"Bee Van" or "Our Season of Frugality"

This all started about a year and a half ago.

At the time, our family was still riding around in a 1999 black Ford Windstar that we'd owned for around seven years. A good amount of time to have driven a used vehicle, and a good amount of miles, too -- it had 40,000 on the odometer when we'd bought it and we'd added close to 100,000 in the time we'd been driving it.

At point of purchase, the Windstar was all shiny and black and new car smell. Seven years later, it had morphed into the Millenium Falcon of vehicles. The back door didn't close very well (we'd been rear-ended, which had also left a crack in the back bumper.) One light on the control panel had popped on, then another and another, all shining quite persistently. Which I think were all put there by the manufacturer, a series of carefully timed warnings: look, you really should probably get this vehicle serviced, the first one seemed to be saying; then, I'm serious -- something is really wrong; and finally, Danger, Will Robinson, Danger...

The real indication that something was wrong came in a trip we took across the Great State of Michigan to the water park we go to every year with friends. About halfway into the trek, our cell phone rang.

"Is everything okay up there?" our friend in the vehicle following us asked.
"I think so," we replied, "why?"
"Um, our windshield is covered with motor oil or something..."

And it was. We would find out later a leaky manifold gasket was to blame, one of those car parts that just SOUNDS expensive to fix -- and is. Easily costing several hundred dollars in car repairs AND embarrassment (words cannot express the dismay you feel at seeing someone's car covered in motor oil -- and feeling you're responsible.)

But this wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back, that would come the next summer when, after a series of minor repairs, we took the same trip from Jackson to Muskegon...

I need to interject something here, and that is the fact that the easiest way for a male to make himself look like a jackass is to utter the phrase "Everything's fine" to his spouse.

Even if you're sure it is. Because there's a cosmic guarantee that speaking those words will promise disaster.

It has been said before that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. This holds true for trips involving any form of motorized transportation. We were planning to leave Friday evening, spending the night at my parents' house, and then going on to the water park Saturday morning. I had spent a couple hours that week getting the Windstar ready to go -- changing the oil, checking fluid levels, vacuuming it out. The transmission had been acting up, but I discovered the source: a terribly low fluid level. Apparently it had small leak. So I simply added fluid and a bottle of "Stop Leak" and called it good.

"Are you SURE everything's okay?" my wife asked.
"Yeah. Wait, what do you mean?" I responded.
"With the van.""Oooooh, you mean the transmission problem. Of course!""I'm just asking," she asked. "Can you guarantee this van is going to get us there?"

And that was when I made the mistake and uttered the phrase, a kind of alchemy that, instead of turning things to gold, turned them to...well, you get the point.

I'll summarize by saying the van DID make it to my parents' house, just barely. We had to stop every ten minutes to dump in as much transmission fluid as possible (it was actually dripping out of the bottom of the engine onto the ground almost as fast as I could pour it in.) We'd pull off an exit ramp and I'd run, Keystone Cops style around the front of the vehicle, pop the hood, dump in two quarts of fluid, jump back into the driver's seat and roar off the down the highway.

It was a long trip. I can still feel the heat on my skin from the glare my wife was giving me.

So with as bad as this experience was, you'd think karma would have had its fill with us. But no. We didn't realize it had only back-handed us, and was returning a second time for a full, open-handed face slap.

Fast forward to a few days later when, after returning home (an adventure in itself getting that heap of metal back home so we could junk it) we received a phone call from my parents.

We'd been shopping for another vehicle, and were looking at buying another minivan from a state auction I'd found online. When we didn't end up getting that vehicle, my dad called with this offer.

You saw the van parked in our driveway? my dad asked. We'd like to give you that.

We had seen it. My dad had bought it from a man who lived about a mile away. The van, a gold Oldsmobile Silhouette was sitting in his front yard with a 'For Sale' sign and a price tag of $400. It needed some major transmission work and some other minor repairs but the body, made of fiberglass instead of steel, was in great shape. Would you take $100 for it? my dad offered after looking it over; the owner would.

And so there we were.

If this seems like a too-good-to-be-true story, that's because it is.

My dad was offering to have a car dealer install a factory-rebuilt transmission in it, at a cost of several thousand dollars, along with making all the other necessary repairs. And all this for a used minivan with a total of, get this, 200,000 miles already on the odometer.

"No, no, only 194,000" my dad responded.

Several days later, there we were, being given the tour by my father, proving that along with all of the other careers he's had (repo-man, mechanic, magician, factory worker, etc) he could easily fall back on a career as a used car salesman, should present conditions require a career change.

Upon inspection, my wife first noticed that a family of yellow jackets had decided to create a nest in the back door (between the door seal and window) so there you have it...we christened it 'Bee Van.' (Haven't checked yet, but I'm wondering if this configuration would be available as a vanity license plate...hmmm...)

This would be the first in a long line of deficiencies and defects we've found over the last 18 months. After my parents spent the time and expense of having the rebuilt transmission put into it, as we were driving it home we noticed a whine coming from the front of the vehicle.

I called my dad that week and after talking it over, he came up with a diagnosis: a defective wheel bearing. Again, one of those parts that, unless you're a mechanic, you have no idea what it does or where it is; which of course means it's a relatively expensive fix.

"But you guys are coming this weekend, right?" my father asked.

My stomach began churning as I knew what was coming next.

One of the things I've learned over the course of my forty years of living with my father is he's a big picture guy. If the devil is in the details, then why even bother looking at them? It's much more pleasant to see the overall picture, to get a nice wide, faraway look at the problem and see that things really aren't as bad as they might seem.

