A recent deathmatch in AvChat recently made me realize how many cars I have owned since 1988 and how many of those cars I truly miss, or don't have any pictures of.

i don't have any pics of my 72 Catalina, my 71 Bronco, or my 81 Citation when it was in one piece.

my first real car was the 72 Catalina sport coupe... It was given to me by a friend of mines' mother while he was in Virginia, just to get it out of her yard. It was HUGE! Had a 350 Pontiac under the hood and really gave new insights into Star Trek, because 70mph really felt like the Enterprise at warp speed!

the 78 F150 was really my dads' truck even though he didn't drive it anymore. I had it a really short time and got rid of it because it would get stuck on a wet lawn it was so useless. It was this horrible cream/peach color with a beige interior...

the 71 Bronco was an animal... 302 V8, 2bbl, 3-on-the-tree moved to the floor, 31" mudders... it was awesome until it came to fill it up. Even with gas at $1.14 a gallon, it got expensive to drive it around.

I had an 81 Citation X11, which today is really rare. I blew the engine up in mine and sold it for parts.

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After that, I had a 78 Mercury Bobcat... I never drove this car as it was too damned rotten. And that was a shame because it had a mint interior!

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I had an 84 Mercury Capri RS 5.0L after that... this car was a foolkiller. It was pretty rare too, especially by 1990. There weren't many built and even fewer left. I sold that to my mom for almost nothing. She sold it to her boyfriend and then he sold to some asshole on the hill who sold it again to a druggie that piled it into a building and destroyed it.

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And then, the love of my life, a certain bright orange Pinto came into my life, a 1980 Ford Pinto Runabout sedan... VIN# 0T11A116655 in 2G (bright bittersweet). I bought this car for $300 with 86,000 miles on the odometer and drove it everywhere. Never once did it leave me stranded. I loved that car and it was taken from me...


I parked that car during the winter of 1992-1993 and bought a 1980 Mercury Zephyr Z7 fastback with that old 200 I6 and automatic tranny. It had been sideswiped, rear-ended and dented on 80% of its body. But, it kept going. I drove that car to 256,000 miles before I sold it. Unfortunately, I don't have any pics of that car.

After that car, i bought a 1979 Plymouth Horizon that had something of a dubious history. It had a Rabbit GTi engine and transmission under the hood... it was a running little fool. I only have a couple of pics of the inside of the car and they were never scanned.

I briefly had a 1987 Volkswagen Golf which was purchased for $25 by me and sold for $25 by me after owning the car for 45 minutes. The car was a total and utter piece of shit, but soldiered on into the 300,000s on the odometer.

The summer of 1993, the Pinto was back. Only to be retired in 1994 and traded for a 1981 Buick Regal, which I got royally fucked on the deal. It had the wimpy 3.8L Buick V6 and was so fucked up, I had to put a steering column in it and replace the battery and alternator every other week!

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i'll finish this story later... my fingers hurt.
bye.

Keep them coming Sam. Rest your fingers under that cold ice cream bowl!

Posted by big dave Keep them coming Sam. Rest your fingers under that cold ice cream bowl!

my mom ate the last of my ice cream

Cool, love to hear people's stories like this. That old Capri RS is pretty sweet looking, and nice to another Mercury Bobcat, you never hear about those cars. There's one for sale not too far from my house.

Hello again... Where did we leave off?
Ah, yes my 81 Buick...

After the Buick (which is really an acronym for Big Ugly Import Car Killer), I traded it in 1996 for a 1991 Chevy Cavalier RS coupe. It was a one owner car with 45,000 miles on it and was really nice. The only thing missing from the option sheet if I had ordered it was the sport package, spoiler and 3.1L V6. It was a 2.2L/5 gear and would really hustle for what it was.
In 4 years, I put over 165,000 miles on that car, drove it all over the east coast and finally parted ways with her in Tennessee right before I moved back to New York.

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While in Tennessee, I bought a 1988 Cavalier RS coupe. It was pretty snazzy in red and black. Had a black interior, 2.0L TBI/5gear and had the old school Z24 digital cluster... if you've never seen this cluster, it was fucking awesome. That's what's missing from new cars are these novel, cool-looking, albeit useless, gauge clusters. Everything now is analog and boring.
http://www.youtube...atch?v=ILyQ1pE9_GE
I don't have a picture of my car, but it looked just like the white RS coupe to the right of this pic, but in red.

