Teaching an Old Car New Tricks

We have old cars. Our Nissan Sentra is a '96 that I bought, used, in college. Our Chrysler Town & Country is a '97 that we bought used about a year and a half ago. It scares me just a little to realize that they are now selling vehicles that are '09 models. That's 13 years newer than my oldest car. And 12 years newer than my van.

It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that they keep falling apart on us.

This past Saturday happened to be rare perfect weather. Jesse woke up bright and early to go work on the Nissan. Because, as he told me, it's complete death was imminent if the weather should get cool enough to freeze. His water pump needed replacing. It had been slowly and steadily leaking for months, and had nothing but water in it. No antifreeze. Well, he managed to replace it, and get antifreeze in it, so yay, his car won't die a horribly predictable death now. When he came in from fixing it, his hands and forearms were completely blackened. And that was after scrubbing a few times. Here is is Tuesday night, and his fingernails are still pretty gross looking, despite more and more scrubbings. That car was really dirty, huh??

Unfortunately, he didn't have time for even more car work on Saturday, because the van needs it pretty desperately, too.

For several months, now, the van has been randomly dying while being driven. (That's it's new trick - playing dead.) We can't seem to find any rhyme or reason to the engine cutting out. It simply does. Could be turning a corner, could be driving straight down the road. Often after sitting idle, or just letting go of the break to hit the gas again after waiting at a light. Luckily, it's easy to get going again - just throw it into neutral and turn the key again, and bam! You're back in the game. Unfortunately, you know what happens when an engine stops running while you're driving? The power steering goes out. So in order to turn at all, you really have to crank the steering wheel with every muscle you've got. The worst it's been was when the car died mid-turn for me. Got halfway through the turn, the engine cut out, and I had to finish the turn while cranking the steering wheel and coasting through the corner. Interestingly, it has never died while driving on the highway (though it has definitely stuttered a lot), and never on an uphill (thank goodness - hard to coast forward on an incline while your engine is dead).

Now, it wasn't too bad, for a while. It used to be that the van would die maybe once every few weeks. But recently, it decided to get worse. The engine cuts out at least once a day, now. Yesterday, while driving home from the grocery store that was 3 miles away, the car died three times. It's now to the point where I'm very nervous when driving - anytime I have to make a left turn, or pull out of a parking lot, or out of the apartment complex, etc., ... anytime I have to cross traffic, really ... I get really really nervous that the engine's going to die and I'm going to get hit. So I've started driving like an old granny, not pulling out until the coast is more than clear, in order to make sure that I've got enough time for restarting the car if things die on me while traffic is heading right towards me.

Jesse thinks it's probably the spark plugs. I'm doubtful... He changed the easiest-to-reach spark plugs a while back, and they were extremely far gone. He said they were worse than the first time he changed our Sentra's spark plugs. And when he changed those, back in our Colorado days, they were so bad that they were the sole reason our car wouldn't even start in the morning. The reason he didn't change all the spark plugs at once was because he didn't have time to try and reach the others... they're very hard to maneuver to, and he doesn't have a lot of tools to work with. Anyway, so he's hoping that a simple thing like replacing the spark plugs will fix the problem. We can only hope. If not, we'll probably end up going to a mechanic pretty soon and shelling out who-knows-how-much money to figure out the probelm and get it fixed. (Jesse's second guess is an issue with the timing - but that's not something he's equipped to deal with.) At least we know of a good, honest mechanic, now, thanks to our transmission troubles last December.

Jesse also needs to try and fix the heater in the car. It wasn't working last winter, either, but we just bundled up and dealt with it. We didn't have all that many freezing cold days that we were driving, anyway. But I don't want to subject Alex to a cold car when we're driving. Jesse hopes that he can just replace the thermostat in the van to get the heater to work again. We'll see, I suppose. We may have good weather again this Saturday, and I hope that we do. I'm eager to see if we can get this engine dying thing fixed.