Scamwagon

I just realized I could pretty much title every blog post with above, or better yet, change the name of the whole blog to it.  Ha ha(!) Yesterday I cleaned up the car a lot.  Finally got a chance to go to the car wash, and I pressure washed the engine bay.   I know, I know, always a little risky for electrical problems, but I've done it before and never had any problems. Anyway, we get in the car to go home from a friend's house. I start the car, glance down and notice the alternator light is on.  I hook up my radar detector (a Beltronics Vector V995, an awesome machine with a bonus voltage readout, totally brilliant!), and sure enough, it's about 12.1v.  No alternator output.  Since child is now screaming, I shut off the headlights (still a little before dusk, so okay) and make for home.  On the way, the alternator output flicked on and was okay for the ride home.  This morning it seems to be down for the count.  I wiggled all the wires, and it doesn't seem to be a

Now that my car has rolled 200K, and I've decided the budget doesn't allow me to by my dream Golf anytime in the near future, I've been thinking about doing some other fairly serious rehab.  Over the last 11 years, there have been a lot of things that broke, rusted, burnt out, collected, or what-have-you in and on the car, and I think it's time to address a lot of it.  Since I drive this car so much, it has a chance to really improve my life.  The older I get, the more I realize investing time and money into things you use the most is time/money well spent. So starting today, here's the partial list of rehab items as they came spewing forth.  I will be adding to this list as I think of things. Exterior Headlight lenses Kamei mesh front grill Rear spoiler Rust repair - Fenders, hood, trunk, above windshield Interior Clean out glove box (remove tapes) Fix rear defroster Tint windows Steering wheel Design custom console around

So this happened. Here's hoping it'll make it to 300k before I have to do major surgery on it again!

We had a big trip coming up, so I managed a last minute push and got the transmission in.  Finished Tuesday night, including front brakes rotors and pads, and new tires.  Trip started Thursday.  The car has been preforming very well.  The new transmission is awesome - very quiet. I even managed to do the 5th gear swap, which was much harder to do on the new transmission. It took a lot more force to get the gears off  for some reason, I had to buy a new impact wrench and modify a new gear puller on the bench grinder. Seriously, I think I spent an extra 4 hours on this (including trips to the store for tools).  I probably had it easy with my old, worn out transmission. The Veggie Golf rides again! First leg of the trip saw 46.2 mpg - lower than I'd hoped, but not bad when I consider how much idling with the air conditioner on we had to do (while feeding the baby).  Also, part of that leg was done with my snow tires and roof rack on.  The round trip mileage was 819 mile