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Unfortunately, this car had been hit, repaired quickly and quietly and had weird electric issues. Once I managed to sort the electrical out, the 'new' clutch the dealer had assured me had been installed summarily shit the bed. At that point, it went back. I let the car go back and lost $800 on the deal. :(

After that, I bought an 84 Cavalier Type 10 coupe. This car was a step away from a demolition derby. As I recall, i think I maybe paid $100 for this car. It was the old school 2.0L with a 4speed manual. I drove the car home and the rear shocks were gone and there was this fucking smell in the car that would've gagged a maggot. I got the car home and started cleaning. There were wadded up used diapers under the seats, aged to perfection food and, the coup de gras, a decomposing animal carcass in the trunk. After the disinfection and cleaning, all I had in the car were two seats out of another Cavalier, the console, dash and door panels. The headliner was gone, carpet gone, rear seat gone... We called it my Tennessee Rally Car. I had that car about a month or so and on my home from work, the engine started knocking pretty hard and I knew the end had come for that Cavalier.

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After that, I bought an 86 Dodge Daytona Turbo Z out of a field. It had 150,000 miles on it and didn't really run all that bad... when it decided to run. You see, the vacuum lines that ran the FI and turbo were pretty cracked and Mopar didn't offer them as replacement parts any longer. As a consequence of running the car like I was, it was getting flawed data and burning computers up. Logic modules for that vintage Mopar ain't cheap. After it died in the yard, I called it quits and sent her to the big crush in the sky.


So, in between that, I had an 80 Dodge D50... we called it supertruck and as far as I know, it's still running around Rhea County Tennessee to this very day. Bulletproof old Mitsu.

When i moved back here, I was given an 85 Chevy Celebrity... vomit green, with a baby shit green interior. That drove ok, but the flywheel cracked and it wasn't worth changing out. Retired. Crushed.

Then I bought The Bitch. Yes, that's right, The Bitch. A 1986 Dodge 600 coupe. This was as pimp as Chrysler could make without having to hang a Bentley emblem on it. Paid $300 for this car and drove it 20,000 miles in one summer. It actually survived me and ran for another couple year before being retired.

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And then I bought another Cavalier... a 1996 Cavalier coupe. Nothing special, a base model with a 2.2L MPFI OHV engine and 3speed automatic transmission. By the time I was done with it, the car was cherry.

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I traded that car for a 1998 Cavalier base coupe, only this one was the SFI engine with a 5speed. I had this car for a long while.

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While I had this car, I had two winter beaters that never saw plates, a 1989 Dodge Shadow Turbo ES sedan and a 1985 Cavalier Type 10 hatchback. They were way too rotten for the road.

I traded the 1998 Cavalier for a 2005 Chevy Cobalt... bought it right off the car carrier on a saturday afternoon in June 2005.

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And then traded her for this:

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i forgot some of the winter beaters...

the first winter I had the Cobalt SS, I bought a 93 Lumina sedan for $125
beat the everlovin piss out of that car.

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And then in November of 2007, I bought the Cavalier from hell for a winter beater. It failed, it was fail, it is fail. It broke down on me two days before Christmas. Got the car back a month later. Had it ten minutes, did the same thing. Sent it back to the garage that worked on it... they had it another month. Got the car back, assured it was repaired. Had it a week and it died in the parking lot at work. I got out of the car, intent on smashing every window out of that grabastic piece of shit, when i calmly called a tow guy I know and gave the car away. It took him a week to figure out what was wrong with it. So then, his daughter started driving it. Coming home from Albany one night, she called her father to say something was wrong with the car... the subframe had rotted so badly it broke in half. The only thing keeping the wheels straight were the CV shafts.

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Shortly after that ordeal, a kid I worked with got is 2nd or 3rd DWI, punched out a trooper and basically was arrested. For bail money, he sold his Explorer to his parents which meant his parents had 3 cars in their yard and only needed two. I made the comment on how bad my SS was in the snow and he called his parents. They gave me the 1998 Chevy Lumina... left keys and title on the front seat. It's a pretty nice car for a larger sedan. Rides like a Cadillac, ok power, nothing next snapping... good gas mileage, easy to work on, cheap on parts... a good car to pound around in.

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I think out of all the cars I've owned (over 100), the 2 I miss the most are my '86 Daytona Shelby Turbo Z, my '88 (I think) Mazda 323 GTX, and my '86 Shelby GLH-S (Omni Turbo)


However, my 2 favourite cars I've ever owned, I'm still driving almost daily, and that's my '91 Tercel, and my '72 BMW 2002.