The Driveway: COBbies talk cars

Update on the car stuff. Didn't get screwed by insurance in fact got more then we paid for because we took care of the car and replaced worn parts.

Lol. Whoops indeed pasted to the wrong window.

edited 15th Dec '11 8:33:31 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Thanks Tuef. Even though this is the wrong thread xP.

Insurance. I have no idea how this works for used cars, and if someone would help me out, that would be cool.

Our new set of wheels will be a 94 Taurus Station Wagon. The dealership had received it as a trade in on the lot and had not yet inspected it. Since we made a pre-inspection offer they inspected it before we could take it. The head gaskets were bad so they are installing a refurb engine. No extra cost. This is the time of year where dealerships try and empty as many older cars off their lots as they can before they have to write the cars on the lot into taxes. So we are getting about 8,000 bucks of value out of 2,600 of cost for car. Or Compared to our old Taurus 1,200 on up to 8k.

We got lucky for once with a car it seems.

Maintenance will depend on whether they slap a reverse engineered higher torque buick style engine 3.8 ltr. Has maintenance issues just like the buick cousin it was spawned from or the Literally Made of Iron 3.0 Vulcan Engine like a standard Taurus that has lower torque but better maintenance records.

Honestly I hope it is the 3.0.

edited 16th Dec '11 4:56:43 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Yeah, Ford decided to pretty much reverse-engineer the Buick 3.8 V6, and had problems with it. They fixed the design over the years, or so I heard. The two engines today don't resemble one another much anymore.

Well, duh, that's what you get for copying one of the 1970's versions. Modern iterations of the Buick 3.8 are light-years better than the crap they made in the Seventies. We got rid of that rougher-than-a-corn-cob firing order by going to a split-pin, which smoothed out the degrees of rotation before another cylinder fired. Iron heads for a long time. Mixing aluminum heads on a cast-iron block will lead to problems due to dissimilar metals and corrosion issues. Go all-iron or all-aluminum; don't go half-baked with it.

The 3.0 is a 60-degree motor. Narrower, better firing order. All-iron. Yeah, stick with that.

edited 16th Dec '11 1:32:13 AM by pvtnum11

I liked it. It was a very solid engine. Still in good shape despite the miles on it. The tertiary parts were wearing out but they were comparitively easier to replace.

The newer Buick mills were much the same way - you'll end up replacing accessories more often than not, but the engine itself is pretty durable.

Well we have a refurbed 3.8 my wife said lets hope it is a later model 3.8 instead of an original .

The gas cap release handle is a bit out of wack but nothing too serious.

edited 16th Dec '11 8:36:46 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I'm not entirely familiar with the Ford's version, only that they used it for the Thunderbirds in supercharged form (I was not impressed by the one example I saw), and a naturally-aspirated flavor was for the base-model Mustangs for a time.

I think straingt-six engines are far superior to pretty much any V6 you can care to name, but they're six cylinders long, as opposed to three and a half. Not many cars today have the engine bay space to devote to a straight-six anymore.

Well, BMW does still make inline-6 engines, and I think they're actually easier to turbocharge than V-6 engines, but I'm not sure.

Actually, Volvo also makes turbo inline-6 engines, if I'm not mistaken. Just look at the S60.

edited 18th Dec '11 4:15:48 PM by RocketDude

Straight-sixes are inherently a balanced design, as is the V12. 90-degree V8s are easy to balance (though with extensive crankshaft counterweighting). Inline 4s are inherently rough though stable. V6s are horrible.

Well, Jaguar has a V-6 in the CX-16 concept, and Jaguar's signature engine was the 6-cylinder, so maybe they can work wonders with it.

Granted, said V-6 is supercharged and hooked up to a hybrid system of sorts, but still.

edited 18th Dec '11 8:45:20 PM by RocketDude

Their signature six was inline, though, as were all the good ones.

You can make a V6 work but it's not "natural" in the sense that you really have to work around its limitations and problems with a lot of ingenuity.

Okay, yeah, inline-6 would have made sense back then.

Granted, the only drawbacks I can think of are: odd cylinder firing and possibly hard to turbocharge.

Buick ran into a lot of trouble with their 90-degree V6 engine. 720d-degrees do not divide into six 90-degree segments - it divides into six 120 degree segments. a 90-degree V6 is about the worst way you can go about doing it.

So why did they do it at all?

Cost.

They had tooling to cast and machine 90-degree V8 engines, which they modified to make the V6 block. It is just about a V8 engine with two cylinders chainsawed off. It was that or engineering all-new tooling.

The rough cylinder firing order led to the split-pin setup, wich evened it all out a heck of a lot. Still, I have an even-fire design (LC 2) and it's... rough. The whole car shakes and lopes at idle. Which is pretty cool for a muscle car, but very much undesirable for a family sedan.

Pontiac used to make an in-house inline-6 engine, which could be found in early Firebirds. It was made in 3.8 4.1 liter sizes. It was also an overhead cam engine, way back in the mid sixties.

Sadly, it died off - too early, too soon. If it had lived on into 1973 (and the first gas crisis), we'd probably still have straight-six engines today, as it was a lot more economical than V8's of the day. Makes me wonder why they didn't dust off the machinery from just a few years before and restart production when the gas crunch finally did hit. In an era of cheap fuel, V8's were pretty much the only game in town...

I wonder what one of those Pontiac I6 engines would do today with modern enigne managment electronics and the like.

pvtnum: Jeep kept the old AMC I6 in production well into the 2000s, complete with modern multi-port fuel injection, so if nothing else, that should give you some idea of What Could Have Been.

Also, those things are nearly indestructible. Probably right up there with the Ford Vulcan 3.0 and the Chrysler 3.3 V6es when it comes to durability, at least in not terribly demanding passenger-car work by people who don't change the oil.

Ah yes, the Jeep 4.0 I6. I still want a mid-nineties Cherokee Sport.

Someone I know drives a Wrangler 4.0L Sport that I think might be from the early 90's.

Our front left brakes seem to be making a barely audible raspsing sound. Brand new brakes on top of everything else. Not sufe if I need to have it worked on to stop the rasping.

Eh, shoot some WD-40 on it, no more noise.

You'll learn to compensate for uneven braking force by pulling to the left, soon enough, but hey, at least that brake noise will be gone.

(From the "stupid crap I used to do when I was a youngling" file)

enter serious mode/

You may simply have noisy brakes, or they were installed incorrectly. Brake parts cleaner may clean out the dust without leaving any oily residue behind, but don't count on it.

edited 19th Dec '11 4:05:58 PM by pvtnum11

...And Saab has filed for bankruptcy. Well, I guess that's not too surprising, but...

Yeah, I read that today.

Sucks. Another car maker gone to the grave. I really want to buy a Sonett III now, but they're hideously expensive nowadays. I'd settle for a GT 750, though.

Granted, I read in Motor Trend that the cash from the Chinese will finally be coming through, but...

Chinese cars? I cannot help but be reminded of their infamous crash test videos.

China's financial system isn't exactly the model of good health at the moment, either...

Yeah, that might complicate matters...