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94 Caravan stick shift: long-term plans
I have one of those rare 94 stick shift minivans, which I love.
Since they don't make 'em anymore, I'd really like to keep this one going as long as possible, since the body and interior are in great shape for its age. It has about 160K miles on it. It's leaking some oil via the valve cover gasket, and perhaps the head gasket, too. But it drives great and doesn't burn much oil considering its age. It has a slow leak of the A/C coolant, but I get it charged every year or two for $100. I've had very little trouble with it otherwise. (other than the current electrical problem I posted last night) But I know the engine won't last forever and was wondering what people would recommend about getting a new engine. I'd probably also need a new clutch, and who knows what else. I'd like to have some info. about new engines BEFORE it breaks down. Anyone have any source of info? Prices, labor estimates, other work that should be done concurrently? Should I have a dealer do it? Does a typical independent shop have enough experience doing engine replacements, or should I take it to a engine specialist? |
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On Sat, 6 Aug 2005, Satan Himself wrote:
> I have one of those rare 94 stick shift minivans, which I love. Since > they don't make 'em anymore, I'd really like to keep this one going as > long as possible, since the body and interior are in great shape for its > age. > It has about 160K miles on it. It's leaking some oil via the valve > cover gasket, and perhaps the head gasket, too. But it drives great and > doesn't burn much oil considering its age. Keep on truckin', then. > But I know the engine won't last forever and was wondering what people > would recommend about getting a new engine. When the time comes, have the engine rebuilt by a reputable and capable engine machine shop. This involves a little more inconvenience than buying a "remanufactured" engine off the shelf, but the end result is virtually always much better. Rebuilding an engine is a relatively major undertaking; for the amount of money it costs and for the long duration over which I'll have to live with the outcome, I will not relinquish the opportunity to talk with the machinists doing the work, specify certain brands or types of parts, etc. for the sake of not having to rent a car for a week. > I'd probably also need a new > clutch It would make a great deal of sense to replace the clutch while the engine's out, yes. > I'd like to have some info. about new engines BEFORE it breaks down. It is very unlikely that it will "break down" in the manner you seem to be imagining (all of a sudden go "kerBANG!" and stop running). Oil and fuel consumption will increase, performance will decrease, noise will increase...you normally get quite a bit of warning (months to years' worth) before the engine is too whipped to carry on. > Should I have a dealer do it? No. > Does a typical independent shop have enough experience doing engine > replacements, or should I take it to a engine specialist? Shop carefully. Many "engine specialists" are no more than parts swappers who throw in "remanufactured" engines. |
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"Satan Himself" > wrote in message 9.11... > I have one of those rare 94 stick shift minivans, which I love. > Since they don't make 'em anymore, I'd really like to keep this one > going as long as possible, since the body and interior are in > great shape for its age. > > It has about 160K miles on it. It's leaking some oil via the > valve cover gasket, and perhaps the head gasket, too. But it > drives great and doesn't burn much oil considering its age. > It has a slow leak of the A/C coolant, but I get it charged > every year or two for $100. > > I've had very little trouble with it otherwise. (other than > the current electrical problem I posted last night) > > But I know the engine won't last forever and was wondering > what people would recommend about getting a new engine. I have done this with my 1984 Chevrolet Celebrity station wagon. Why did I do that with one of -these- cars? Well I will have to plead stupidity, but I will say the car has about 40K on the rebuilt engine and is still running strong, so I guess I will be driving it for another decade. ;-) If I had your van I wouldn't think twice about doing an engine swap. In fact I would almost kill to get my hands on one of those vans with a good body on it. Believe me I have looked hard for one where I live and they just aren't available. That is one of the very few kinds of vehicles that I would actually consider buying brand new. Anyway, enough of that. Here is my story with my Celebrity, I hope you enjoy it and I am sure you will draw some conclusions from it. I bought my wagon for $400 and it had 130K miles on it. At least the seller claimed that, but I am pretty sure now that it actually had 230K miles on it, the problem is that the odometer only reads to 5 places so there is no way to tell. I had wanted to get about 2 years out of it. About 6 months/6K miles after I bought it, the engine started knocking badly like someone was hammering on it with a ball peen hammer. Well it was a $400 car, so what do you expect. I first thought I would just get a wrecking yard engine. I've done a couple engine swaps before so that didn't bother me. However when I called around none of the yards had my engine except for what they called "rebuildable cores" so that was pretty much out. I considered abandoning it, but by then I had put another $400 into it for miscellaneous bull**** stuff that was broken and needed to be fixed, and I just couldn't bring myself to walk away from $800 that I just just spent over the previous 4 months. Plus that, laugh as you may, a station wagon actually is perfect for someone who most