When I was in college a friend had one of the most disreputable looking Citations ever all bondo, rust and grey primer. One time it wouldn't run so I went over to help. When I pulled out the spark plugs the electrodes were GONE, missing, not present at all. He said it had been "Starting hard" but passed it off as a POS car.
Of course being in college we had no money so we headed to a local junkyard which had a yard full of Citations. We told our sob story and asked him how much our $5 would get us. He laughed and told us to take anything we wanted. We pulled about 20 sparkplugs plus caps/rotors/plug wires, plus some other bits and bobs and headed home. Some time with emery paper and wire brushes got 4 pretty nice looking plugs and some time sorting got the 4 best wires plus a good enough cap and rotor. Car fired right up and ran fine After that semester my friend decided he was going to leave school and work. Soon after he bought a new Saturn and GAVE me the Citation. Being that it used less fuel than my S15 I decided to commute with the little car which worked out fine until the last day of the summer. I had to wait to make the left turn into my parent's driveway and when I stepped on the gas the engine revved WAY up and the auto trans EXPLODED out through the pan all over the road. The red spot stayed on the pavement 5 years until they repaved. The junk man gave me $20 for it. I figured on the whole I was up around $100 I'd saved in fuel considering other than the initial "tuneup" I'd never done anything other than put fuel in it. -Curt Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2011 00:32:47 -0400 From: Mitch Haley <m...@voyager.net> To: Mercedes Discussion List <mercedes@okiebenz.com> Subject: Re: [MBZ] Citation Message-ID: <4e4f38ef.4050...@voyager.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed relng...@aol.com wrote: > You, sir, are a masochist. In 1985, there was no such thing as a $500 300SD, so I made do with what I could afford. Considering I paid $435 for it in 1985 and put about 64,000 miles on it in the next four years, I don't see how I could have done better. When I lived 36 miles from work, it used less than two gallons of gas a day. In those miles, I replaced the alternator (warranty, it was a rebuild that the original owner bought a month before it failed), outer CV boots, rear shocks, front and rear brakes, rebuilt the carb, during which I figured out the real problem was a leaky choke pull-off solenoid, radiator, Hella headlights (huge improvement), rebuilt the starter, replaced the clutch cable adjuster, replaced the muffler and had to tear into the tranny at 180k because a bolt fell out of the shift interlock giving me a handful of neutrals. (that was when I replaced the clutch, it still worked but was 90% gone) Except for the transmission failure, nothing I'd fault the car for. Except for the brakes, it had 80-90% of the performance of my Saab 99EMS, at a sticker price about half the Saab's. _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
