I have to do a little bit of thinking to remember exactly how many times I’ve attended the Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge. My first time was in 2005 when I went with Tim and the CRX. I returned the next year with my own entry, the Neon, and then took a break from all things motorsports for a while due to having my first daughter born not long after the 2006 challenge. In 2011, I came back with Tim and that inspired me to bring the Neon a second time in 2012 for some redemption. I provided the towing services for Robert’s Rampage in 2017. And then I drove the Miata down to join Tim’s team with the Impala in 2020. By my count that makes the 2023 $2000 Challenge my seventh. It was also far and away the best time I’ve had so far.
The car certainly was not competitive in the 54-car field by any stretch. In terms of the autocross, the car was 41st. In terms of drag times, it was also 41st. The car did much better in the concours judging, ranking 18th overall – but none of the overbudget cars were eligible for judging, so that was really only out of 31 cars. In the under-budget classes, we were 21st out of 31 and in our own class – Great Tire Narrow, underbudget – we were exactly in the middle – 7th out of 13. Ironically, that is the second time that I’ve managed a finish at the Challenge exactly in the middle of my class – in 2012, the Neon was the exact middle finisher as well.
If I look at just my own class, the Saab scored the seventh-best autocross time, the 9th best drag time, and the 7th best Concours score. Overall, including all the scores in all the classes and excluding the cars that didn’t actually run at the event, we were 25th out of 54.
The best part for me was watching my daughter give our presentation to the Concours judges. We could have taken a default score of 12 by just putting a “Don’t Judge Me” note on the car. There’s nothing on the car that represents any kind of amazing modification or radical improvement. The specialness of the car is that it was a derelict that was destined to rot in a back yard for decades until we dragged it home, spent a few hours over a couple months getting it road-worthy, and now it’s a very nice looking car that we just completed a 1600 mile road trip in along with 5 autocross runs and a half-dozen drag passes. But I believe that every car should compete in all three events – how much better could we have done if I could have chosen to take an average drag race score! My daughter practiced her speech and we wound up with a 12.75 average score which is what pushed us up into 7th place. I’m a very proud papa.
No, it wasn’t the car that made this the best challenge yet. It was the people and the relationships. Yes, we got a lot of compliments on the car and lots of people wanted to come and talk about it. But it was having that chance to see people that I only get to talk to on the forums. And to come together and work on the parking lot build. And more than that, the Father-Daughter time that I got to spend. And like Dom says, it’s all about family.
And just like that, May is nearly over. Like the old trope, I really thought I’d have more time. Becca has graduated from high school, registered for her first semester’s classes at Northern Kentucky University. My middlest daughter has given her Junior Drama class performance – it was amazing, by the way – and my youngest is one exam away from wrapping up her Freshman year and ascending to Form II. All of that to say: Holy crap! It’s 1412 and I wanted to be on the road by 1500 today!!
Becca and I took the car over to the shop this morning to wrap up the last few things. We needed to bolt the rear seat into place, flush the brake fluid, check the oil, check the suspension, check the exhaust, vacuum out the car – for whatever good that will do in a convertible! – and finally get those lights installed in the dash. Plus there were a handful of things that needed to be picked up from the shop to go with us.
First off, the seat was bolted back down. Probably not 100% necessary, but if we didn’t do it now, I’m sure we’d never remember.
The suspension all is good with nothing broken or wobbling anywhere. The shocks are in pretty tired shape and all the bushings could stand to be replaced. But we’re out of time for that for now,
The exhaust, however, needed a little help. It’s all been replaced at some point, but it doesn’t quite line up right, angle-wise. So it was banging around a bit and creating a little vibration from time to time. The muffler had no hangers attached.
And the tailpipe was wired into place.
I thought I had some rubber hangers around somewhere, but I’m fresh out. What I do have, however, are stainless steel zipties.
We’ll see how well that works. It’s not a long-term solution to be sure, but we’ve got to hit the road.
While the car was up in the air, we exchanged the ancient honey-colored brake fluid for some DOT4 that was manufactured during the current century. Brake performance has increased dramatically. I think there was some sort of clog in a brake line in the rear as well – we weren’t getting much fluid at all with the vacuum pump until we pumped the brakes a few times. There was a bunch of crud that came out and suddenly fluid was flowing better.
While we were fiddling around the wheels, I had Becca adjust the air pressure. I thought I had checked that before, but apparently not – they are all in the 43-45 psi range when they’re supposed to be 30 in the front and 32 in the rear! She let an appropriate amount of air out of the tires and it’s far less skittish on the road now. It’s amazing how much difference that can make.
Getting that dash fascia off again was not a task that I was looking forward to, but we were able to pull the radio back out of the dash and reach in through that hole to swap out the three bulbs that are responsible for illuminating the dash controls. We’ll now be able to see the heater controls at night! Nothing that’s necessary to autocross, drag race, or even show the car, but it will make it a nicer place to be.
The last couple steps before we make like the Autobots and roll out are cleaning and packing. We need to use a little degreaser on the engine bay to clean it up a bit and then hit the trunk lid with the polisher. Once that’s done, we’ll pack everything into the car and hit the road.
At this point, the major work items to have the car safely on the road are complete. The car has been transformed from a derelict parts car to a running, driving functional vehicle. Unfortunately, I found myself terribly behind schedule at this point due to the extensive troubleshooting that had to be done on the electricals behind the gauge cluster. It was particularly frustrating to have the car in a such a position since my expectation was that I was going to have a fairly small amount of work to do to make the leap to “runner”.
Water under the bridge, though. It was time to start working on some of the odds-and-ends that needed to be done. The first problem to tackle was that the car would flood every single time it was shut down and it was getting terrible gas mileage. I suspected that there was an injector that might have been stuck open, but when we popped the vacuum line off of the fuel pressure regulator there was a significant quantity of fuel that came streaming out. Apparently, the diaphragm in the regulator can fail and it starts to spray fuel into the intake causing it to run rich and to bled off all the fuel pressure by dumping gas into the intake when you shut the car off.
The long term plan is to make a little bit of a tweak to the boost control computer – known as the APC – to allow it to boost a little higher, so this was a good opportunity to make sure there would be enough fuel to make that happen. eBay provided a 3.0 bar pressure regulator – the stock pressure is 2.5 bar – which should provide enough fuel for a couple more psi of boost pressure down the road.
The next issue that the car presented was the alignment. It tracks very straight and true, but the steering wheel is canted about 10 degrees to the right. I knew exactly how to solve this problem: I called Tim. Using a tape measure and some of those flat, rectangular curtain rods, Tim is an absolute genius at performing alignments. I didn’t want to mess with the camber at all, but the toe definitely needed some work and Tim got right to it.
By measuring the distance between the wheels in the front and the back, he was able to determine that there was a little more toe-in than the spec said it should have. Given the measurements that he took, the toe-in specification, and the thread pitch of the tie rod ends, Tim was able to determine that the right wheel needed to be adjusted about 3/4 to 1 turn of the tie rod. We made a slight error the first time around – forgetting that the Saab steers from the back of the wheel not the front – but once we overcame that, it was basically perfect. Just like that.
Turning our attention to some of the appearance items, we broke out the 303 Aerospace protectant and started wiping down the seats and the plastic trim. I had already given the leather seats some treatment with Murphy’s Oil Soap and used the carpet machine on the floor, but hitting the rest of the trim with the 303 made a huge difference in terms of getting the plastics looking shiny again. The dash is basically a lost cause with the amount of cracking that is there, but otherwise we’re trying to make it a nice place to spend some time.
Another trim item that needed to be addressed was the fabric inset on the door cards. It’s supposed to be wrapped around the panel and then glued to the back but that glue had deteriorated over time and the fabric was sort of flapping in the wind. It sounds kind of crazy, but that loose fabric really made the car look sloppy and junky.
With the panels off, we used a Gorilla spray adhesive to re-stick the fabric and then back on to the doors they went. All in all it was a very easy and fast task that really improved the look of the car.
The trim was peeling off of the glove box door as well, so Becca broke out a different Gorilla glue product and a clamp and got that secured. These few appearance things were so minor, but it really changed the character of the car. Just tidying up the trim on the car transformed it from kind of a beater to just an older car and made it a nicer place to sit.
In that same vein, we decided to tackle the seat belts. They are really slow to retract and wind up just sort of hanging about instead of going back where they belong. From what I could find in some internet research, you can take the cover off, give the spring some additional turns to tighten it up, and solve the problem. Easy, right?
For four hours we fought with getting the rear seat out, the side trim panels out, and then taking the seat belt retractor apart. The spring went flying, of course, and I spent a very long time getting it re-wound. In the end, I had it wound as tightly as I could get it. All that time and effort really paid off when I put it all back together and it was exactly the same as it was when I started. I’m assuming that the spring is just sprung.
The next thing we decided the car needed was a better entertainment system. For about a hundred bucks, I got a no-name single-DIN Android Auto / Apple CarPlay head unit and four Pyle speakers. The sound quality isn’t great, but it’s pretty amazing considering the price. It also means that any phone functions will be fully hands-free, so hopefully that will limit the temptation for young drivers to be fiddling with their phone while they drive. And, honestly, you can’t cruise down the highway in a convertible without being able to blast some music. Or, since it’s a Saab, I guess you have to blast NPR?
With the car finally doing the running, driving, and stopping bits that are required of it, it was finally time to make it weathertight again. There were a number of holes in the roof fabric that allowed the headliner to get exceptionally moldy and mildew-y and having to constantly throw a tarp over it was getting old and looking pretty janky.
Replacing the top presented me with two major issues: First of all, the car was only $750, so spending more than that on a top for it seemed crazy. Secondly, I’m exceptionally cheap.
Saab used a three-piece top arrangement: There’s the main top which is what was all torn up on this car, the rear window section, and the headliner. Rather than buy all three parts, I decided that the headliner could be cleaned and the rear window section was solid. For $329.00 from Auto Tops Direct, I had a new black Stayfast Canvas front section shipped to my door.
The top didn’t come with any instructions, but I did find some available from another website dedicated to Saabs. Those instructions weren’t perfect and they didn’t include any pictures, but they were good enough to help me.
The old top came off without too much drama, revealing the rear section and the headliner. The rear section was as good as I thought it was and the headliner was as bad!
The only real surprise was the condition of the front bow. The aluminum had a lot of corrosion and the tack strip to which the top is supposed to be stapled was disintegrating. Fixing the corrosion was easy with some wire brushing and a little Rustoleum. The tack strip required some thinking.
Since that tack strip didn’t exist anywhere that I could find, I set about trying to make a replacement. I thought I had a really good idea, but in actuality, I would not ever recommend that anyone do what I did. As an aside, that is a common theme in my life: I believe that I am an example to others. Of what to NOT do.
My solution was to replace that strip with PVC plastic sourced from a bit of PVC pipe pulled from the trash pile. I heated it up, split it down the middle, and flattened it out. I cut a section out, bent it to fit, and glued and riveted it into place.
That part was just absolutely fine. Basically, I recycled my cosplay prop building tricks and had myself a nice bit of plastic. The problem, though, was that I failed to answer the most basic question beforehand: Can I shoot a staple through PVC plastic?
The answer to that is “No. No, you cannot”.
Since it was too late to change course, I had to experiment a little more to try to find a way to get the fabric to stick to the front bow. Fortunately the main ingredient in the front attachment methodology is 3M Weatherstrip Adhesive #8011. Much like in woodworking, the staples are there to hold things in place while the glue cures and to just give it a little extra attachment. After playing around with a leftover bit of the old top and a discarded hunk of PVC, I found that if I glued the top to the PVC, let it cure, then heated it up just enough to soften the plastic a little, I could sink a staple all the way in and everything would remain solidly attached. Putting that in to practice on the front bow, I was able to get the front section of the new top as well as the wind stop strip glued down and stapled.
As you look at the picture, you might notice something that I hadn’t mentioned before. The headliner was in good shape other than being a bit mildew-covered, right? So what’s that hole right there? Stupid. That hole is the physical manifestation of stupid.
Once the fabric is attached, the final step of preparing the front bow is to glue the rubber weatherstripping back down to the bow. In order to do that, the old adhesive must be stripped off the rubber. Heat is a very effective tool for getting that adhesive off the weatherstrip without damaging it, but one must be careful where one is pointing the heatgun lest one melt a giant freaking hole in the otherwise perfect headliner.
Other than that misstep, though, the process of putting the new top on was rather straightforward. The new material seems like it’s pretty thick and of good quality, but of course only time will tell. For now, this part of the project was wrapped up and I could move on to the next job.
So far, our Saab resurrection project was moving along nicely. It had been only a couple weeks and the car was starting and running on its own power. So the next three projects all got kicked off at once: Replacing the ignition switch; Replacing the tires; Performing a tune-up.
The tune up parts were bought from Rock Auto and shipped out. The tires were a gift from Tim. He had these tires that were basically unused that were the right size for me on his S10. He wanted larger tires for it, so if I took his 16″ rims and the new tires he bought and had them mounted up, I could have his old 15″ tires.
For the ignition switch, I went shopping for a replacement and they needed to use smelling salts to get me off the floor. If you could find one, the going rate was $140. For a relatively simple switch mechanism! Granted, Saab did some weird things with their ignition switch and I wanted to keep it as Swedish Normal as possible. First of all, the ignition switch is down in the center console, between the seats. Then they have a lock cylinder which is connected to the actual electrical components by way of a linkage and gear. And the spring-back from “start” to “run” is managed by a spring inside the electrical bit, not by the mechanical lock cylinder. Whatever we were going to do, the switch was going to have to come out of the car, though, so it was time to dismantle the center console.
Taking the center console apart isn’t as simple as it sounds, though. While the various plastic bits come off as they would in any other car, the bolts for the cover over the switch are located underneath the gearshift assembly. In manual transmission cars, removing that assembly to get to those bolts requires dismantling the shift linkage. At this point, please make sure you are sitting comfortably and the device you are using to read this is secured because the next sentence is as shocking as it is provocative.
I sure am glad this car is an automatic!
That will be the first and likely last time I will use those words all strung together in that manner. In this very specific case, though, the automatic transmission linkage is trivial to disconnect and reconnect, so the whole assembly could be removed from the car and set on the workbench.
Removing that assembly wasn’t completely without difficulty, however. As a theft-prevention measure, those wacky aerospace engineers at Saab used a trio of carriage bolts fitted with triangular-shaped nuts to hold the assembly down.
No socket sold in stores around town is going to fit that and it seemed foolish to spend money for a tool that I’m not going to use very often at all. A knock-off design of the socket was available from a website I’d never heard of before for about $25, but I had an 11mm socket I didn’t care about and an angle grinder. After a few minutes of grinding away, I had a three-point socket that just barely fit. With the electric impact and a lot of downward pressure – I mean a LOT a lot! – all three nuts came loose. Just like our team motto from the first GRM Challenge we ever did back in 2005: It’s not just good. It’s good enough!
With the switch removed from the car, it was pretty easy to see that it was a plastic housing that had a plastic cap latched in, so it was pretty easy to use a flat-blade screwdriver to open it up and take a look. What a horror-show of corrosion!
The mechanism, however, is actually quite simple. There are the sets of contacts, a spring to push the contacts together, and a second spring that flips the switch back from “start” to “run”. The contact spring had rusted into oblivion, but the rest of the switch could be cleaned up and lubricated. For 89 cents, I sourced a replacement spring from the local hardware store and saved myself about $139.11.
Riding high on the success of that switch repair, I tackled the switch that controls the interior lights and found it similarly corroded.
This switch was a bit less complicated with just a couple copper bits on the inside that provided the contacts as well as the spring function, but a little bit of sandpaper had the contacts gleaming again and I was able to quash the resistance that the corrosion was injecting.
With that done, we were ready to get the tires on, button everything back up, and start worrying about replacing the top, so we got the switches installed and started it up and – oh, that’s not right. There were lights on the dash and no power assist from the brakes. We had all the brake-related lights turned on and the oil pressure and charge lights were on very dimly. The dash lights I could have lived with for the time-being, but the fact that the brake system wasn’t working kind of put a stop to the whole thing. Or rather, it made it somewhat difficult to put a stop to it!
The brake system in the Saab 900 is different from what I’m used to. They have a completely self-contained ABS system that uses a brake master cylinder, an electric pump to provide power-assist to the hydraulics, a brake fluid pressure accumulator, a brake fluid pressure controller, an ABS valve block, an ABS ECU, and a separate ABS fuse block. It’s the same braking system from ATE/Teves – the ATE ABS MK II – that was used in some Fords, Alfa Romeos, Jags, the Buick Reatta, and a bunch of others that I’m forgetting right now.
While the process was a very lengthy one, it distills down to one very important lesson: When you’re trying to fix a problem that someone else already tried to fix, you really never know exactly what symptoms are real and which have been caused by troubleshooting.
Without having an opportunity to speak to the previous owner that tried to repair this – and it wasn’t Powar – I have no way to know for certain, but I believe that someone discovered that the brakes weren’t working and rather than correctly diagnosing the problem as a failed brake fluid pressure switch, they managed to destroy most of the electronics in the brake system. My first discovery was that the relay that was in the socket for the Brake Pump Relay was completely incorrect. While most standard automotive relays have the #85 pin located directly opposite the #86 one, ATE decided on a special relay for their brake system where the #85 and #30 pins were swapped. Thus a standard relay – which is what I found in the pump socket – was not able to properly trigger the pump. My original plan was to simply re-wire the socket so that a standard relay would fit in there, but another GRM forum member, Procainestart, had a spare relay and offered to send it to me as a gift.
While I waited on that, I did some additional checking and troubleshooting and discovered that the two diodes in the ABS system were also failed, so I ordered replacements for those as well. The day before the package from Procainestart was to arrive, I happened to be walking past the main fuse and relay box and touched my hand to the cover. A half-step later, I froze in place realizing that something wasn’t right but taking an extra beat to discern that I felt something warm. Odd that something in the fusebox would be warm when the car hadn’t been started for some time! Stepping back, I removed the cover, felt around, and immediately found that the fog light relay was rather toasty. Not to a temperature that would be dangerous, but certainly warmer than a relay for lights that don’t exist on a car that has the circuit for those non-existent lights turned off should be! A closer look revealed that the relay was the missing pump relay! At some point, someone must have decided to swap relays since there weren’t any fog lights anyway and they both had the same type of plug.
With that mystery solved – and the gifted relay returned with much gratitude! – I was able to read through the wiring diagrams to determine that the brake fluid pressure switch was faulty. Unfortunately, these are not easy to come by and appear to be priced in the $500 range. In a junkyard down in Louisville, however, there was a 1993 convertible that – if intact – should have had the same brake system with the same pressure switch. It was time for my daughter to be introduced to the joys of the junkyard!
We returned with the entire brake master cylinder assembly that included the pump, switch, and accumulator for the low price of under $20. While there we also scored a new ignition switch and a spare brake pump relay – both of which went on to the spares shelf. The accumulator was as non-functional as the one that was already on the car, but a new one from FCP Euro coupled with the pressure switch gave us functioning brakes!
But the dash lights were still acting up and the ABS light was on with no ability to show any codes. So still not good.
It is at this point in our story that the reader is going to need to close their eyes and imagine a common trope from TV and movies. Think of the character that everyone knows is a lunatic who has disorganized notebooks with cut-out newspaper articles and nonsensical scribbling all over. Their house has every flat surface overrun with stacks of papers, diagrams, books, and drawings. A wall is covered with pictures and clippings that have push pins tied with strings connected to other push pins. Their gaze is unfocused and off into the distance while their stubble is unchecked and their hair is unkempt. You have that image? That was me for about a month.
We tried so many different things and so many experiments to try to determine why the lights on the dash were acting the way they were. I spent my evenings poring over the wiring diagrams trying to follow the current. There were sheets and sheets of scribbled notes about what components were connected to what other components and what tests had been tried. I had pages and pages of the service manual printed out, some with several copies so I could mark them up or have a copy to stay on my desk, one on the dining room table, one in my backpack, one at the shop, and another couple copies that I had abandoned in various places by accident. My family began referring to the giant sheaf of paper as my “crazy-person papers” and I was in no position to argue the point. I was nearly to the point of being ready to just get rid of the car but I decided to try one last test – de-pinning all of the connections on the gauge cluster’s left-side connector and pinning them in one-by-one.
It was during this test that I finally discovered what had been vexing me for an entire month. The oil pressure and charge lights get their positive voltage from a fuse box connection that runs through one of the pins on the left side gauge cluster connector. That pin was relaxed just enough to not make contact with the cluster. Without that connection, the voltage was back-feeding through the other side of the cluster through the connection to the brake fluid and parking brake lights, causing them to light up. Now that the pin was bent back a little bit and it had good contact, the only light left on the dash was the ABS light. That was a simple problem solved by installing a replacement ABS ECU. My assumption is that during their troubleshooting efforts, they managed to put voltage somewhere it shouldn’t have been which toasted the diodes as well as the ECU itself.
The final step was to plug the MAF sensor back in – someone at some point had unplugged it for “reasons” – and to put new belts on. The initial drive was mostly successful – by hitting a pothole, I discovered rather suddenly that one of the clamps for the boost pipe was completely loose – but a quick roadside fix had everything running 5×5. Finally!
With our orphan in our possession, I needed to proceed carefully to avoid the minor financial ruin that is always a possibility with a car that’s been sitting for a while. Granted, the amount that I had in it at this point could have easily been recouped with a couple of the parts and scrapping the rest, but I didn’t want to add to my burden a shelf full of brand new parts that wouldn’t be used. To that end, I set about working in small stages, keeping the injections of cash as small as possible to achieve the next goal.
Before worrying about replacing the top or the tires or even buying a used battery for it, I wanted to get the fuel pump working and verify that it would start, drive, and stop. Yes, the claim was that the engine ran and sounded fine with starting fluid, but I wanted to be sure there wasn’t anything that was going to make this cost more than it would be worth. Step one was to get it off the trailer and into the shop.
Fortunately, this is one of those vehicles where access to the fuel pump is through removable body panels and the tank doesn’t need to be taken down.
The fuel pump canister had already been removed from the tank and the pump itself removed from the canister. The good news was that we had a head start. The bad news, though, was that not all the various bits made it back into the trunk.
Not seen in that picture is the clip that holds the fuel lines to the top of the canister or the rubber isolators that hold the pump inside the strainer. I didn’t realize at this time that I was missing that clip, but when I mentioned on the GRM forums that I was missing the isolator, Powar immediately ran to his parts stash, took another canister apart, pulled out the bits I was missing, and mailed them to me. All on his own dime and out of the goodness of his heart.
Once we had those parts, the canister went back together, got installed in the car, and…. nothing.
The fuel pump wouldn’t run when we cranked the engine and it wouldn’t run when we bypassed the fuel pump relay. There was power at the canister connector, but the pump itself wasn’t running. The frustrating part of that was that I always test things like fuel pumps before installing them because the amount of work involved in getting them in and out of their installed location is so great. In this case, my jumpbox wasn’t handy to make a direct connection to the pump, so I was lazy and just slapped it in there.
Out came the canister, out came the pump, and before I started the return process I decided to go ahead and give it 12 volts just to see what it would do. Amazingly, it started humming away with no hesitation. Through some more detective work, I determined that the problem was in the canister itself.
The lid of the canister has a connector that is simply two male ends, one on the outside of the canister and one on the inside. The car’s wiring harness connects to the outside one and then the fuel pump itself connects to the inside. It isn’t a complicated design at all, just four long pins held in place with plastic, but it was the source of the lack of fuel delivery. We hit the pins with some sandpaper to scrape away the corrosion that had built up and suddenly the pump was working. Total cost for the repair to the canister was zero dollars and zero cents – all we needed was a new pump and a little bit of fuel line because I managed to break one of the brittle plastic tubes in the process.
With the pump re-re-installed, we clamped the ignition wires together, tapped the starter wire to a 12V source and before the car would start, fuel went flying everywhere!
What we didn’t know was that there was supposed to be a clip to hold the fuel lines down. We didn’t have that clip and didn’t know it existed, so ours was just unsecured like this.
That little clip didn’t seem to exist anywhere as an easy-to-find part, so a little bit of scrap steel got us a new bracket that was effective in holding the fuel lines in place.
With the clamp in place, we were able to get the car to start up and after 9 years it moved under its own power!
My daughters have never been tremendously interested in my automotive pursuits. That’s not something that has ever bothered me or that I’ve tried to impose upon them. I try to expose them to what I’m doing and if they’re interested that’s great, but if it’s just not something that they want to be involved in, that’s perfectly okay too. When my oldest started approaching her 16th birthday, however, she started noticing cars more and more. Of course she was excited to get her license and find in it the same freedom and entry to adulthood that I found all those years ago and I encouraged that excitement as we would point out cool cars to each other when we were out and about. As her birthday got closer and closer, talk turned to how she would learn to drive and what vehicle would become the outlet for that education. That’s when I floated the idea: What if we found a car and worked together to build it for the Grassroots Motorsports $2000 Challenge? Initially I thought her positive reaction to that was more lip-service than actual interest, but as time went on I found myself getting constant reminders from her that we still needed to find a car and get started.
Naturally, my first place to look for a car was the GRM forum. Scrolling through, I found an ad that had been up for a few months with some commensurate price decreases:
Sitting south of Louisville, KY, the car was only about 2 hours away from me. It was being sold by a forum member, which meant that I was probably dealing with a stand-up guy (spoiler alert: Damn right he is!). It was advertised as needing a new ignition switch and fuel pump along with a new top and tires. The headlight adjusters were broken and it had been sitting for 9 years. The tank was said to be full of bad gas but the only other downside was the fact that it’s an automatic. Powar, the forum member who had the car for sale, had originally bought it to be used as a parts car, but decided that it was just a little too nice to cut in to. It was either going to be sold to the GRM family or it was going to go sit in his parts car collection until he needed to scavenge from it.
When I saw the ad had bubbled to the top again, I texted my daughter and got a resounding – uh, something,
With that ringing endorsement, I set about making a deal. A few days later, we hooked up the trailer to go take a look.
For the princely sum of $750, I had adopted an orphan and was ready to start dragging it out of its slumber.
