Frankenstein's Muscle Car?
February 23rd, 2010
So I'm in Omaha this week. I haven't been here in a good long time, so I was spending a week catching up with friends and relatives and whatnot. But i'm also doing a bit of maintenance on the auto-mobile, which is amusing if you know me at all, 'cause my auto-motive know-ledge is less than com-plete. I could go so far as to say it's highly lacking - so much so, in fact, that seeing me struggle with mechanical bits might be amusing.
So imagine my surprise when I wound up at the U-Pull-It today. The U-Pull-It is an automotive graveyard, a place where cars go after they die. Far from a sort of nirvana, it's more like a Frankenstein's Laboratory, because instead of resting in peace, the cars which wind up at the U-Pull-It are picked over by all manner of people looking for spare parts and to simply loot what's left in the vehicles.
The specific reason I was at the U-Pull-It was that my odometer is deceased. The actual mile recording quit on the way to Ohio proper, but the trip counter still worked, so I kinda sorta used that thing to approximate my mileage from then out. The trip counter was working even when I started driving out from Ohio to Omaha last Monday - I'd reset it before starting, to get a basic idea of how long the i-70 drive was.
But it inexplicably died upon being reset here in Omaha. So my dad had the idea of heading to the U-Pull-It to see if we could find us some replacement bits. So we did. We went to the U-Pull-It (you can see a wall of Ford and Chevy corpses there in the photo), and went looking about. We found several Grand Marquis (amusingly pronounced as MAR-QUEEES by the local Taco Johns guy) but they were the wrong year.
Luckily for us, we did encounter a Crown Victoria that seemed to be the right year, and they're very close to my Grand Marquis in design; the dash was different, but the bits looked similar. It turns out we didn't get an exact match of course, as they don't line up right. But we are going to see if we can substitute parts after dismantling the sucker and see if we can restore one or both of the odometer bits.
That may or may not be successful, but I did also grab the Crown Vic's factory tape deck whilst I was there. I figured the fuckers around our complex wrecked mine, so I may as well replace it and see if I can get better performance from the thing. And not have to jiggle the tape converter on it for a half hour before driving. Oh! I also found an old Cobra radar detector, but thought I'd leave it.
Like I did the hooker boot I found there. Now if I'd have found its pair I'd have grabbed 'em and e bay'd 'em, but you know.