I went prepared to bid knowing what it was worth to me and how much I was willing and ready to pay. When that price was exceeded I stopped bidding. Somehow even after I had stopped bidding the auctioneer figured that I had continued. They had me at winning the bid $400 over what I was prepared to pay. I took the issue up with the auctioneer, in my mind I had quite clearly stopped bidding, I had put my card down, stopped looking at the auctioneer, and was just watching the bidding continue. Somehow out of all of this through about 30 seconds of bidding(quite a long time for the rate this auction goes at) the auctioneer thought I was bidding. Well all that was rather inconsequential to them. I could either pay the $200 reneg fee, or pay the extra $400 on the purchase price. I ate the cost and bought the vehicle.
Well after purchasing the second vehicle the first thing needing to be finished was the Jeep I had bought in February of 2005. After finishing that project the work on the convertible started in mid June, my father came out and help me out for a few weeks before heading off for a round of meetings in D.C. When he left I had a repaired rolling chassis with new paint on it, 3 weeks later I had a reassembled TwinTurbo convertible.
At the end of July the lease for the house I was subletting from ended and I had to move, the convertible had just been finished a mere days before that and registered. After moving all my tools and equipment to a storage unit at the end of July I embarked on a cross country trip to SoCal where I would visit my parents before coming back to Colorado. When I headed out to SoCal I had put a mere 300 miles on the car when I headed out.
Having previously decided that I didn't need the complexity of having both a Jeep and a Convertible during the winter while living in the CSU dorms I decided to leave the convertible in Socal. So I drove back to Colorado leaving a car that I had driven only a few dozen hours, compared to the hundreds of man hours I had invested in it.
Well in April 2006 I moved into my first home, strait from dorm living to home ownership. I moved in all my tools, parts, and cars from storage. My father drove the convertible out from SoCal(without a working air conditioner) to leave with me for the summer. I fixed and recharged the AC and took the car to a Z meet in Ohio, on our last day of the meet we had a road course reserved, Nelson Ledges. I ran many laps and had a blast, shortly before noon I came out of turn #2 faster than I had ever managed before, and had a knocking rod.
#6 rod knock, every Z I have ever come across that gets a rod knock gets it on #6. Well that was the end of my fun, I got a last minute ticket back to Colorado, bought a tow bar setup, drove my Jeep out to Ohio, picked the car up, and drove back.(Thats the cliff notes on that story however, it was an epic tale in itself)
The Z sat for over a month while I scurried around selling car parts, doing odd repair jobs on random vehicles, and wheeling and dealing to get myself out of the financial hole that the unexpected problem caused. I did not particularly enjoy that summer financially because I was also without any roommates to help cover the recently acquired home mortgage, to top it all off I got very little work done on my vehicles because I spent the time working to sell a $20 part here and a $30 part there. Having to deal with someone who wants to bicker about the price on a $15 part is not fun.
Well a few weeks before my fall 2006 semester started once again my father stopped by to work on a convertible. We pulled the engine, took the longblock apart, and bolted everything onto a new shortblock I had lucked upon. We finished it up, put it all back together, ran 200 shakedown miles on it, and once again it left me and went to SoCal.
This brings us to 2007, in April of 2007 we bought a rolled 2005 Jeep Liberty CRD for my father, he came out after my spring 2007 semester and we rebuilt it, we drove it out shortly after repairing it and I took my convertible back to Colorado.
These are the various pages of the repairs and pictures taken of the convertible from purchase to roadtrip:
Repair Set One
This is the second time the engine was pulled:
Repair Set Two
These are various pictures of the car:
Mixed Picture Set
All Images and materials contained within this site are Copyright 2000-2007 James Slaten unless otherwise noted.