toast

[opabinia]

I went out there today to remove the vinyl top, which would have involved removing the headliner and unbolting the roof trim. On a whim, I decided to check the bottoms of the doors and the door frames for hidden rust.

Hidden is a good word. From the surface, things didn't look bad at all. I saw a little rust bubble here, and I poked at it with pliers. Crunch. I poked again. Crunch. The entire bottom of the door sill on the driver's side is rotted from the inside out, so that the damage was nearly undetectable from the outside.

This alone, nevermind whatever additional stuff I might find, translates into a loss. I consulted my G-body guru over the phone, and he told me I have a good parts car. I said I had considered trolling Ebay for a southern (pronounced "rust-free") Grand National, and he agreed that was the way to go.

A GN will cost a lot more to begin with, but it will be clean and straight. GN owners baby their cars. I'll have to make sure not to mention what I plan to do with their baby.

Hard lesson #1: Rust is as bad as people say it is, except worse. It is a money pit. It's better to lose money on almost anything else -- transport from a distant, winter-free land included -- than it is to lose it on rust.

Well, there went a whole lot of money.

Comments

[sbazzy.livejournal.com]

shit :-( can you at least sell the frame and stuff that you just had repaired?

[lepidosiren.livejournal.com]

Probably not, because I lack space to stash an entire vehicle and facilities to strip it down to individual parts. To sell a frame, you have to take the whole car off it! :)

[jasonlizard.livejournal.com]

ah...american cars. :)

you could still fix it up and then sell it to some sucker.

[lepidosiren.livejournal.com]

american cars. :)

Hey, man. I'm sure a Mercedes would look pretty sad after 17 years of MA road salt and sleeping outside. :)

[bottleimp.livejournal.com]

Is it not possible to replace the doors themselves and the rusted part of the sill? If you have fixed the main load-bearing part of the frame, are the sills just impossible to fix?

[lepidosiren.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely certain yet, but I think this may be a losing battle. One the one hand, I must avoid entrapment: "Gosh, I've already spent x, I may as well spend 3x and finish up." On the other, I don't want to chuck the car if the rest can be fixed at a reasonable price. My suspicion is that it cannot.

Unfortunately, a body shop will rarely give you an unbiased opinion (Sure it's worth fixing! We can fix it!).