Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:12:26 -0500
Reply-To: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: David Beierl <dbeierl@ATTGLOBAL.NET>
Subject: Re: Sealant necessary for coolant hoses?
In-Reply-To: <20110224132308.GHZS5.760657.imail@eastrmwml28>
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At 01:23 PM 2/24/2011, mcneely4@cox.net wrote:
>Not inexpensive, but what is money not spent worth when one is 60 or
>100 miles out, in a driving rain, at night, and a hose blows? I
>realize that other failures can occur, but this one seems like a no
>brainer to me, given the age of the hoses, the lack of knowledge
>most of us have about past maintenance on the vehicle, and the
>relative simplicity of doing the work. Of course, if you only drive
>the thing around town, and are comfortable with killing the engine
>by loss of coolant, then running old hoses might be a risk you want to take.
It ain't always that easy, and not always a matter of comfort. You
said a while back that you had the means to buy a big RV if you
wanted to, so for you this is a matter of prudent allocation of
surplus money. But supposing for the sake of argument that you were
getting a Social Security disability check for $1529 a month and drug
expenses around $150 monthly at $8/scrip from the VA; and were
keeping up your end of a $1000 mortgage plus heat etc. on a house you
jointly own with your former wife, and working on a five-year plan
with her to pay off $25k in debt that you'd foolishly acquired during
the marriage. At that point choices about expensive parts for your
Vanagon get a bit closer to the bone...
Which is not to say that having had fair warning, so to say, I didn't
get a full set of replacement hoses from Ken, barring the one that
costs a million bucks and is NLA; and I'm half proud and half ashamed
to say that 18 months later well over half of them are installed,
along with the Go Westy pipe-end band-aids. What's left is largely
the tricky little devils around the oil cooler. But the money for
those hoses came from emergency money not intended for that sort of
thing. So...can I afford to keep a Vanagon? Realistically, probably
not. Except for one thing...in the worst case, if everything goes
pear-shaped, I can drive to some warm place and live in the sucker
while things get sorted out, which is a terrific improvement on
several possible alternatives. And speaking completely frankly, I'm
in a population that is prone to having the world get ahead of them
sometimes, and my much-loved USAA has declined to insure my life even
though I've been a faithful customer since 1976. So entirely aside
from (unlike yourself) simply loving the beasts to death, there's a
serious practical reason why it's important to me to keep one around,
even though I'm not always sure how to do it, and for both financial
and personal reasons it doesn't get the up to the minute maintenance
I would wish it to.
Yours,
David
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