My Buick is finally parked inside a warm and dry garage but it wasn't exactly smooth sailing getting there.When I decided to drive the car from my brothers house to the garage the weather was clear, the roads dry and the temperature 3-4 degrees Celsius.
When we actually got things going it was pitch black, sub-zero temperature and foggy. Not the best conditions for driving a two ton muscle car with absolutely nothing along the lines of winter tyres on.
This meant that I had to keep the speed to about 20-25 mph which in turn meant that I had to take the back roads to the garage. The journey took roughly 45 minutes.
Worth noting is that the car still had a lot of moisture and water in the coupe - water that froze as soon as the temperature went below zero. There's no heat in the car due to the fan and/or dashboard electronics being broken.
Nothing to do but roll down the windows and put on a lot of warm clothes. It wasn't all that bad though, most of my body went numb after about 15 minutes so I couldn't feel the cold for the better part of the journey.
Well, we finally arrived at the garage but at this stage we were so tired so we just drove the car in, front first, just so that it'd get in for the night. Since I'm going to work more on the front end we needed to turn it around, something we planned for yesterday.
Now, turning a car around shouldn't be such a big deal, right? My reply to that is "It depends."
In my case it depended on two things; does your car have insanely bad ground clearance due to headers and does the garage have a big bulky door that has it's frame protruding up an inch from the ground?
We tried to rig a ramp from planks that we had lying around but no matter what we did the headers caught on the frame and brought the car to a juddering halt. Nothing to do but drive it in, front first, again and work out a better solution to the problem.
To top things off I'm a bit torn about the garage. The guys I'm sharing it with are true characters but great in every way. One guy, Reijo, is currently rebuilding an Oldsmobile estate into a pickup truck, just for fun of course.
The guy who hooked me up with the spot, Anders, works at the biggest Yankee car parts dealer in Gothenburg. Roland, who actually lives in a trailer outside the garage, is apparently an extremely talented mechanic.
All of them very helpful and willing to answer any and all questions I might have. I noticed just yesterday that the garage even has a plasma cutter, something I never could afford on my own.
Still, as you can see on the pictures, there's not even enough room to breathe in there as it is now and I can't help but feel that it's going to be tough getting any major work done on the car.
I'm not going to change for a year or two anyhow - the knowledge these guys bring with them is worth way too much. One example of this knowledge is that Reijo, as soon as he hard my car start, thinks that a crankshaft bearing is busted.
Not great news as I was told that my engine was in good condition when I bought the car but it's better to get the news this way when I still can fix it than in the form of a completely busted engine.
All in all, with the garage solved I now have one less problem to take care of. The rest is a lot more fun.
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