How did I get to this point? A quick recap of my fleet, as of this morning, in order of how long I’ve had it:
1996 Golf: Daily. Reliable ish, gets horrible gas mileage.
1994 Saturn SC2: I bought this last summer from a fellow Opponaut. It drives pretty good, but is pretty loud and I don’t have a ton of time to mess with it, because there are five other cars.
1986 Cabriolet: I pulled it out of storage a while ago and I’ve been driving it when the weather permits. It’s good, but needs some love in terms of brakes and CIS tinkering. The interior also isn’t great.
1981 Rabbit: There is still no engine in this. I have a short block in pieces in my living room needing assembly.
1995 Jetta: Also does not run, but it cranks. Again, not really finding a ton of wrenching time.
1991 Jetta: Fun, but again, has issues. Daily driver potential, and I drove it daily for a week or so. I didn’t really like it, so I listed it.
As of 4pm today, however, I’m down to four cars. I had the Saturn listed for a while and finally sold it, despite its numerous shortcomings for way less than I’d spent keeping it alive and on the road. Also sold is the turbodiesel Jetta, to a friend of a friend. I was back and forth on selling either for a while. But in the end, having four daily drivable cars is a bit silly.
However, this leaves me with no fewer operable cars and a greater percentage of inoperable shitboxes. So now what? Hope the Golf doesn’t break? Fix the Cabriolet? Fix the other two cars?
For now, my plan is to slap together a motor for my Rabbit and get it driving. After that, it will still need an everything.
The diagnostic work I’ve done on the black 95 Jetta indicates that the ECU is fried. Which should mean it’ll be relatively simple to get back on the road, but VWs being VWs, a drum seized while it was parked for however long it was parked, so I had to take apart the wheel hub to get the car inside my workshop area. So now I need to rebuild that wheel hub (and all the other brakes as a precaution) and bleed everything before I can even drive it for the first time.
Now I just need to not buy any more broken VWs.