Well, I was reluctant to make a thread, for fear of making a fool of myself. But hey, I make a fool of myself all the time, so here goes.
I guess you could call this an impulse buy, or maybe an impulse bid, because I was browsing Copart for weird Fords as I often do, and came across this puppy down in Georgia. Now, on Copart, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're really buying, even if you look at the pictures carefully. But everything I was seeing looked pretty okay. The front was fine, and the rear just seemed to be missing the bumper cover and tail lights.
Now, I've never done this kind of thing before, but I figured, "how hard could it be" so I bid on it, max bid of $1000. (This will be important later.) I didn't really think I would win, in fact leading up to the auction day I thought it might be better if I didn't win, because I was having second thoughts. But when the live bidding started, I was kind of excited. Someone kept bidding on it as it crept up from $500 to $600, then $750, then $875. But then they stopped. And the time ticked down, and that was it. I won with a bid of $875, a fair ways off from my max bid! Yay!
Oh but wait, Copart charges fees, don't they?
Yes, dear reader. I'm dumb, don't be like me. Remember remember the fees of November, or April in this case. Okay so, what now? How do I get this car up to Pennsylvania? Can I even afford to ship it? (The answers were, "call the Copart location and ask dumb questions, pay for shipping through Copart to make it simpler, and yes but only with stupid usage of a credit card, in that order.) Several days later, a truck arrived in the vicinity of my home, but there's nowhere to unload at my house, so I had him go a quarter-mile down the road to the post office parking lot. It was dark, nobody was there so it was fine.
He had to unload two other cars to get mine off the truck, and then he started to back mine down the slope, but he was having some kind of trouble so he asked me if I could do it. I guess because it's a stick. I said no problem, climbed up there and proceeded to do the scariest part of the whole thing so far: backing it up while keeping it straight and not falling off the side of the ramps in the dark with a strange car and a sketchy shifter and it kept wanting to stall...phew. Made it. Down on solid ground. We do the paperwork and go our separate ways. I drive the car home with someone following since I have no tail lights, a quarter mile, and then rearrange the cars to get it in the driveway.
So what exactly did I bring home? Well, it wasn't *just* the bumper cover and tail lights that were damaged...there's a small crack in the unibody around the bolt hole for the bumper on the driver's side. I don't have a welder and I haven't welded anything since high school shop class, so I chose to ignore this for now.
Also, there was some detritus left behind: an old deodorant in the door pocket, an ID card for some high school student in the spare tire well, and various receipts in the interior that referenced vape products. On the bright side, it seems like it was being driven as recently as January, so it didn't sit for a super long time.
Fast forward a bit, and I've procured all the bits to reassemble it, minus a few screws and adapters. The hardest part was removing the remnants of the old bumper cover, which was ripped right off leaving mounting tabs behind. Well, getting the junkyard bumper ready to go on was a bit of a chore as well. It had nuts rusted onto the mounting bolts, which were not fun to get off with the primitive tools I had on hand.
I managed to somehow get things mostly attached and more or less looking like a complete car. And I ripped it around the back roads for a couple of test drives as well.
I think it needs shifter bushings, or maybe a whole new mechanism or something, because there's no confidence when I go to shift gears that I'll actually find the right one. But it's more or less functional. The engine sounds like it needs a new belt, but it's non-interference so I guess I'll wait until it snaps. And it seems to blow smoke out the exhaust when it's cold, but maybe that will magically go away if I drive it more. Or until it blows up.
Now I just need to get it safety inspected and find out if that cracked bit of metal is going to burn me. And maybe have them weld it for me, if it stays in budget.
And then if all goes well, I'll drive it to Pikes Peak to spectate the hillclimb in a couple weeks. And if not, I'll take the Cougar and deal with this turd when I get back.
