Monday, November 23, 2015

Thousand Dollar Car

It's not unwise to replace your ignition coils* more often than once every 248,965 miles.

It is a joy to fix something.  She's back, as smooth and powerful and assured as ever.

It is serene to feel a machine operate properly after almost  year of stumbles and stutters.  It's good for one's obsessive-compulsive balance to adjust everything back to plumb.  The third string on a guitar is difficult to keep right, but it has to be in tune.   The same with an Audi.  I do believe Germans engineer the way they do because they suffer some national form of OCD.  "Surely," they say, "there's a more clever way to make this more precise?"

I'm inspired to replace a few gaskets around the engine to see if that stops the oil which accumulates in my drip pan before making its slow, sludge-hampered migration south to ultimately slip onto my driveway and the highways and byways and parking garages of commuter airports throughout northern New England.  I'm tired of my buring-oil odor-cloud catching up to me like Pigpen's dust cloud as I slow for a traffic light.  There are two cam-end covers that are $5 each and apparently an hour to fix, and the oil pan itself, also an afternoon job.  What are Christmas breaks for?

I'm now willing to pay the state's outrageous $350 annual registration fee and keep pushing the survival envelope until I have the cash I need to buy the replacement I want. I might even fix the power head-rests. 

Car of the week is currently a 2008-2010 A8L, although an S8 with the 500 hp Lamborghini-sourced V10 would be cool:



*or at least half of them.  I'm not dumb, I'm just cheap.