Is Christmas over yet?

Notice the lovely Teal latex house paint that goes nearly three quarters of the way around?

WOW! this post has been a long time coming! It's been about 3 months since I originally posted, and not much has been done in the way of work on the Mighty Dodge. I spent a little while cleaning it out, and a little more assessing the condition and all the repairs needed, and it is just a short list:

1. Everything

That about sums it up (well, what did I expect for $60?).

Here are a few pictures I took the first time out, to get a general idea of what I had purchased.

Broken sliding window, door lock, lower hatch, etc. At least this is the only broken glass.

Cabinet doors were removed and/or painted blue, and the cabinet was hacked away to make room for the microwave. Love the keyholder and painted ironwork.

I am guessing the chairs are original, but possibly not on the correct side. They don't, however, match the front seats. And they are bolted to the floor.

What can I say? Yuck?

I really expected to find more crap stored in the compartments. This is not too bad.

I think the first order of business is to get it running again, which will be no small task in itself. I figure that if the motor can be made to work, then the rest will be salvageable. I am planning to get out to the storage facility in the next day or two and try to spin up the oil pump to get some oil circulating in the engine, then at least try to crank it through to check the compression in the cylinders. This will be the big indicator of the current health of the engine, and everything else will depend on that.

For starters, I am sure that the fuel tank is full of gunk, so I would need to drain all the gas. It currently has a Holley 1850-2 carburetor (this is a 4160 type carb) with manual choke. The choke was not connected to anything, so I would guess that it was pretty hard to start, if at all. The carb also needs work (actually a rebuild), and since I am sure it is not stock, I would guess that it is NOT jetted properly.

After the engine will be the next most expensive system, the brakes. The master cylinder was dry when I bought the motor home, so I know it will need some work. I put brake fluid in the master cylinder and pumped away, but so far have not found the leak(s). I do know the pedal doesn't hold pressure, so the master will probably need a rebuild, along with the wheel cylinders. Ogburn Brake in Fort Worth has been pretty good in the past at coming up with wheel cylinders and kits for my old 1963 Ford F500 truck, so I am hoping they can do the same for me now.

The transmission is a typical truck 727, so I am pretty sure that it will be easy enough to get rebuilt if there are any problems. I will probably do that just to be safe, since it will be easier to do it now than on the road somewhere. I can pull it myself, and should be able to get it rebuilt for typical 3 speed rates (usually around $400). Or I may just do it myself (wouldn't be the first time).

Beyond that, there is the rest of the fuel system (unknown). The 12 volt charging system (unknown). Steering (unknown). Tires (crappy). Generator (unknown). 120 volt electrical system (unknown). Water system (unknown). Air conditioners (unknown, but newer). Refrigerator (unknown, but newer). The cooling system is holding water, so I am hopeful that the radiator will hold up, although I wouldn't count on the water pump (again, relatively inexpensive, so worth fixing now).

The story -

That's right, you read it correctly: I purchased this wonderful piece of motoring history for the princely sum of $60.

How, you may ask? Well, for starters, let me say that Craigslist is a wonderful thing. This particular motor home had been advertised several times on the local (Dallas/Fort Worth) Craigslist site. It had been abandoned at a south Fort Worth storage facility, and they (by law) had to sell it at auction to the highest bidder.

The peculiar thing about Craigslist is that it is "reader moderated", which means that all the users (or at least a handful of the more self-righteous ones) determine what content is appropriate by "flagging" those ads they deem inappropriate. You don't even have to understand or even know the terms of service before you go about randomly flagging ads, and if an ad is flagged enough times it is removed from the site.

Apparently, those people (let's call them netcops) felt that the ad for this RV was inappropriate and flagged it every tiime it was posted, so it never stayed on for more than a few hours. Maybe it was because it was being listed by a business. Maybe it was because it had to be auctioned instead of sold for a fixed price. Maybe it was because they relisted it every 2-3 days (which is allowed by the TOS). Maybe it was because the flaggers' wife/mother/parole officer/dominatrix would not allow them to spend their money on something so "frivolous", and so they flagged the ad in a fit of jealous rage and/or infantile tantrum-throwing. We will never know the true reason for it being flagged, because no one records a reason why.

So Friday came and the auction was supposed to start at 10:00 am. I arrived at 9:00, not sure of what to expect for turnout. I was the first one there. While waiting for the event to start, I noticed a handful of people with trucks and trailers showing up in the parking lot, and they all seemed to know each other. I began to wonder just how many of these people would be bidding on the Travco. Typically, these auctions bring out an assortment of scary looking people who resell the stuff they buy in storage building auctions on eBay and elsewhere. Or maybe they just drag it all back to the trailer park to ad to their collection of Hummels and beanie babies.

10:00 passed, and the management finally opened the gate to start the auction. There were a whopping 8 people registered to bid, so it was quickly becoming apparent thet the field of competition would be thin for the Travco. As we went through looking at the various spaces that were being sold for storage fees, it appeared that all of the people around me were there for those auctions, and not thr RV. Surely I wasn't the only one there that had seen the ad on Craigslist!

Finally, we made it to the last item on the auction list, the mighty Dodge! Everyone had to take a turn walking through it, but no one seemed to be really interested. The auctioneer asked for an opening bid, to which no one responded. He waited what seemed like 20 minutes (I'm sure it was more like 1) and finally a guy said "50 dollars". This was the same guy that bid $50 on almost every other auction, didn't jump in when he was outbid, and never won a single one. I decided to hold off until the auctioneer was going out to see where this ride would take me, so I waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It became apparent that no one else was going to bid. You should have seen the look of panic on our dear bidder's face (hey, maybe he wasn't a shill bidder after all!). Finally, when the auctioneer started with "going", I bid 60 bucks. Relief came over the opening bidder's face, so I figured there would be no counters.

It wasn't until well after the auctioneer declared it "gone" that I realized that I now owned this marvelous treasure. Then, suddenly, instant buyer's remorse! What the heck have I done? I now owned 5 tons of immovable object. I had nowhere to keep it, no way to move it, and I didn't even know if it ran. It had been sitting unregistered for 6 years in the same spot and had apparently not been running in all that time. Still, it was a relatively simple vehicle as far as systems go, and it had a REALLY cool 413 Chrysler engine in it, so why not see what comes of it?

The storage lot agreed to let me keep it there as long as I wanted to pay for the storage space (hadn't they learned from the last owner?). I figured it will give me a place to keep it until I can either get it running or figure out what to do with it. I paid for the next two months (which, incidentally, was more than the purchase price of the RV) and went back to assess exactly what I was dealing with.

I will (hopefully) be able to get out and take some pictures once the storms have pushed through our area. Until then, I've posted the ones that were included in the original Craigslist ad.