1991 Mercury Sable LS Station Wagon

So there we were. We didn't want to use the new car for a dog transporter and my wife doesn't like driving my old stick-shift truck. Convenience cried out "GET ANOTHER CAR!" so we did.

We plonked down a grand on this nice, blue station wagon. I really didn't think I'd ever be a station wagon kind of guy, but what the hell. It's pretty darn handy. Now we have a second car that my wife can drive and we have a car that we can haul the dog with without worrying about getting the new car all doggy. We rule.

The Sable has a little over 100K miles on it. It has the 3L V6. I've found out that this motor is called "The Vulcan" or "The Vogon" or something. Whatever the fact, it's the mid-line motor between some tiny-ass four and the 3.8L V6.

It's somewhere in the middle with its trim options as well. The seats are cloth, the windows and locks are electric. The stereo ain't bad. It has the 3 speed overdrive transmission. It has big honkin' roof racks. It also has that bizarro lighted front grille. All the bulbs are burnt out, and at $5 a pop (there's 4) it may stay burnt out.

Naturally for a grand one could expect there's work to be done on the car. It needs new brake rotors in the worst way. It needs at least one or maybe two motor mounts. It also pulls a bit to the left. The air conditioning doesn't work, but that's a pretty high priority if I'm going to be using it for commuting. Still, I can't rationalize putting much money into it in the short term. I'll probably do the motor mounts and the brake rotors myself and after that's done, maybe then I'll have the alignment and air conditioning looked after.

6/12/02

I had the oil changed today and I stopped by the auto parts store to pick up a book on the car and to pick up some stuff to put the inside rearview mirror back on the windshield with. Mission accomplished.

I also picked up those little lights for the grille. I'm such a loser.

6/20/02

Motor mounts are important things. Leave a broken one too long and bad things start to happen. Hoses break. I broke a heater hose, so off to the parts store I went. One length of heater hose and one front motor mount later I'm done and the car is on the road again. The heater hose isn't the metal and rubber, form-fitted job Merc put on the car originally. It's a carefully routed, carefully clamped and carefully wire-tied piece of rubber heater hose from the generic spool at the local parts desk. A pain in the ass, yes, but 1/8 the price of the original unit from Merc. We'll see if it holds up.

The motor mount was a lot less fun. The old one had been ripped asunder by the various torque loads on it and it was a big mess. My annoyance grew larger when I removed it by tipping it sideways to get it through a tight passage between the block and a frame member. From out of the top came a gusher of hydraulic fluid. It missed my face by an inch, but I ended up with that crap in my hair, on my shirt, hands and pretty much everywhere else. Insert string of explitives here.

Getting the part in was no easy feat, either. You'd think a part with just one bolt at the bottom and one bolt at the top would be a can o'corn. This just wasn't so. The top bolt went through a vertical flange on the top of the motor mount into a flush hole on the engine block. The bolt didn't have a tapered end to help with lining it up, and both the mount and the mouting surface had no ridges to help with lining it up either. This meant an hour and a half of various positions, writhing on the ground, trying to get these things to line up. I could find the hole just fine, it was getting the bolt threaded properly that was the problem. Wrong angle after wrong angle ended up being quite an ordeal. I won after much cussing and swearing.

The car drives much nicer now, but there's still more work to do.

7/12/02

Driving down the street today produced a lawnmower-launched rock that broke my windshield. I don't have the kind of insurance that covers that particular problem. Shit.

8/28/02

We just got the car back from the shop. In preparation for winter, we took the car in and had them do a complete brake job and do both axle shafts as both CV joint boots were broken. Total cost ended up just under 800 bucks. Ouch. They also discovered a ply separation in one of the tires. More shit to do, I guess. They moved that tire to the rear of the car so it didn't make the steering wheel shake so badly and so it wouldn't put the hurt on me if it does blow out. Taking all this into consideration, the thing works flippin' great now. It had better.

4/03

Took the Sable in to have some work done on the fuel system. It was starting to stall and chug a bit and I didn't know what was the deal. I thought it might be the fuel pump and since that is located inside the gas tank, I thought it better to have the pros do that job. I no longer enjoy bathing in gasoline. Go figure.

It turns out it was a bunch of sensors and valves in the injection system. There was no way I'd have figured that out, so it was a good thing I brought it to the pros. They also replaced the neutral safety switch as it was broken and not telling the engine management unit what gear the transmission was in. This was supposed to have settled down its wild shifting and it did. For about a week.

I was coming home from work and I stopped at a stoplight about 3 blocks from the house. As the light turned green, the tranny went clunk, grind, grind, fweee. Not good. I soon found that I could have any gear I wanted as long as it was neutral and park. That sucked.

I ended up pushing it 3 blocks uphill to the house and, after a couple of weeks of sniping some parts off of it for some friends' Taurus/Sable cars, I donated it. She's gone.