Gotta Be Quick

It looks like I've had the second TDI in as many months sold out from under me on Craigslist. There's an 03 Jetta Wagon that's the same color as ours with a different interior and transmission up in Albuquerque for $3000 with a toasted engine. The LW and I went to the bank yesterday afternoon to make sure that the money was there to get it and fix it, only to get home and find an email about how some guy from Santa Cruz is basically on his way to get it. Now the guy won't answer any of my emails or pick up the phone. What a deal.

On bigger ticket items on CL, I usually give the first person a chance at getting things in order. Since most folks don't have $3k laying around on the counter, it takes a day or so to get things going. The people who contact me about the item are then responded to with what's happening and are put in line for it. Seems pretty fair, but it seems that most folks treat the people as if they're responding to an $10 old box fan they're sellling and there's little to no order or courtesy involved.

The last car that I looked at on CL was a '92 VW Cabriolet. It was in pretty bad shape, but the autocheck wasn't too bad and the car didn't look like it was going anywhere. On the fist call, I asked about the title. The owner was selling it for his brother and didn't have it. Ok, well get it. He got the title and got it notarized, so I went to look at it. I drove all the way across town (an hour in T-town) with the toddler, only to find that this dumbass didn't even have the keys to the car. The steering wheel is cranked to the left, so how is one even going to get this thing cleanly up on a tow truck? I told him to call me when he had the keys.....still waiting on that one. =0) The car was selling at a price where I could fix the top, clean it up, and maybe make a few hundred dollars on it, but having to get keys or locks would have eaten most of that tiny margin.

Folks get these cars and don't put the Panzer skid plates on them to keep the oil pans from getting tapped by those concrete parking barriers that have rebar sticking up out of them. The concrete or the rebar knocks a little dent in the aluminum cast oil pan and the oil slowly drains out. Then, as the person is driving the car, (in this case on a trip to Santa Fe) the engine and turbo run out of oil, lock up, and bad things like metal parts coming through the block happen. There you are...on the side of the road...with a big, German- crafted boat anchor.

Ours has been saved twice by the plate because the city of T-town loves what they call, "speed humps". I don't really mind them and think they are a great way of traffic mitigation in quiet neighborhoods, but the city doesn't keep paint on them. If you're traveling through town on a dark street at the speed limit (25mph) and hit a speed hump, your car will almost certainly leave the ground. On the TDIs, it's not the takeoff, but the landing that gets you. See the deutschlanders that designed and built the car didn't see fit to add a higher weight front springs to account for the engine heft, so the front sits lower on the TDIs after the springs sag a bit. There are aftermarket 10mm spacers for the front struts, but that's down on the list from stopping the adjuster block leak that's dripping diesel down the front of the engine. Scheisse.