New Member in Kansas

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07-02-2008, 09:45 AM

PushnFords

Thread Starter

Join Date: Nov 2007

Location:

Posts: 21

New Member in Kansas

I actually joined a while back when I first bought my '94 DX. My poor car has had a hard life. I bought it just after it was wrecked. They hit something with the LH front fender that mangled it, bent the hood, and tore the front bumper cover. The car also slid backwards into a pole and that manged the rear bumper cover and dented the trunk lid. I paid $500 (supposed to run fine) and took it home. I found an inner bumper off eBay so I installed that with new foam and got the bumper cover to fit good enough that the accident damage wasn't too noticable in the back. Couldn't do much with the front. I cleaned it out really well and did a tune up, replaced tie rod ends, muffler, stereo, timing belt, etc. Didn't drive it much before I realized the head gasket was blown...the seller's son had overheated it. I changed the head gasket and the car ran good but smoked and burnt a quart of oil every 250 miles. It still got 33-34 mpg so I ignored it and hoped it would hold together until summer.

Then one day I was driving in town with my wife and came up to a stop sign. Waited for 5-6 cars to go by. There was a parking lot on my left...full size Dodge 4x4 sitting in the first parking spot, then the lot entrance, then another full size 4x4. I couldn't see anyone so I started to pull out. As soon as I got even with the parked trucks I could see a car flying down the road...I gunned it but she hit the rear 8-10" of my car on the driver's side. She never swerved (there was empty parking spaces behind me so the road was basically two lanes wide), never hit her brakes, nothing. It was a 20mph zone but she managed to cover the distance of three parked trucks and hit me hard enough to spin me 90 degrees. The cop said they couldn't prove how fast she was going but I had a stop sign so they gave me the ticket. The impact raised the trunk 2-3" on the driver's side and pushed it over an inch towards the passenger side. I had a body shop pull the corner of the car down ($150) and I found another inner bumper, foam, and bumper cover in a local junkyard ($35). A couple thousand miles later the engine started to overheat and smoke a lot worse so I parked it. Just finished pulling the engine last night. Going to try to either rering it or have it bored and do a stock rebuild on it.

This is how the car looks now: