Mike Douton's Stuff and/or Junk

a.k.a How I Spent $8k and Never Made it to the Convention

Borked.

So that looks like a lot of fun, right?

I commute to the Boston area cons because A) I don’t really have the money to stay for a whole weekend B) I work Fridays anyways C) I have a two year old who is really rad and D) Even the raddest and most well behaved two year olds are still a handful and that’s not fair to my wife to just up and go for a whole weekend.

So Boston is a hellish place to drive in but it’s only actually 60 miles away from where I live in Rhode Island. I drive 45 miles in the other direction every day to work in Connecticut. Not a big deal. Well I never made it out of Rhode Island yesterday.

That picture is of a completely seized engine.

The short version of the story (which isn’t that short, but I don’t want to repeat it a lot so I’m putting it here)… Between my house and the gas station, my car was perfectly fine. Since I started working in Connecticut, I’ve put a big chunk of miles on my car, but it’s a Subaru. Once a Subaru hits 100k, it’s just getting warmed up. That’s half the reason I got a Subaru and mine wasn’t on track to hit 100K until this summer even though it’s seven years old. After the gas station, I hit the interstate pointed north to Boston. The car started rattling. You can’t tell, but my bumper is held together with zip ties because it hooked on a snowbank a couple years ago. So sometimes it comes loose and rattles. The rattle didn’t change with how much I was on the gas. I figured there was some snow up under the wheel well that was screwing with the bumper.

At this point I was in Providence. Rhode Island’s capital kind of sucks. I avoid the city when I can but I know that the exits will dump you in crappy parts of town or near the mall. Neither of which are convenient places to stop and mess around with your car. I knew of a nice gas station right off the highway just over the Massachusetts line and planned on stopping there.

I didn’t make it that far.

The horrible noises got progressively worse. Stopping had to happen immediately. The engine light flickered once and went off. I’ve had it go on for a week at a time before so I didn’t think one flicker was my car’s death knell. It was.

I was on the exit ramp in Pawtucket (Rhode Islanders are wincing, The Bucket isn’t a great place) when the engine cut out completely. I was EXTREMELY lucky that it was on the exit ramp at about 30mph. Power steering goes away with the engine. Rhode Island also sucks at plowing and with all the snow, there would have been no where to get my car off the highway. As it was, I randomly picked an exit right next to a gas station and was able to manhandle the steering wheel to get it in there and out of the way.

Still borked.

I waited for a tow. Ironically, when the tow truck pulled up, it wasn’t for me. There was a car right next to mine in the gas station. I figured it was the guy who worked there. It wasn’t. That car was also dead and waiting for a tow, the driver just wandered off and abandoned it instead of waiting in the cold. The second tow truck showed up and took my car back down to the Sears Auto Center not far from my house. (Butch, our local guy, isn’t open weekends) The guy at Sears took one look at it and said “Oil’s gone. The damage is done and I doubt it’s salvageable.”

At least I didn’t have to pay an $80 diagnostic fee for that.

My car gave me ZERO warning that was going to happen. Really, as soon as it started rattling on the highway, it was already too late. No oil lights. No engine lights. No smoke. No leaking fluids. My driveway is covered in snow, I would have easily noticed a leak in the white snow. I had that one flicker of the light one mile before it seized up, which doesn’t really count as a warning since the car was borked before that. (The Subaru guy later told me that oil light only comes on with low oil pressure not low oil level cause that makes a lot of fucking sense.) When I popped the hood waiting for the tow, there was a sleight smell but I don’t exactly sniff my car that often to diagnose by nose.

So back to Sears. They conveniently does not do that level of engine repair. I waited for another tow. At this point, the blizzard had started so it took me 20 minutes just to get a call through to AAA. My wife is awesome so she came over with her car and we cleared out everything from mine and got some noms from Wendy’s while we waited in the snow. The car got towed to the local Subaru dealership this time because they can dive into it hardcore.

Prognosis from Subaru is not that good.

With this level of damage, our only practical repair option is an engine swap. I do not have the money or the desire to send a forensic repair team into the innards of the car for hours to tell me it’s borked. I know it’s borked. I had my last oil change in my car in mid-December and the same place did my state safety inspection a couple weeks later. I was scheduled to go there again on Tuesday for another oil change. I’ve had a number of people suggest that I call up and make them fix it. That’s not even worth the stress to me. I would have to pay for the lengthy diagnostic labor for a 50-50 shot that it was someone’s fault. The roads in Rhode Island are so shitty, it’s more likely a pot hole caused it. I don’t need to pay someone money I don’t have for those odds.

So what did Subaru tell me? Labor is going to up in the neighborhood of $2k. Then they need to source a used engine. Oh, did I forget to mention Subaru doesn’t sell crate engines? Yeah. That. Subaru only sells the engine blocks and then you have to put all your own pieces on it. Well my engine seized… who the hell knows how many parts are any good on my car. My car only had 88k miles on it. My car did not have a turbo or any of the WRX go-fast parts, but a low mileage used Subaru engine is not going to come cheap. I don’t think they show up on the market that often. The ballpark figure to getting my car back on the road is $8k with zero estimate yet on the time frame.

The dealership isn’t open on Sundays (cause, ya know, why be open when it’s convenient for people to get things done like get cars repaired) so my car is sitting in the snow at the dealer, waiting to get looked at and see what the damage is. Hopefully on Monday they can give me a real estimate. And then if the estimate looks good, I need to make sure they stay with that estimate because there is a very finite line where it’s not worth it to bother. That’s both a dollar amount line and a engine mileage line. They could do it on the cheap, but hell no am I putting some 120K engine in my car.

So that’s the story. A new Subaru Impreza starts at $21k. A quick google search shows only three 2008 Imprezas for sale. The only low mileage one is 800 miles away for $15k. Which is funny because I paid $16k in god damn 2008 for mine. I don’t want to buy one of these things. My car was supposed to last long enough for my kiddo to drive it (and then not be allowed to because I know how much trouble I would have gotten into with a Subaru at age 16).