*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

I took a serious hiatus after the wedding, mainly because I wanted to come back with pics and news of the wedding and honeymoon, and then never got any pics posted anywhere so I never did a post about it and on and on until now when I feel like enough time has passed that I can forget about the wedding and move on with a new post.

And my new post is about - cars!

Not the cartoon kind, the kind you spend your hard earned payolas on, and that break down and suck more payolas, and that get smashed up and suck more, and suck more and suck more and more and more...

Anyway, a good buddy of mine has been going through the process of selecting a new car recently, and it's made me think of all the things that I go over when I check out a car for myself to buy, and when I maintain the cars I do buy.  I'm certainly not an expert at buying cars or anything - actually I'm pretty inexperienced at that. What I do have experience with is nursing along old cars, and so I have some advice about the types of things you might look for when purchasing a car that is less than new (and I do recommend that you buy a car that is less than new in almost every situation - many other people have covered that on the web so go look for their advice on that one) and when caring for a car that is a few years older than the typical leased vehicle.

So first off, let's talk about service records. When you're buying a used car, service records are like money in the bank. And actually, the lack of service records are money in the bank too. 

The existence of service records means that work has been done and you can see exactly when it was done (date and mileage) and by whom and how much it cost. If a particular piece of maintenance can not be proved to have been done by service records, than it may never have been done as far as you, the purchaser, are concerned. As such, you should ask for a discount on the asking price given that you will have to perform that service yourself, and also to compensate you for any damage that may have been done during the time the car has gone without that service.

The user manual is a wealth of information about a vehicle, and although I have recently discovered that most people don't do the very simple and important task of reading their user manual (that little book that sits in the funny wallet thing inside the dash), it fully describes all service intervals for the car. The term service intervals refers to the specified time or mileage that can pass before a particular service item needs to be performed. 

For instance, on my 1998 Volvo V70 the service interval on the timing belt is the shorter of 70,000 miles or 5 years. The timing belt for this car cannot reliably be trusted beyond that and must be changed. The service interval on changing the brake fluid is 2 years. The service interval on changing the coolant is 3 years. In the case of a timing belt, ignoring the service interval could mean a ruined engine (noticeable!) while ignoring the brake fluid service interval (which most people do) probably just means additional corrosion in the braking system (likely not immediately noticeable). 

The lesson here is that sometimes ignoring service intervals will bite you in the ass. Big time. Other times it will bite you in the ass sometime far off in the future in some vague and unspecified way. The point is, it WILL bite you in the ass. 

More to come...