of the time needs a sedan for commuting, but probably about 6-8 times a month is hauling moderately sized objects around that are too delicate to be put in an exposed bed of a pickup. (ie: electronic equipment) Also, more importantly, the transmission had been rebuilt around the 100K mark, and the body of the wagon was straight. I called around to several engine rebuild shops and they all told me that the 2.8L v6 chevy engines of that vintage all had oil problems - the factory did not make the drilled oil passages large enough, and they all fail with bottom ends that are oil starved. Several shops in fact once I told them what kind of engine it was, even before I told them what was wrong they said "oh you must have a bad rod bearing" And they all said that the rebuilt ones have redrilled oil passages in the rods. When I was calling shops I asked them specifically if they rebuilt the engines or send them out. Most of them did in fact send out the short block and many sent out the entire engine. The few that did their own total rebuilds quoted about $1500 higher than the shops that sent them out. None of the shops that sent them out would tell me who they used as a rebuilder/remanufacturer, as you might expect. So then I decided to start calling around to rebuild houses. There are not many here and I went and visited them all. I ended up using Jones Auto Engines, the URL is he http://www.jonesautoengines.com/ To be perfectly honest I did not select them based on any technical criteria. I selected them based on my experience in going down and actually talking to the people there and looking at the facility. You see, Jones is an engine remanufacturer who mainly wholesales to mechanics that R&R engines. Even though I was not having them do the R&R on the engine, if a problem happens with the engine later on, they are ultimately who is responsible. If the remanufacturer does not stand behind their work, then you are stuck trying to get the mechanic that put it in to eat the costs of repair or replacement, and that is not going to be easy. To put it simply, after talking with the people there I was satisfied that they would, in fact, do what they say they would do. Originally my thought was to buy the engine itself from Jones and install it. It is, of course, much easier if your doing an engine swap to have the new one sitting right there so as you remove pieces from the old one you can transfer them over. The problem though was first that they didn't have a 2.8L already built and in stock. So they would have to use my core, or at least try to use it assuming it was rebuildable. Jones assured me that if it wasn't rebuildable, they would have little trouble getting one that was. More importantly, their warranty if you pay a mechanic to install one of their engines is much longer than if you do it yourself. -very- much longer. So, I had them refer me to a local mechanic in the city and I basically walked into that person's shop, told them I was referred by Jones, and asked them if they could do the job for $2500 or close to it. As I knew by then what most other shops would charge, and knew pretty much how much the shop would have to pay for the engine from Jones, and knew what the labor time would roughly be, I knew pretty much what to negotiate from. The total bill came to $2800 and I was satisfied with the costs and the line items on the bill. Since that job was done about 4 years ago, the following engine-related issues have come up: 1) The day I picked up the car I drove it for about 15 minutes on the highway and the oil light started coming on at idle once the car warmed up. I immediately drove it back to the shop and they replaced the oil pump. A new oil pump, supplied by Jones as a matter of fact, had been installed in the engine when the new engine was put in, but obviously it was bad. That was of course warranty work. Say what you want about cheap oil pumps, but I think it's pretty obvious that of anybody, an engine rebuilder has an incredibly high interest in making sure that the oil pump works right. So I really don't think that the supplied oil pump was a cheap POS, I think it was just one of those things. 2) About 6 months later I noticed oil consumption rising and it leaking oil, I took it back to the shop. Warranty work again, bad pan gasket. Probably they screwed the pan gasket up when changing the oil pump, the shop owner said as much. 3) When the car was next up for emissions testing it did not pass, high NoX. A new EGR valve didn't help. I dug into it further and discovered the egr passages cast into the intake manifold were plugged solid with carbon. I had to hammer a long wood drill bit into the passages to break up the carbon plugs. (fortunately I had a spare manifold to experiment with to see exactly what the right angle for the bit needed to be) I blame the shop for this one, even though it wasn't directly related, because since they had the manifold off (a new manifold isn't included in the rebuilt engine) they should have checked to see that the EGR passages were clear. Fortunately, it was a pretty cheap fix, I didn't have to unbolt the manifold and deal with putting a new set of gaskets on and retorquing it, and arguably it needed a new EGR valve anyway. 