Current developments
Well, it has finally happened. After 5 years of almost trouble free motoring and half a year of getting frustrated with shit breaking, the Mazda has been traded in for another car.
A few small problems had been annoying me:
- The front strut towers were cracking from having rock hard springs with only 10mm suspension travel.
- The bonnet had been speared/punctured with a steel bar (driveway accident) and repaired with filler and spray cans.
- 2nd gear had been mis-selected many times and signs of a near death were appearing. The clutch was shuddering a bit too. Thicker oil worked okay.
- Every panel on the car had been flexed via the large stereo and things were breaking/falling off. No matter how much Liquid Nails i used, the rattles just kept coming back!
- The front A-pillar was badly infested with rust the whole way up it, extending down into the bulkhead and thru 2 layers of steel. The whole inside of the pillar was getting soft enough to push a pencil thru. This was covered up with a rubber strip.
.......but the massive damage in the rear/driver's side was the final straw. The damage was so bad that the whole car/chassis had been twisted out of shape. The bloke who repaired it did a good "cheap" job straightening it, but the right rear corner of the car was still found to be 20mm out of alignment (the whole rear corner sits 10mm further off the ground and 10mm off to one side.) All in all, not bad considering how bad it was before!!!
Unfortunately due to this, the boot lid was not able to close perfectly. It was necessary to remove a couple of locators from the boot to get it to shut, but then the body around the door would flex and the door would come off the seal when going up driveways and whatever.
An outer skin panel had been sourced and welded to the car, but the interior skin panels were a poor match. Water leaked heavily into the car from the wheelarch... occasionally filling the boot with water.
The car had been given "Defect notices" by the police in the past which took me 4 attempts to get rectified, but i'm pretty sure it wont pass if caught again without alot of $$ spent on repairs. It was time to cut my losses and trade it in on a different car. All the problems were covered up as cheap as possible, most times without actually repairing the problem.
The car WAS a show car..... when I got sick of that the car was driven on a race track, then thrashed more and more and more. I just lost all interest in the car.
I feel sorry for the new owner. My guess is that they'll have about 4 grands worth of repairs to do within 4 years. But sometimes thats what you get when buying used cars.
Its all over now.
