Cars should easily last 35 years?

I have a bad habit of having cheap to maintain daily drivers, but when something goes bad I replace it with something stronger and more expensive. Case and point, the motor in my Protege is old and tired, so I'm building a fully forged, race ready long block, medium-large-ish sized turbo and all the supporting mods.

Please help me, I think something is wrong.

pete240z wrote:

slantvaliant wrote: That car isn't even close to "old".

you rarely see daily drivers like these in the midwestern snow belt. Salt eats them away......although this one is still holding up. Paint looks to be original?

Seriously--cars like that are long-gone from New England--at least the daily/regular drivers are. The ones that are left are being preserved, and even those are rarely seen.

'73 Buick Century(I had the Regal version as my college car.) Good car until you had to take the tires off to change spark plugs and do other maintenance. Fast car too because I used to do the 400 miles between Knoxville and Memphis in 5hrs 20min!

Trans_Maro wrote: Steel cars with simple mechanicals are infinitely repairable.

+1... Another great example of this is the old american cars in Cuba & their 'grassroots' repair techniques.

This is one of the reasons I went with a 93 Roadmaster rather than a newer one. TBI, iron block and heads, simple to sum it up in one word. Keeping it running for the next ten to 20 years should be easy and cheap.

Toyman01 wrote: This is one of the reasons I went with a 93 Roadmaster rather than a newer one. TBI, iron block and heads, simple to sum it up in one word. Keeping it running for the next ten to 20 years should be easy and cheap.

those TBI 350's will run forever with simple maintenance. i know of several with well over 200,000 miles on them, and last summer i bought a 95 Suburban 2wd with 375,000 miles on it (for $225) that runs like it's brand new.

i had a 92 Caprice cop car that i parted out with 175,000 miles on it. the engine went into my cousin's 95 Suburban 4X4 5 years ago and it still runs great 5 years and 45,000 later and knocks down 20mpg when he goes on long trips. this spring, it had a head gasket go out- nothing major, just a small coolant leak that would foul the #3 plug every 5000 miles or so. when i pulled the heads to fix it, i found no ridge on the cylinders- and even a faint hint of the cross hatch pattern from when the cylinders were honed.