4) About 2 years later the engine started running very rough at half open throttle, the problem I finally figured out was a broken-off viton tip on the carburetor selonoid. New selonoid fixed this. (fortunately the broken tip hadn't got sucked further into the carb passages) The R&R shop had actually strongly recommended that I replace the carb. I overruled this due to the expense ($400 for a rebuilt carb) In hindsight I realized I made the right decision, because GM produced dozens and dozens of variations on this carb for those years, it would have been a miracle for a rebuild house to have supplied the exact carb for this engine and vehicle. If the carb ever gets rebuilt it will have to come off and take a trip to a carb shop. Anyway, in my case I am not really sure what you would classify what I did as. What I basically did was have an engine remanufacturing facility rebuild my engine. So I guess you can classify it either as a rebuilt engine, or a remanufactured engine, depending on your point of view. Granted, I did not get the opportunity to specify brands or types of parts. However, in exchange for that I got a 5 year/50,000 mile warranty on my engine from a company that so far has, in fact, had 2 opportunities to back up the warranty and both times they have done so. All they require you to do is change oil at the 3000 mile mark, and I do so religiously. Ultimately what I ended up with is a vehicle that cost me $3600 and had a 30Kmile rebuilt transmission, and a 5 year/50K mile warranty on a rebuilt engine. It was a lot more than what I had planned on paying, but it wasn't a bad deal at all. And it was a lot better than walking away from $800 + a lot of my time invested already. So, maybe I won't get to drive the car I was planning to drive for a few more years yet - but at least I'm not stuck in a Prius. > I'd probably also need a new clutch, and who knows what else. > I would guess that by the time your engine is ready to be rebuilt, that your transmission will be ready to be rebuilt too. Or at least, opened up and inspected for wear. You should do both of them. > I'd like to have some info. about new engines BEFORE it > breaks down. Anyone have any source of info? Prices, > labor estimates, other work that should be done concurrently? > Well, if I were you I would worry about all that once your van's engine goes. I think it will surprise you, I think that if you keep oil in it it will last a lot longer than you think. But if and when you do get it redone, here are some things I learned from my story: 1) The resulting vehicle is in some ways equivalent to a new vehicle. From a reliability standpoint it is, certainly. Unfortunately, we find that Kelly Blue Book and the local insurance companies do not hold this point of view. Thus, for the sake of example, suppose the times comes and you dump $4K into a rebuilt engine, and $2K into a rebuilt transmission, into a vehicle that otherwise has a book value of $500 when running. Your going to end up with a vehicle that has a -replacement- value of perhaps $12,000 or maybe more. In other words, it would cost you at least that to go to the market and purchase a low-mileage vehicle that had a market equivalency of yours. If you are carrying comprehensive insurance and you paste this van into a tree by accident, your going to take a loss. Sure you can argue that the vehicle is worth $12,000. Your insurance company will not hold this view - they will (if your very lucky) grudgenly admit that perhaps it's worth is $6500 but most likely less. And they probably won't even admit that unless you run out and have the van appraised the day after it comes out of the rebuilders shop. And, how many people carry comprehensive on that old of a vehicle? Before you spend a dime on a rebuild, you really need to have a conversation with your insurance agent. And you probably need to expect to pay for comprehensive on it, for at least a while. 2) Resale value of such vehicles is next to nothing. For starters, these kinds of warranties are usually not transferable, so the buyer isn't going to pay extra for a warranty. Secondly, the burden of proof would be on you to convince the buyer that the rebuild job was done well and the van is going to last for a good long time. And that will be nearly impossible. So, you better be planning on keeping this. 3) Even though your humming along happily with your van with the rebuilt power train, the rest of the world isn't. Which means that every year that you prolong the life of this van with a rebuilt power train, there are fewer and fewer of these vans on the road, fewer and fewer of them in wrecking yards, and fewer and fewer places selling spare parts for them. I've seen this first hand with my '68 Torino. 20 years ago when I bought it, there were still a fair number of 68 Fairlane/Torinos in wrecking yards and I could scrounge parts for it fairly cheaply. Today the only reason that parts are still available is that it's a "60's muscle car" and so has value, people still have stocks of these parts in their basements. But, the 'normal' channels for parts - wreckers, Ford, the aftermarket - have either dried up completely or are extremely limited. It's either swap meets, Hemmings, or Ebay - and all those places are horribly expensive to get parts for that vehicle for. And, it's even worse with my '81 Datsun 210. THAT car has NEVER become a classic and never will - and body parts for it are increasingly harder to find. It's at the point now where I can call every wrecker in the book and maybe one will have one of these cars in their inventory, and they will be located way out in the sticks where land is cheap and they can afford to sit on a vehicle forever. But of course, the part I really want someone else will have got already. And even the aftermarket now has stopped selling body parts for it, and engine parts are getting very expensive. Anyway, sorry this was so long. Hopefully it will have given you some things to think about. I did learn a lot about going this way, and I would definitely do it again - given the right vehicle - and in fact I -am- doing it again with my '94 T&C with the transmission. But, that's another story. Ted |
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Thanks for that. It was an interesting read. I was aware of the insurance. I think my agent said that I would need to bring in the repair bill after I got the work done, and they would reappraise it. "Ted Mittelstaedt" > wrote in : |
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