I got to thinking recently of the vehicles I’ve owned over the years, and thought I’d create a page about them that I can keep updating from time to time as things change. I’ve had some fun with these cars, trucks, and motorcycles, and hope to keep having fun with the iterations of vehicles I’ve had!
1984 Honda Accord LX (1998 – 2001)
The first car I owned was a 1984 Honda Accord LX that my parents gave me my Junior year of college. Not a super sweet car, but a great college car. It got high mpg’s since it was a manual 4 liter. It was carbureted, so there wasn’t much to break in it (electronically). It was a sedan, so I could fit people in it. It was a Honda, so even when I did stupid things like high-center it in a parking lot, it was virtually indestructible, and when it did break, parts were cheap.
I don’t have any pictures of it that I know of. Back then, I had a film camera (just imagine!) so I didn’t waste pictures on the car :). It looked something like this car, though.
I sold the car for $2,000 (I think?) to a friend. I think it had 160k miles on it, but a lot of new basic parts and was running great. He drove it up over 200k miles even after forgetting the parking break one time and having it back into a tree on one of those steep hills in Golden. It was a solid car.
1981 Datsun 280 ZXT (2001 – 2003)
This car was a not solid. It was a mess. An awesome mess (I generally consider it “my first car” since I actively paid for it and chose it). I bought it for $300 from a gas station. It had been sitting there the entire time I was at Mines, and I finally asked the station owner about it. Apparently, it had been left there by someone he knew, and he had gotten the title somehow. He couldn’t get it to run.
A friend and I came down and checked it out, pulling some plugs, moving some wires, hooking it up to a new battery, and as he was inside, we got it to fire up and run for a few seconds. That sealed it. He wanted $600, but since “it didn’t run”, took $300 for it. We towed it the one mile to my apartment, did a tune up, changed all the fluids, and had it running in a day.
This ugly little car had holes in the floorboards, a hole big enough for the spare tire to fall through in the back, and literally had .22 caliber bullets heat-welded into parts of the car. But it also had an in line six and a turbo. It was quick. I blew up the turbo by exploding the oil supply line at one point and replaced it with a refurbed unit on the cheap. Later, the ignition timer failed on it, and a friend helped manufacture a new distributor shaft that would let us use the cap and rotor from an ’82, which had the timing sensor on the rotor rather than on the flywheel. All told, this car probably had $1k in it when I gave it away to that same friend. I spent a lot of time fixing little things on this car (and a couple big things) and between these two college cars, learned a ton about how to fix and upgrade cars.
1999 Ford Ranger XLT (2002 – 2005)
As much as the last car was terrible, this car was great. I bought it used for about $9k from a dealership and the only part that needed replacing on it during my ownership was the clutch, and that wasn’t a hard clutch to replace.
I got this car when the Z became unreliable (I kept both while I still lived in Westminster), and had it while working at Circuit City. Because of that, I installed a fairly large number of gadgets and high end stereo components in the truck. It had GPS, a really high end alarm system and remote start, a 2,000 watt stereo and 1,000 watt sub, could be lit up with under-dash lights, and had some of the silly “bling” that Circuit sold back then. I would take customers out to the truck as an advertisement for what they could buy, and it helped me sell a lot of gear there.
I also, though, continued to want to tinker with the car itself. I left the engine alone (sadly), so the little 6 liter was a little underpowered for the lifted chassis, larger tires, and off-road suspension. It had a hard time at 80+ mph, and definitely had a hard time driving up I-70 into the mountains, but the manual transmission let me keep up for the most part. It also was a blast to drive off road.
I sold it to a college kid for about $7,000 so I could pay for my new truck.
2004 Honda Shadow 750 Aero (2004 – present)
I got this in October of 2004 for $5k, so I barely got to ride it before winter set in, and it’s been through a lot of changes. I was able to upgrade the timing, clutch, air intake system (slightly), added bags, sissy bar, risers, grips, mirrors, tach, seat, RF key fob, all kinds of things.
Almost every year I’ve owned it, I think about selling it. I could get just a little under what I bought it for (maybe $3,500), and upgrade to a bigger bike. However, this little guy is great in the city, gets nearly 60 mpg, can still out accelerate most cars on the road, is nimble for a cruiser, even 2-up, can manage the highways and mountain roads with a little room to spare, and it’s a Honda, which means it pretty much never breaks down, the parts are super cheap to fix it, and maintenance is a breeze.
Plus, it’s paid for.
Hard to argue that it needs to be updated. It’s been my daily driver since day 1.
