaded to begin with.
my car is a 1991 Rover metro, I paid £100 for it 18 months ago and it hasnt given me any trouble.
just passed 60K miles so provided the body holds together its got a bit of life left.
Posted by CricketBeautiful on 12-04-2006 at 16:24:
Nope, get them new, treat them well, and you'll enjoy the reliability.
The money you save buying used will be spent on repairs, unless you can do them yourself.
__________________
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
- Viktor E. Frankl
Posted by meridianday on 12-04-2006 at 17:55:
I haven't spotted a lot of escape routes in the safari park - but they must have to rescue people, especially on hot bank holidays when people overheat. My daughter's childminder was telling me she went on a bank holiday once and it took a long time to get round (2 hours plus) and she had the aircon on because it was such a hot day, and she ran out of petrol. But the safari park are used to such things and sold her some for £15 (inflated, but she'd have paid £100 to not be stuck without petrol so she didn't mind).
I had a little red 1990 Rover Metro as one of my company cars - that was my favourite car for ages. Nice fun, reliable vehicle. My neighbour used to work at Rover building them, as did many of my parents' neighbours. I recall several of the other guys at work having them - theirs all got stolen at one time or another, unfortunately. My Metro was much better than the Rover 200 I got after it, and the Peugeot 205 joy-rider magnet I had before.
If you buy an old car, you get somebody else's screwed up vehicle - my father had a series of old cars, as did my father-in-law, and while they worked out a lot cheaper than a newer car they were a lot less reliable. Spent a lot of their time either being fixed by them using parts from scrapyards or being fixed in garages using parts that might as well have come from scrapyards.
If you buy a new car, you get the depreciation. Most of the people I know who have bought new cars change them for another new car every 3 years (or even more often than that!). So they're constantly paying for new cars. And some new cars are just not very well built. I bought my car a year (or was it two?) before the price of new cars stopped being so inflated over here, as the government realised the number of people heading over to mainland europe to buy new cars was damaging their VAT coffers. I believe the price would have dropped by about £2000 then.
My car has about 50k miles on the clock. The engine goes, the bodywork is in decent condition, I know all its existing quirks, and I have a big emotional attachment to it. Parts are bound to wear out from time to time, it's just a bit inconvenient when they wear out before they're replaced. I know a decent garage.
I sometimes think how nice it would be to have a newer car but then I remember how many times my car has been vandalised (although since they started issuing ASBOs I haven't had so much trouble), and also crashed into because I live on a hill, next to a bend, and when the weather's icy people tend to lose control a bit - the bus driver who hit it a few years back stopped to trade insurance info but nobody else who ever hit it bothered to do that.
So, on that basis, it's not really worth me trading up to something else that's going to be shinier, possibly less reliable, have different quirks, and hurt my feelings by getting vandalised/crashed into again.
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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny." Posted by Cep on 12-04-2006 at 21:52:
I would suspect that a 1991 Rover thats just past 60k miles has been clocked. Big time!
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Posted by meridianday on 13-04-2006 at 07:10:
Come now, it might have had one previous little old lady owner who barely used it?
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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny." Posted by Cep on 13-04-2006 at 10:47:
From 1991? No I'd be highly suspicious of that without an authenticated FSH book.
I mean whats that like? Less then 2 miles a day in its history?
My 97 Golf has only just clocked 100k and thats good mileage for a car its age, only 2 owners.
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Posted by Ronin on 13-04-2006 at 13:58:
Strangley enough there was only one owner on the logbook
A little old lady.
(who obviously didnt know the value of a low milage car.)
Posted by Cep on 13-04-2006 at 15:24:
She wasn't living in a caravan was she?
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Posted by Ronin on 13-04-2006 at 21:24:
Dont get that reference
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