Gary's fine new ride (#10680)

["content22207" <brobertson@xxxx>]

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.