First & foremost: always keep steel wool away from your car. Tiny bits will transfer to the stainless and rust. Looks TERRIBLE. My vehicle had an altercation with a carbon steel object sometime mid 1980's and I'm STILL cleaning rust out of the dent. Second: buy a factory tech manual. All major vendors sell reprints. You or your mechanic won't make it without one. Book is far from perfect, but guarantee is NOT optional. Third: check ALL your coolant hoses. Was promised "all new hoses" by my PO but discovered were two big formed ones only (after roaring up and down I-95). Don't forget hoses and pipes hiding underneath intake manifold, which isn't difficult to remove BTW. Is very dangerous rely on 21 year old rubber. Did you follow the recent thread Re: coolant system bleeder lines? Fourth: while your intake manifold is off, replace distributor cap & rotor and ignition wires. Was once told by old mechanic that 99% of all vehicle problems are electrical. This is so true, especially on little silver cars. Because distributor is hard to reach, many of them are well past service interval. Only takes a tiny crack to render vehicle totally DOA in the rain or humidity (AZ may save you on this one). Fifth: take fuel pump out of tank and examine condition of pump boot, baffle (especially protective screens), and connecting hose. Fuel pickup is one of our cars' biggest Achilles heels. Is not too expensive to replace everything in the tank, which is my preferred RX. Have run out of fingers on left hand so will shut up. List just goes on and on... Little silver cars are tough pieces of hardware, but they ARE old and most suffer from being driven too LITTLE. Don't feel bad about money invested. I've got $8,600 in mine and would drive it to California if I could only shift gears. Disagree that you need $20,000 to play DeLorean game (conventional wisdom). Use extensively the Google search engine on list archives (Dave Swingle has link to it on DMCNEWS website). Someone has had every problem you will ever encounter. Answers one mouse click away ("answers", not "solutions"). Bill Robertson #5939 (19 days...) >--- In dmcnews@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "Gary Weaver II" <gw2tulsa@xxxx> wrote: > Just to follow-up... > > My car is Vin# 10680 - All in all the car is not too bad.