Car repairs are getting more frequent...

[alkemyst]

never said rust free. His seems to be falling apart from it though.

Why do you describe the obvious things in every car post?

 

[TheEarthWillShake]

Originally posted by: JulesMaximus
Those Contours were not built to last. A friend of mine had one and that thing was a pile of junk by the time he got rid of it. Try finding one that the dash hasn't peeled back on too...it's impossible.

Pretty much any American car was never meant to last. Maybe the trucks. People need to stop buying shitty American cars so they American companies have to step up to compete right.

 

[AMCRambler]

Alkemyst you're right about the LCA's. Premature wear of the bushings on the LCA's is common to the Contour. My car only has 106,000 on it and it just about shredded one of the two bushings on the drivers side. It sucks but not much I can do about it. The arm itself is fine so you can just take it off and get a new bushing pressed in but a whole replacement arm which comes with a new ball joint is so cheap ($74.50 apiece) it wasn't worth the pain in the butt of taking them off, getting the bushings and finding a shop to press them in. The ball joints are actually riveted to the LCA so you can replace those separately but you have to grind off the rivets so that you can bolt the new one on. Obvious choice was to get two new arms. I did of course replace both front arms even though the bushing was only toast on the one side. Preventative maintenance which should save me some time down the road when the other bushings would fail at an inconvenient time.
As far as rinsing off the underside of the car, I guess you can do that but as Earth was saying, winter time up here you'd have to do it daily and as soon as you drive outta the car wash it's going to be covered in salt again. When I do wash my car I try and spray up underneath and in the wheel wells but it's pretty low to the ground so short of gettnig down on hands and knees, it's not happening.

$600 for tires is just a guess but the last set I bought I went for the best rated all season tire I could find since I wasn't going to bother with snow tires. Bridgestone G009's ran about $120 apiece plus the mounting and balancing required ran it up to about $600 down at Firestone. Tire Rack is cheaper so my next set will come from there but that might save me $100 all told. Still looking at some dough.

Update on the gas tank straps. They've had my car since last Sunday waiting for the ford parts to ship so they started calling all the local parts stores again and found one that could order up some aftermarket straps. They're probably the universal straps as the mechanic called me today to let me know it was done. The straps fit pretty well but there's a small gap between the tank and the straps, however the tank is secured (woo hoo!). I'll be picking my car up tonight finally.