As it applied to this present situation with Bee Van needing the wheel bearing, his perspective was this: I've fixed this before. We can handle this.

In other words: EVERYTHING'S FINE.

That I should have had this churning sensation in my stomach might make it seem like I was ungrateful for the help he was offering in helping us fix this problem; he was going to pay for the parts, and we were even going to use his tools to fix the van. And, remember, he'd been a licensed mechanic previously -- so what was the big deal, right?

And from MY perspective, the big deal involved all of these things: 1) my wife and I felt TERRIBLE that he was willing to invest YET ANOTHER fairly large amount of money (money which, let's face it, we didn't have) in the vehicle that my wife and I weren't sure was worth more than the price of the scrap metal holding it together; 2) previous experience has told me that the 2 or 3 hour fix he was promising would probably turn into 5 or 6 hours; and 3) if we couldn't get it fixed in that period of time, what were we going to do for a vehicle? We were 2 hours from home.

But he was undaunted, not even remotely dissuaded by my reasoning. And with no other good argument I could think of, I agreed. Since it had to be done, we might as well do it. So after driving into an auto parts retailer to buy a wheel bearing, we set out to work.

Another note needs to be interjected here, concerning the process of installing wheel bearings. "Bear with me" if you'll pardon the pun, but several things need to be explained to squeeze the full humor out of what I think you'll find is a hilarious episode in the saga we call "Growing Up Strodtbeck."

Each wheel -- that is to say, the thing that a car tire is bolted to -- has a component that bears the weight of the car as it drives down the road. This is a wheel bearing. (I'm not a mechanic, I only play one on tv, so my description is a little light on details.) Over time, the 'bearings' -- that is, the little metal ball bearing inside the wheel bearing component, wear down. The grease that lubricates them breaks down, and eventually instead of rolling smoothly as they are supposed to, to bearings begin grinding, louder and louder and louder until they become so hot that something even more serious can happen to the vehicle.

The wheel bearing assembly is purchased as one unit on most vehicle, about the size of, say, a portable Compact Disc player. The way the disassembly is supposed to work is this: Jack the vehicle up, take off the tire, take off a bunch of brake parts that are in the way of what needs to be replaced, take off the old bearing assembly, install the new one, and put everything back on.

So the question always arises in ANY and EVERY single car repair that I have ever dealt with, from changing the oil to replacing a complete exhaust system: what do you do when something goes wrong?

What went wrong first was how long it took in taking everything apart. We couldn't seem to get the old bearing off. Numerous parts were taken off -- brake parts, springy things, suspension components. Still the bearing unit wouldn't come out.

"We must need to take the sway bar off," my dad said.

Definition of Sway Bar: a torsion spring that resists body roll motions...i.e. this is an enormous spring -- nearly as wide as the vehicle you're driving -- that has enough tension in it that it keeps the entire vehicle from rolling over if you, say, jerk the wheel to one side to make a sudden swerve.

That I didn't know what this device was should have been a warning sign. Had I realized what we were taking off, I'm not exactly sure, but I think I would have dropped the tools we were using and repeatedly asked the question, "Are we sure we should be doing this?"

Consider: a four foot long spring that prevents an entire automobile from tipping over at high speeds must have like, what, four or five thousand lbs. of resistance to it?

I don't know. I don't even know if 'resistance' is the right word used to measure springy things, but anyway, we worked for like an hour just to get the thing off...only to find we never had to take it off in the first place, another part was actually preventing us from finishing the job.

But we finally finished after about 3 hours. We had to grunt like animals, like cave men to get that stupid thing pried back into place, but finally...

...it was done.

My dad grabbed the keys, jumped behind the wheel, and asked excitedly, "Ready to try her out?"

"You go ahead," I replied. I was exhausted and covered with grease and grime.

And off he went, roaring down the driveway and onto their street.

Two minutes later, he was back. The look of defeat and exhaustion on his face brought a flurry of klaxon warning signals to my mind: "What's wrong?" I asked, not really wanting to know.

He padded slowly toward me, handed over the keys, and closing his eyes in resignation, said: "It was the wrong one."

"What do you...the wrong side?" I asked. "You're lying." He only slowly shook his head.

"See for yourself." He handed me the keys.

And sure enough, he was right. Somehow, we'd managed to take wheel bearing off the wrong side and replace a perfectly good wheel bearing with another one.

That same day, we drove back into town, bought another wheel bearing and replaced the other one. It was the first in a series of repairs Bee Van has needed, including the following: driver's side door handle (outside, replaced TWICE), passenger's side door handle (outside), rear seat belt, driver's seat belt, driver's side door lock assembly, passenger's side door lock assembly, turn signal switch (twice), steering wheel (yes, apparently those can wear out also), front brakes, battery, and wiper transmission assembly.

I'm not making any of this up. Either the mechanic my dad uses is taking him for a ride -- and trying to put his kids through college? pay for a yacht? -- or this van is a bigger piece of crap than even I would have believed possible.

Either way, I'm convinced I'm right; it probably wasn't the best purchase, nor was it the best decision to spend such an unbelievable amount of money on a vehicle that my dad HAD ORIGINALLY PURCHASED TO USED AS A PARTS VEHICLE.

And my dad is equally convinced it was STILL the right decision; after all, his Oldsmobile Sihouette has over 300,000 on it, right? He can't understand the skepticism I have toward his belief that EVERY Olds Silhouette should be capable of going over 300,000 miles...

So, to recap:

1 used bee-infested van... $100

1 rebuilt-transmission/brake repairs/2 wheel bearings/new turn signal switch/new steering wheel/assorted door locks and handles...$4500

Getting to tell your father 'I told you so' for the foreseeable future?

Priceless.