Car Talk

Time for another update, I suppose! I've been watching time pass (rather quickly, I might add) in Georgia for the past month or two. Besides a quick trip to Kansas and Albuquerque (sorry there wasn't enough time to socialize with everyone!), I've been hanging out at my parents' in good old Rome. I spent the first few weeks of my vacation sitting on my butt. Literally. Then I remembered that I don't really like sitting around all the time and started a major project with my dad, who really doesn't like sitting around :) He really needs a truck to haul some stuff and start a few other projects at the house. He has this old Volkswagen Rabbit truck that doesn't run (major engine problem), but he also has a Rabbit sedan that does work - same body. So we decided we would just take the engine and transmission out of the sedan, and transplant it into the truck. Piece of cake, right?

Well, 4 days later we had a running truck. No joke. It took a lot of sweating and cursing, but we removed the engine from the truck, removed the engine from the sedan, and mounted the sedan engine in the truck, all using a tractor and a cable. The cars are from '81 and '82, so the wiring under the hood was...interesting...to say the least. After hooking everything back up (minus a half a dozen wires that we were relatively sure didn't go to anything), I have to say that I was not very confident the thing would start at all, but I was trying to act optimistic. Amazingly, it turned over the first night we tried it, and we had it running the next morning! After that, my dad bled the brakes while I ran some errands, and that night we took it for a test drive. We were congratulating ourselves and laughing out loud while we were coasting down the road at 55 mph! When we were within a mile of home though, we suffered a minor setback...one (or both) or the CV joints failed catastrophically. We had to walk home (because you know we weren't going to call my mom after all of that bragging!)

So, then I left for onion-town (Vidalia) to see my grandmother for a few days and go on a juice-fast. Today is day 5 - I think I'll start eating solid food again tonight or tomorrow - and I'm back in Rome. We're going to try to fix the CV joint today; probably just replace the whole axle since we have a donor car that we know has good ones. Hopefully the next test drive will last longer :)