The good news is...

[johnpalmer]

... that I was right about the car. It needs new rings. However, the tech at Saturn seems to think that, at the mileage of the car (165+k), it wouldn't be enough to do rings and such; she said that it'd be time to go straight to a remanufactured engine. So, hey, I'm learning enough about car engines to figure some stuff out. I was right about my car needing engine work.

The bad news is, yesterday, it wouldn't start. Cranked like a sonofagun, but didn't cough, sputter, fire, or (obviously) turn over.

The worse news is, they couldn't find anything wrong with it. Everything tests just fine, it started on the first try for them, etc..

So now I'm stuck with the only thing more troublesome than "no car", and that's an untrustworthy one. I mean, with no car, I'd do some searches, make some calls, find a car I couldn't exactly afford, but whose loan payments wouldn't kill me, and I'd get a car. Now... well, now I'm not quite sure what to do, because I don't know when (or how often) my car will decide not to start.

I guess, first and foremost, it's time to stop reveling in having money, and start living by a tighter budget. (Not that I've been spending unwisely, but I've been feeling the pull of "I can buy stuff!".) I have to get my debt down to 0, ASAP.

Then... well, I don't know. Conventional wisdom says never put a remanufactured engine inside a car that old. It's not worth it.

That's because conventional wisdom keeps thinking of cars as salable assets. Put a (wild guess from the Saturn tech) $3500 remanufactured engine into a 1997 Saturn SL, you don't have a $3500 car to sell, so it's a net loss. You'd have been better off selling the Saturn, and using the $3500 (+ whatever you get for the Saturn) to buy a better car.

But you don't buy cars for resale; you buy them to use them. And just because a car is worth more at retail doesn't mean it's any better. If I spend $3500 + (a bit) to buy a used car, I'm risking having a car in much, much worse shape than the Saturn. If I spend $7000 on the used car, and the engine would have lasted as long as the used car does, I'm potentially losing money.

And all of this is complicated by the fact that I want to go back to school, and need a reliable car to consider doing that. I have the money right now to get a car loan and make payments, but I don't want to be making payments for three years.

Ah well... no point in worrying about this right this instant. But if anyone has any advice to offer, I wouldn't mind hearing it.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

I tend to be of the "fix the car" philosophy, personally, though one useful thing to do may be to have a mechanic pull the transmission pan and go through various other bits of it to see whether you're likely to need a new transmission or various other high-cost bits in the near future.

One thing to consider is that there is always some risk of unwillingly selling the car, to an insurance company if it gets totaled. Although, if that's a serious consideration, there is such a thing as "agreed value" insurance; I haven't actually looked into it, though.

Incidentally, I think you're using "turn over" differently from how I've always heard it used -- to me, it simply means that the engine crankshaft physically turns. Since "crank" means that the engine turns under the power of the starter, then that implies turning over. (One can also turn over an engine by physically hauling on the fan belt or such, so the inverse relation is not true.) There is a failure state where the starter doesn't "engage" (it's got a small gear on it, that connects to a big gear on the engine's flywheel when you're starting the engine, and disconnects when it's running); this is characterized by the started making a high-pitched whirring noise rather than the usual engine-cranking noise.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

You're probably right about terminology; most people know better than I :-).

I'd always thought the engine turning over was the "vroom" at the end of the "rererererer", and if that happened, but then it died, it was "turning over but won't keep running". But, whatever was happening, nothing fired. I'd assumed it was a gas problem, since I wasn't even getting a sputter.

And thank you; that's a great idea about the transmission... it'd be awfully stupid to spend big bucks on a new engine when the tranny's due to die, and I wouldn't have thought of that... but I'm sure that the cost of a transmission inspection will be cheap compared to the panic I'd go through if I hadn't thought about it *before* making a decision :-).

[brooksmoses]

The other options are for it to be an electrical problem (no spark) or an air problem (no oxygen). Assuming you didn't entirely flood the engine -- which seems unlikely, since flooded engines still tend to splutter -- that eliminates it being an air problem. Electrical problems aren't uncommon, though; the last time I had a car do something like that, the problem was that moisture had gotten into the distributor, and once it dried out, things were okay until the next time it got damp.

[johnpalmer.livejournal.com]

(Be warned: as long as you keep talking, I might keep doing so, if there's a chance I'll learn more. Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong about, or missing, something. And feel free not to get sucked into this :-).)

Nod. The car's been tuned recently, so with the cranking hard, I figured spark probably wasn't the issue (I did check my spark plug cables thinking, I dunno, maybe someone pulled them as a prank, or something.) If it cranked weakly, I'd suspect a low battery, but with no general problem starting until then, I'd kinda guessed spark wasn't a problem.

I hadn't thought of oxygen, because the engine was cold and hadn't shown problems when running hot.

But that last bit... yesterday was a very wet day. If moisture could have caused the problem, that might have been it. It would have had all night to dry out (and half of a sunny day, to boot). Is there any thing to do to fix that (or diagnose it)?