'96 Saturn sold, '01 Saturn finally on the road!

[Midwestzx2]

There are tons and tons of these things in the salvage yards, plenty of parts to keep them going a long time. I'de like to pick up yet another, strip it to the bare chassis, and go through it completely. Build myself a "brand new" sl1 that will last 200k, for a fraction the price of a real new car.

[VetteOwner]

Must have different salvage yards then... out of the prolly 12 yards in my wide area ive seen maybe 4 or 5...

[Project84]

The local junkyards to Cincinnati typically have 8-10 of them in each yard. Mostly I'd assume due to transmission issues as these cars are known to have a "reverse slam" issue which is pretty easily and cheaply corrected most often but to the common person they'd just think it needed a new transmission and give up on the car.

The FE figures in my gaslog are for all stock, general driving w/ no hypermiling techniques. I can't complain much about that.

[VetteOwner]

Hmm weird. altho out of the few i mentioned only about 3 have s10 parts haha. which is weird because you cant go a city block without seeing a s10/blazer/sonoma/jimmy around here haha of all years...

[Project84]

I have some shockingly embarrassing news to report here...

Upon the original entry in this thread, I had just done the 100k mile tune up on this SL1.


......at 122k now, I did another MMO soak and when replacing the (broken) spark plug wires for the initial startup I realized something quite disturbing.



FOR 22k MILES I'VE BEEN RUNNING THE WRONG FIRING ORDER. DOH! lol

I wired the car 1-4-2-3 when it's acutally 4-1-2-3.


Upon this fix, the car runs INCREDIBLY SMOOTHER, go figure. Oddly enough though it feels more anemic than ever. Oh well, 100hp isn't much anyway!

The shade-tree-mechanic in me is grinning because although I drove 2 years on the wrong firing order, she's running better than I've ever experienced.

I hope the mileage goes up, been averaging 26-28 city for quite some time now. I'd like to see some 30's now w/ the firing order corrected.


haha

[theholycow]

Glad you got it figured out.

[Project84]

holycow - this place seems to have lost most/all of it's steam...

[theholycow]

Yeah, I guess there's an ebb and flow to it. I know I'm not as prolific as I used to be...that's partly because of changing interests (hooray short attention span!) and partly because I've adjusted my posting style, which I think used to be excessive, verbose, and too often offensive.