Not sure why you alone are having so much trouble with them.
Long story but it's a combination of incompetent mechanics messing with me and my car and then my family getting into my business and dismissing me and any problems. I desperately need to leave this place for good. My family doesn't want me to have a car or a job and they run me broke. My grandfather is a helpless senile mechanic that has been retired for a few years. He has a lot of expensive tools and likes to butt into my business every morning because I have a car and he has the tools to work on everything. He's been an engine mechanic his entire life but knows nothing anymore. This situation gave me problems from the moment I bought the car and any time I have a problem with the car where he has to work on anything, I resent him for the next thing that blows up and then he resents my car because it's "the worst thing he's ever worked on." The worst was June of last year when I finally had the best job of my life leaving this crap town and making $700/wk machining furniture most mornings. I worked 6 days each week for 3 months and did no maintenance to the car on my only day off due to constant exhaustion. In which time, my family would mess with my car without me learning about it until the last week of my job and they continued to bother me about everything wrong with it and how I shouldn't have a job. The whole time I drove it would randomly die on the freeway in extremely dangerous situations where I'm trying to merge into traffic, oil would blow out of the crankcase all over the engine compartment and inside the air cleaner causing it to stall and this just went on and on. I began working on the car during my lunch breaks to mitigate these issues and figure out what was wrong. People at work would get in my face and start bothering me while trying to concentrate on what was going on, effectively nullifying any progress. It got worse when the court got involved in my life and started mucking up my payline so that I started losing as much as $80/day. I eventually figured out that I don't have to agree to their contracts so that harassment went away pretty quickly.
Some weird stuff happened during that time but the worst of it was waking up every Monday to some problem where I had to resort to driving any three of my grandfather's big 1972 Fords to work for the rest of the week while this trouble got fixed. Gas was $4.25/gal so the whole time I was just
. These all have big 390 engines and just aren't made for driving every day let alone 64 miles out of town every day. A dead battery was the first issue after my alternator blew up. Since this town is such a constant availability issue, I had to wait a week just to get it. When that was fixed the next week I had a problem shifting on my way home from work. I barely got the car home and my grandfather jumped on that pretty fast. I told him what was going on and he started arguing with me about how I don't maintain the car. He didn't even know what the problem was and he started to fill the transmission with fluid as I tried very hard desperately pulling the transmission into neutral and started it up. I still couldn't shift into reverse and he continued pouring fluid into the transmission hoping it would shift. He eventually snapped the dipstick while checking the fluid level and that was pretty much the defining point where everything went out of control afterwards. I took the shifter apart trying to diagnose the problem and found that the safety linkage broke. I removed it and could shift again. No more problem with that.
From then on, the transmission started to overheat after driving for 10 minutes. So much that the bottom of the shifter would burn my hand. I knew that wasn't right and that the transmission needed rebuilding or it would blow up. About early September I needed to make a trip to Portland to get something to replace in the car and that's when the transmission started slipping to the point where it stranded me in Vancouver. Everyone but police were willing to step in and help me, so that was a disaster. I eventually got it to a gas station and had to run around everywhere in the middle of the night looking for transmission fluid only to find it was spilling out faster than I could pour it. After the weekend was over I finally managed to get a wrecker to tow it home for about $300. At that point the harassment from my family and verbal abuse became awful and would only end after screaming down their throats to either help or leave me alone. That didn't accomplish much though. After I finally pulled the transmission, we discovered that the valve body tube had exploded and the shavings were in the pan and transmission cooler. So I got that rebuilt at a friend's garage while my grandfather got it in his head to flush the transmission cooler. Only he didn't.
So I got it rebuilt, bolted up, transmission started jerking again but started to behave after about a week. Winter came and I started having alternator problems again. Transmission started leaking fluid to the point where I had to add some every morning before leaving for work. It finally blew up after 6 months while I had another amazing job. My family doesn't want me to leave, won't get a shop for me to do the rebuild and is just making this into a huge expensive mess. So, I had no choice but to take it to a real mechanic. It is now day 57 that I'm without a car, my friends are starting to worry about me a lot, I haven't been able to get a job during the production time of my work season and I'm already broke again trying to get this fixed without the city and my landlord complaining about the "nonfunctional AMC wagon."
I towed it to the transmission shop and now it's his problem. If he can't fix it, I'll just have to send it to the crusher. If it gets fixed, great. I can go get the transmission I intended to put into this car in the first place. Yeah, this transmission that I need rebuilt so bad is
temporary.
Topic: help! Transmission rebuild or remanufactured? (Read 18491 times)