Car Trouble!

"Have you ever had trouble with your automobile?" Adam Ant

So yes, I am now the owner of a 1986 Cadillac Sedan Deville, which as it turns out is a much maligned car. You see the car itself looks fine, and has no real noticeable issues, even its spare is in excellent shape. However as it turns out there is a monster under the hood.

The 86 Cadillac Deville has an HT 4100 V8 engine, which as I understand it has quite the history of random catastrophic failure, mainly due to airflow issues wherein the air intake fan simply never flicks on. Besides this there are problems with coolant leaks in the engine and other such and such. This however is not my current concern. You see I purchased the car on Monday, drove it home and found to my surprise the following morning that it was completely dead. Fortunately I could tell it was the easier to fix kind of dead. There was no power, none at all, and I determined that the battery must therefore be the problem. What to do eh? Well in the dead of night i tried jump starting the car, but without any flashlights or source of visual reference blindly affixed the cable to what I had determined to be the positive and negative terminals, I was completely right incidentally. However the car would not start. So today I set about with the toolbox and decided I would remove the battery, take it to Kragens and have them dispose of it whilst also giving me a rebate for the new battery. Once I opened the hood however I discovered that I had affixed the negative cord to a 'metal' rod, that was actually wrapped in plastic. Perfect I thought, and quickly set about trying to jump start it again. This time it worked, with the negative clasped to the vehicles metal interior edge.

The car started and I went driving, if for no other reason than because I needed to charge the dang thing back up. I pondered what had caused the battery to drain, seeing as how I could not accurately identify any light sources that were on. As I drove though I noticed an acrid smell. GADZOOKS! It was the lights in the ceiling, they were burning hot, to place a thumb print of water on them was to watch it disappear in a evaporated mist. Poke the off button on them as I may they would not stay off. Then after leaving the car for a time i noticed that an additional two lights in the back of the car were trapped in a permanent 'on'!

So I quickly decided to bump up the inspection on the car by my mechanic at Dikes-Thornton Automotive. The car will be left there till Monday, its wiring will be inspected and then the engine and other bits will be looked over and I will decide what bits he finds worth repairing will be repaired.

Such trouble! Hopefully the catastrophic engine failure will miss me.