Through the Eyes of a Delivery Goddess |
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Yesterday, you read about my silver Toyota Corolla getting backed into on a main road, very close to where the Unspoken Deputy installment took place. Apparently, Toyota has a defect in it's Corolla and Geo Prism engine that causes the engine to burn up to a quart of oil every 300 - 500 miles. I drove the original engine to 97,000 miles, but the warrenty was declined because they had just covered the front axle gearcase less then 10,000 miles earlier. They claimed we were not responsibly changing oil every 3000 miles - WHY BOTHER? It was burning it faster than that! I placed an ad in the free classifieds (Craig's List) selling my beloved Toyota Tacoma truck with 325,000 miles; $500 or swap for Corolla engine. Someone from New York took me up on the swap offer, so I called the local salvage yard and asked if they could swap an engine for me, if I brought over the car and had the fellows bringing me the engine drop it off over there, too. "Sure, no problem," they said. I beleive it was a Monday night when I dropped off my car - the salvage yard is on my paper route, so I drive past it every morning. Finally on Thursday, the car was gone; I assumed they had put it into the garage to work on it. Saturday morning, the gal who helped out in the office called me, asking me to help her find a new trunk lid for my car. I assured her that the key had never worked, and if you just pull the lever on the left side of the driver's seat, next to the floor, it would pop right open. She quietly said, "Not any more...." She went on to explain that someone new was running the fork truck Wednesday afternoon. He had been instructed to go to the garage and stick the forks through a car that had been sitting there for a few months, awaiting higher scrap prices. The fellow did as he was asked, but when he backed up with the car on the forks, he didn't quite calculate the proper amount of space needed to spin the fork truck around... WITH the car hanging from the forks, and he ended up skidding the forked car across the trunk of my Corolla and through the back window. Go ahead and laugh; I did. I finally regained normal breathing and was able to ask her how bad the damage was; should we just skip it since I was about to drop another engine in the dumb thing. She assured me the salvage folks were anxiously trying to get body work people to come in and fix the car before I found out, but she was having problems finding a trunklid. On Sunday morning, while on my paper route, I stopped to sneak into the garage to survey the damages. Up on the rack, it didn't look that bad. Somehow, the guy had managed to only put a crease in the quarter panel right where the back window fits in, wrinkle the trunk like a roller coaster (not sure how that happened), smash in the back window, and bust up the tail lens.  I guess the hole for the trunk lid was a bit irregular after the fact, also. The back door was untouched. Monday morning, I went over to talk with the nice folks that own the yard. They felt SO badly. I laughed. I told them the only thing I was upset about, was that no one got it on tape. I think it would have been a riot on video tape. They said the guy felt really badly; I told them that it probably could not have happened to a better "client" since it's  already there for an engine, and it's a work car, so it gets beaten up pretty badly anyhow. I told them there was no need to fix the quarter panel - just see if we can stretch the back window hole into something that will allow the back window to stay installed, throw another tail lens on, and bungi the trunk lid down. If the replacement engine lasted four months until inspection; I'd deal with the trunk lid then. Mr. B stood up and said, "You know, the best part of the whole story, is that the car he put through your back window was your step-son's car that's been sitting here for three or four months."Might as well keep it all in the family, right? Mrs. B's biggest fear, was that Bob would be so upset at them, that he'd never make them any more of his famous stromboli.... I wish I'd have had it on tape!! Ultimately, the engine brought in on swap was no good; the salvage yard in Binghamton, New York had spun the intake manifold, broken the fuel injector bracket and split the neck where the air conditioning unit bolted onto the engine block  when they wrapped the chain around the engine to tug it from it's original car. The salvage yard [here] felt bad and managed to put enough repairs into another car they'd received as scrap, giving me a Subaru Legacy as a replacement. It was a great paper car - the interior lent itself well to being an office. However, the unibody frame rails and rocker panels were only good for about ten months worth of wear; we bartered our neighbors for their '93 Corolla in return for walking their dogs every day at lunch time for a couple of months. That car currently has 297,000 miles and is still running strong. Burns a LOT of oil, but just keeps running. |