Thanks for the kind words. I had previously been on your site and think it is great. It's one of the first places I visited after I bought the car.

The work has been on a hiatus the past three or four days as I had a project to do on my motorhome. Since the weather is supposed to be nice for the next week or so, I cleaned up our daily drivers today.

It is cool here today so I washed the cars in the lower garage with the lift. That's also where the furnace, TV and sound system are. To give me a bit more head room (and to avoid hitting said head on the low hanging tires), I removed the wheels and tires today. I had a balance issue on the drive home so I cleaned the wheel and tires so I can haul them to the tire place and not make a huge mess in my station wagon.

The exhaust needs to be replaced. On eBay I found a used Borla stainless steel exhaust for a 4.5. It is in the stock configuration and in very good shape. It was also cleaned up today in preparation for its installation.

In Microsoft Access I created a database containing all of the service records that I have for the car. Those date back to 1991 when the second owner purchased it with 96K on the clock. The very first record is for a PPI done prior to purchase. The second record is a work order fixing those issues found on the PPI. The car was sold in 2015 so the guy owned it 24 years. The total dollar figure for the 24 years was $48K and change. So his average cost per year was about $2K.

The most interesting part of entering the information was how the costs have changed. The same shop was used for most of the repairs over that period of time with the hourly rate going from $45 per hour to $90 per hour. But the cost of the oil filter remained at $9.35 until about 2005 when it went to $11. However, the third owner (the guy I bought the car from) was only charged $10.50 for an oil filter back in December, 2016.

The oil of choice over all of those years of ownership was Pennzoil 10W40. There were many oil changes over the years. The third owner used Valvoline synthetic. I may go back to Pennzoil the next time I change the oil just for old times sake!!

Now that I have the data very accessible, I will take the time to hit some highlights on a future post. My impression was that the second owner fixed whatever needed to be fixed. The one thing that is not there is a bill for a paint job. There is an estimate for $2800 for rear end accident damage in the year 2000 and there is a reference in one of the service bills about taking the car to the body shop for repair. But no bill.

Another quirk happened in the year 2000. If you recall, there was much consternation about what would happen with computer dating during that year. Evidently it affected the computer at the repair place. I had placed the work orders in a three leaf binder in order. As I came upon three entries for the year 2011, I discovered a discrepancy in the mileage figures. After looking over the entire work order, I found where someone had hand written the date of the receipt of payment and it was in the year 2000. I made some notes on the affected work orders for future owners.