You know, eventually you just have to take the old horse out back and put it out of its misery.
My 1996 VW Golf, with 310,000 kilometers on it, just blew a brake line. The car can still be driven, it just cannot be stopped. Obviously this presents a problem, but it’s only part of the larger problem – namely that the car is really old.
The hatch rusted so badly that the locking mechanism eventually fell off. This necessitated tying the hatch down. Very ghetto indeed. The solution was to purchase an rust free hatch from a different car. The car is black, the hatch is silver, lending it a nickname – Silverback.
The resonator fell off, so we replaced it with some stock pipe instead of a new resonator. It sounds like a Honda Civic with a cherry bomb muffler, but its livable. Twice the ghetto power.
The power door locks don’t work any more. This isn’t much of a problem, except that some of the doors might be unlocked when one arms the alarm, making it that much easier to wake the neighbors at 3 in the morning when I come home from a gig. Ghetto ghetto ghetto.
The silver hatch has a different key than the rest of the car. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that the junkyard didn’t have the key for it. There is a ‘ripcord’ in the back seat that is tied to the latching mechanism of the hatch. 4x ghetto factor.
Sometimes the front passenger door lock freezes when its cold, meaning the person in that seat must clamber over the gear shift. Ghetto jackpot.
And these are just the things actually wrong with the car, not things that are impending, like replacing the original clutch, or replacing the brakes, or doing the wheel alignment. Or any of a million other small problems that I have grown so accustomed to I can’t even remember.
It might be time to take the old girl out to the pasture and put her out of her misery. Of course, this means I will need a replacement car, and that’s going to present problems of its own.
Strictly speaking it can be stopped. It just takes a while… ;)