2005 Ford F150 w/ Stage 1 Roush Supercharger (2005 – 2009)
This truck was the great mistake. It was gorgeous, but I had nothing but problems with it the first year of ownership. First, I bought it right before the auto industry collapsed in 2005, so I paid the highest price anyone paid for a truck in the next several years (almost the next decade). Second, I also got the Roush supercharger, which was amazing, but no one knew how to work on it, so it was installed incorrectly from the dealership and had trouble over and over until that was fixed (Medved kept screwing me over on that one). Lastly, it was so new that I really couldn’t do much to it. Everything was computerized, and the only real change I could make was to reprogram the chip … which wasn’t the kind of fun I was used to.
But it was fast. They claimed 450 hp and 500 ft-lbs with that supercharger, and I could chip it (supposedly safely) up over 700 hp. Now, it wasn’t 0-60 fast, but it screamed on the highway and could pass anything with plenty of room left over. Even when towing. Plus, it was a 4-seater, which was nice to have again. Interestingly, it got 25 mpg … the supercharger improved the fuel efficiency so it actually slightly beat out my Ranger!
I finally sold it, losing tons of money on the deal, but getting out from under the loan for a car I wasn’t really enjoying.
2001 Jeep Cherokee Sport (2009 – 2013)
Couldn’t have been too much happier with this vehicle. I bought it for $4k and sold it four years later for $3500. It was the last of the years they made Cherokees, and if I did it again, I’d have bought a 2000 (to get away from California emissions), but that’s about it. It had the inline 6 that was bulletproof, did about 170 hp, had four wheel high and low, decent suspension, and handled great in the snow, decently off road, and the highway. I kept it in shape, upgraded a few things here and there, and it did very well.
Sadly, the California emissions meant there was a lot I couldn’t do to the engine, limited the horsepower, and made me get only 17 mpg. I could have got over 20 mpg and been able to upgrade the engine much easier without those extra two catalytic converter canisters clogging it all up.
1972 Chevy El Camino 350 (2013 – present)
I bought this almost on a whim. I’ve always wanted one (a ’70 or ’69 would be better, but they’re much pricier) and was building a search engine that searches other regions of Craigslist … so I tested it with “El Camino”, when I found this. $5,500 in decent condition. It had some problems leaking water into the cab and some engine issues, but I fixed a few minor rust holes, got some new sealant in there, and it was fairly solid.
Initially, I just spent the time getting the engine back to top condition (for original parts), and preparing it to be a daily driver for a while. It did terrible in the snow, so it won’t be a daily driver for too many winters, but it’s an absolute dream to work on, and even with the shot suspension, it’s a lot of fun to drive. Over the next few years, I’ll be making it even more fun to drive (I already bought a manual transmission I’m going to install next summer, hopefully!).
Update (Dec 2013)
Well, there’s been a lot of work done on the car this year. I put a lot of time into the engine and various smaller parts I could fix easily, and it was doing well. We got a lot of rain one week, though, and I started seeing rust bubbling up through the paint from the bed, so that needed to be stopped ASAP.
I did some research and interviewed some companies, and finally decided on a Maaco on Colfax Ave. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake. They initially told me it’d be about 3 weeks of in-shop time, but they still weren’t done with it when I went and took it from them after 8 weeks. On top of that, several parts were reinstalled incorrectly and an expensive trim piece was broken and then hidden rather than just owning up to a very likely mistake on an old vehicle. Not a great experience.
The paint job, however, came out decently. Not amazing, but I wasn’t paying for great, it was a relatively inexpensive paint job. I also got some truck all-terrain tires on there, steel rims, and about 450 lbs over the rear axle.
It now does very well in the snow.
2000 Jeep Cherokee Classic (2015 – present)
Just a couple years after I sold the old Cherokee, I’m back with a Cherokee! I moved out of my apartment, so I had space for two cars again, and having a winter car in Denver just makes sense. I did learn my lesson with the 2001 and went back to a 2000 and made sure not to get California emissions. I found a good deal on an XJ up north, replaced about $2k of parts, and have a very solid vehicle that does great in the snow! It’s got a little rust growing on the hood, the roof, and the bumpers, but I’m not sure it’s worth fixing for a winter vehicle that exists to be beat up.
Instead, this car will do excellently for getting me and the family to and from work and other events as needed. Easy to fix for usually a couple hundred dollars and easy to maintain. It’s definitely got more road noise than more modern vehicles, but for the price, you just can’t beat a Cherokee! I tried!