Our car curse has struck again. Those who were reading our e-mails before we went to the blogs know that we bought a 1999 Honda Civic for Anna to use when she got back from her mission. Although it had 150,000 miles on it, it seemed to be in great shape and everyone told us that a Honda would easily go 250,000-300,000 miles. Well, not our Honda.
Anna left a week ago Thursday and drove to Rexburg to resume working on her degree at BYU-I. She made it there without any problems. A week ago today she left Rexburg to drive to Logan to attend a friend's wedding reception. Somewhere around noon she called me to inform me that her car had "died" about 10 miles north of Malad City, Idaho. One of her old roomates was from Malad, so she called her family and they came and rescued her. She got the car towed to into Malad, but the guy there told us that he wouldn't have time to look at the car until Monday.
An elder from Anna's mission who is trying to woo her was driving up from Salt Lake to spend the day with her in Logan, so he drove on up to Malad and brought Anna down to Logan so that she could still go to the reception. On Sunday morning he drove her part of the way back to Rexburg and another friend drove down to meet them and take her the rest of the way back.
Monday afternoon I called the guy in Malad. He hadn't really looked at the car yet, but he was convinced just from listening to it that it needed a new engine. He said there wasn't any oil in the engine, but the strange thing was there was no sign that it had leaked out anywhere. I talked to our mechanic here, and he wasn't convinced we should write it off just yet. He suggested a couple of things to try, but when I called the mechanic in Malad he insisted I would just be wasting time to try anything. Our mechanic then called the guy in Malad directly, after which our mechanic was somewhat convinced it was a lost cause, but still wasn't sure the guy really knew what he was doing. We decided we wanted a second opinion. We really would have liked to have gotten the car back to Boise so our mechanic could look at it, but we couldn't figure out a good way to make that happen.
Liz has a friend who lives in Pocatello, so she called her to get a recommendation for a mechanic there, and we had it towed to his shop. Thursday morning we got the word from him that the engine was indeed shot. This guy had taken the time to do some diagnosis, and determined that the 4th cylinder's rod bearings had failed, causing the rods to get mangled and doing damage to the crankshaft. I discussed what I was told with our mechanic here, and he felt like this was probably an accurate assessment of the problem. The guy in Pocatello had located an engine imported from Japan that only has 40,000 miles on it (evidently there are laws in Japan that make it very expensive to continue driving cars with more than around 40,000 miles on them, so companies have sprung into existance to take the engines out of these cars and ship them over here to sell to us less picky Americans), so that's what we are going to have put into it.
Hopefully the engine will reach Pocatello on Monday, they'll take a couple of days to get it installed, and by the middle of next week Anna will have to find a way to get back down to Pocatello to pick it up. In the meantime, it's footpower for Anna.
6 comments:
What a bummer! Sorry to hear about your troubles with cars. We've been lucky lately, but we've had our share of that kind of thing, so we feel your pain!
Erika's hoofing it too, she's got the curse as well.
I feel your pain. Been there and done that a few times. The car curse seems to be hitting a lot of us lately--Erika, Anna, and our mini-van.
Oh, and , ah--it brought back fond memories of when my Mazda blew a hole in the engine on a corner of University in Provo when I was a BYU student. I was trying to take it home to Orem so dad could look at it since I could tell something was seriously wrong with it. At least Mom & Dad were following me in their car in case mine didn't make it all the way there. That was the end of that car!
We too join in your pain. Tim took his Honda in for emissions & safety inspection for October and it needs a list of repairs to pass--more than the price we paid for the car--what to do? I think Tim will be taking the bus or carpooling until our tax return comes! Owell. . .
For the curious, the engine did get replaced, and so far the car seems to be doing fine with it. I guess it didn't reject the transplant anyway.
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