So Dmitriy and I wanted to start a LeMons team, so we started to look for a car. Its harder than I thought it would be to find a car that is $500 or less and isn't in too bad a shape. Dmitriy seemed to have some love for Ford Escort GTs, and I was looking for, well, almost anything. An old bimmer, Impreza, Neon, V-dub or whatever, but Dmitriy was scouring craigslist for an Escort. Eventually he found one in Ohio posted for $750. I gave him a call to see if he can be talked down but he didn't budge much. We decided to go see the car anyways, and maybe we could sell stuff off the car to bring it down to the $500.
I can't say it was luck or ill-fated set of circumstances, but when I called to confirm our trip donw to Ohio, it turns out the car had died. The owner diagnosed timing belt failure, and was willing to part with the car for $300. Some quick research revealed that the motor would be fine if it ate its own timing belt, so we decided to go for it. The trip was about 2 hrs, and several tolls later, we met the owner on the side of the road looking over the car.
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| Car dead on the side of the road. |
From the outside the car seemed fine, actually, it seemed like a perfect Lemons car; spray paint paint (including the headlights and tail lights), a junky interior that was spray painted bright orange and yellow, shocker stickers in the rear windows, drilled and slotted rotors (in the rear but not the front!), and most of the interior stripped out. So, it seemed, all we needed was to get a new timing belt and we would be ready to rock and roll!
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| The sticker from the cops telling the owner the car had to be moved within 3 days. |
Money was exchanged, and the car was taken home to bring the transformation from rickety ricer to crap can extraordinaire!
We got it home and over the next couple weekends we stripped out the remaining interior and started to to a good hard look at the car. All I can say is that its a good thing we didn't buy it for $700, it was definitely only worth $150 for the motor, and tranny. The whole rear frame was rotted out. Its amazing that it drove at all!
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| Trailing arm broke off the frame when the car was jacked up. |
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| Driver side strut tower. The rust almost completely removed the strut tower from the frame. |
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| Passenger side rear strut tower. |
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| Frame as seen from the passenger side rear wheel well. The frame was flaking off and soft when poked with a finger. |
Well, we started to work on the car thinking that we could weld in a rear tube frame. Christian had bunch of 2" square tube, and we started hacking away. Eventually we cut out the frame and pan from the rear seats back. One of the team mates took the rear cross-member home and was going to try and loosen up all the fasteners and alignment adjustment points.
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| This is what we ended up putting into the car. It needs to be tied to the front of the car and probably a roll cage (if one ever gets installed). Mainly we put this in so we can move the car. |
Basically, we decided this car was more of a project than we honestly felt we could tackle. Steve said he had a Neon that was currently dead, and it would be a good lemons car since it wasn't to rusty. It has been sitting for 5 years in a garage. He hadn't done anything with the car since he thought a rod bearing was fried.
The only thing we are keeping from the escort is the theme. We have some ideas that should be pretty entertaining.
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| All she needs is a rod bearing or two, some control arms, and she is good to go! (fingers crossed) |
