My next favorite hobby, however inactive it might be at present, is cars. I'm looking to do a little tweaking on the Saturn, but that's about all I'll be doing for quite a few years to come. In the 12 years that I've been driving, I've owned a LOT of cars. The first was a 1973 Ford Maverick, bought it for $200. Had the engine (250 inline six) rebuilt, then wrecked it... twice. Then bought an almost identical 1976 Maverick with a 3 speed stick, it had problems, I bailed out of it.
Then I bought a 1978 Chevy Monza (151 4 banger with a 5-speed) which was a pretty good car until my girlfriend (coincidentally, I'm married to her now) wrecked it for me when I was trying to teach her how to drive it. Then I picked up a modified 1976 Mercury Capri. Cool car! Someone had taken the factory V6 and 4-speed out of it and replaced it with a Buick 215 V8 and a 5-speed out of a Vega. The Buick 215 is a rare engine I later found out, GM sold it to British Leyland and it was used in several Rovers, as well as the Triumph TR8 and who knows what else. The sweetest things about it were that the block was all aluminum, and standard GM parts bolted right on. So anyway... in a light car like the old Capri, with a light-weight, slightly warmed-over V8, I had a fast car. It got me into trouble... so I decided to get rid of it. (damn, damn, damn)
Traded it in on a 1981 Plymouth TC3. (2.2 with an automatic) That's a glorified Horizon, if you didn't guess. I have a lot of respect for the 2.2 liter engine, but the transmission sucked. I went through three of them before I finally traded that one in. That's when I bought my first new car... a 1986 Chevy Sprint. That's right, the predecessor to the modern-day Geo Metro. I loved it, too! Great little car. With a 5-speed, it was relatively fun to drive around town, and extremely efficient. About that time I decided to go join the USAF. Mom decided to take the car off of my hands, so I let her. She ended up wrecking it soon thereafter.
I ended up buying a 1972 Ford Pinto while I was in tech school in Colorado. Drove that heap from Colorado to Florida, and then back to Kansas. Only major problem was a broken timing belt. But after a few months, it decided to die on me as I was out driving around out on a country road not too far from the base. I didn't have the bucks to fix it, so I tried to get a loan... and couldn't. Tried to get some cash from the Air Force Aid Society to fix it, but they decided that they'd rather loan me money to make a down payment on a new car than to fix that one... so I went new car shopping again.
Bought a 1988 VW Fox. I really liked that car, too. I'm still kicking myself for trading it in on a 1986 (yes, two years older) Honda CRX when it was two years old. The CRX was great fun to drive... a bit underpowered, though. Then the ex got pregnant... no backseat in the Honda, so we had to get rid of it. We decided that since we had bought a house, a truck would be really handy, so I ended up trading the Honda for a new 1991 Mazda B2600. Great truck! Absolutely no complaints on that one at all. But then the time came for me to move on, so I bought another car and left the ex with the truck. The car I bought was a new convertible 1993 Metro. Cute, and fun... but if you think the standard Metro is flimsy, you don't even want to think about the convertible! After one year, I decided it would be best to trade it while it still had some value. That's when I bought my Saturn.
I left out all of my second and third cars. At the time that I had the VW, I also owned a 1977 Toyota Celica, and a 1979 VW Rabbit. And during the CRX days, I bought my baby... a 1975 Triumph Spitfire. Among the most beautiful cars ever made, slow and unreliable, sure... but downright fun to drive! I fell in love with the Spitfire when I was 16 and my mom bought one... which I wrecked... twice. Anyway, after about a year, I got bored with the 1500 engine, and never liked the 4 speed, so I got creative and stuffed a 2.8 liter Ford V6 in there with a 4-speed Pinto trans. Took me about two years to get it to the point that it was driveable. Unfortunately, the engine had an oiling problem that I never did find, and I never got all the bugs worked out. With the original rear-end gearing in it, it was the very definition of the term "torquey"! But the only driving I ever did in it was back and for to different shops and a few times around the block for testing. When I left the ex, I had to sell it... didn't have the place or money to work on it.
That's about it for my cars. I'll probably keep the Saturn for at least a few more years... quite an accomplishment for me, I've never had a car this long before! Oh, and my wife drives a Saturn, too. Hers is a 1996 SL1, adequate transportation, but a bit of a dog compared to the SC2.
