Yay, I finally got a decent car! It's not amazing, but it has a lot more potential than any of my previous cars. I got it a couple weeks ago when my Tracer took a nose dive straight to hell. The Contour had 85K miles, which is pretty damn good for a 97, but it has a few issues, so I talked it down to $1,400.
First, the bad:
Ok, so I'm working on all of this, but here's the first, most important issue for me, the broken windshield. I really can't stand a broken windshield, and this one really bothers me.
No picture here, but the clutch is going out, it's very difficult to try to start off up the steep hills around here.
Lots of broken plastic parts, mostly from some idiot who owned it before not knowing how to take the door panels off without breaking EVERYTHING!!! Every one of these panels are broken, in addition to 2 of the dash vents.
broken off and missing sail panels
Ok, now for the good!
I used parts from the Tracer's intake to make a cold-air intake on my Contour. Works great!
No crank case breather filter with an after market filter system, so I added that little red filter to keep the head clean.
This is the first stage of the shifter knob I built. The shifter knob was really messed up, so I filed it down and fiberglassed over it. At the stage in this pic, it looks like something a 3rd grader made, but just this morning I used bondo and made it beatiful! In addition to the new short shifter, it's a lot better looking. Pics soon.
I put in my stereo and speakers from the Tracer, as well as installed 3 led's behind the clock (which actually look a lot better than in the cell phone pic).
This is a $6 security system. If you really know electronics, this is really easy to do, but for security reasons, that's pretty much all I can say here ;)
Btw, I have a couple weeks left delivering pizza, then I'm out of the pizza delivery business for good!!! Going to be delivering fitness equipment in a box truck starting in early August.
[08/03/2007 update:]
Added mesh to the grill, looks decent, here are before and afters:
Even expanding the image, cardomain.com reduces the size such that you really can't tell how it looks in great detail, but the mesh is pretty nice.
