It all started with an email.....

It all started with an email from my friend Josh R. Someone on craigslist was looking for teammates for some "beater" race called the "BABE rally." My inital thought was that babes were going to be involved, but alas I was wrong. BABE stands for Big Apple to Big Easy and the only condition of the rally is that your car must have cost less than $250. Of course this sounds like a GREAT idea to me. I love bargain hunting and I love working on cars. I contacted the guys, they were iffy and not committed until they could find a car. I offered to have a beer with them to discuss and found out later they came to their senses and decided not to go....


So Josh and I start $250 car hunting, mostly craigslist ( ah the beacon of crap cars everywhere). He finds a Chysler Diplomat (Kramer car) that has electrical problems after the rats chewed through the wiring harness, then a 280 or 300z that was sitting in two feet of grass, but nothing is jumping out at us. Until that faitfull Saturday afternoon when I find the $300 Fox on craigslist.
My favorite part of the add was the statement... "this car is a piece of junk" Perfect!







I call the guy up and explain what we are doing, 3800 miles - car must cost less than or = $250. He agrees that he will be able to bargain with me to that price point and I get directions to the car located south of Dripping Springs.

An hour later, I get there and we strike a deal. The car is supposed to be a good driver with a broken starter. I pay him and tell him I will return for the car tomorrow or monday. Sunday rolls around and Josh goes to get a trailer hitch installed on his just purchased from ebay F350 15 Passenger Van. It has a 5.4 Liter small block and has plenty of towing powa! We pick the car up monday and tow it back to my house via the car wash. (we threw away all of the trash and a few dominoes) When we get home and try to get the car off the trailer, we dont have enough muscle to dislodge the car manually, so I pull out my new smart car and we hook a cable to in to draw it off the car... a smart car as a tow vehicle...



The following days, I ordered a starter from a junk yard in San Angelo and it comes in. We slap that puppy in and it starts to crank and even runs!!!! We are home free, or so we think. We jump in the car for a quicky trip around the block and get about 50 yards down the alley, hit a bump, the car dies and smoke starts billowing from the dash, and I catch the distictive smell of plastic burning.... I quickly turn off the car and the smoke dissapates. We then try to start it to no avail... crap. We decide to push the car back to my house, but at that very second the locking mechanism in the key switch decides that it would rather visit its volkswagon ancestors in Vallhalla or wherever and gives up the ghost, but in the locked position. Good think my alley isnt very heavily traveled, we dissasemble the steering column and push back to the house. So this may be a little more challenging then first appearances.



We put on the problem solving hats and quit for the night. Josh manages to find diagrams online and he starts doing his engineering thing (did you know that circuits have to be closed?) Anyway we get the car started after tracing a burned wire from the key switch to the ignition coil. We run a replacement, but have another problem, the fuel pump isnt running. So more tracing, blah, blah, blah and the fuse panel has a short. Sqeeze it and it works. Great nothing like an intermittant electrical problem..



I find a guy on VW Vortex parting out a Fox and buy a various assortment of used parts from him, the parts get in, I install the fuse panel and we are off to the races again...