Grangerland RFD
  • Home
    • Govt Contractor Caught Working
    • Testimonial for Chriopractic
    • The Rambling Cardinal II
    • Finding a name: Parkinson's Disease
    • The Great Winter Storm of 2014
    • it was a very long week
    • The Christmas Lights
    • Improving the Gene Pool 2
    • Mother's Day, on the Farm
    • A working birthday party
  • Family
    • Driving Miss Sally >
      • Texas >
        • Anahuac National Wildlife Preserve 1/3/17
        • Anahuac Birds 8/1/16
        • Birds of East Barnard
        • San Barnard Preserve
        • What is Geocache?
        • Even More Geocache
        • Geocache Log
        • 2/19/14 Geocache Log
        • Geocache , 4 June 2014
        • The Rambling Cardinal
        • Taking a break
      • Canada >
        • From Houston to Points North
        • Travels in Maine
        • Bar Harbor to Halifax
        • Peggys Cove
        • Halifax
        • Halifax to Ingonish Ferry N.S.
        • Cape Breton Eye Candy
        • More Cape Breton Eye Candy
        • Prince Edward Island
        • Sackville Waterfowl Park, New Brunswick
      • With family in Florida >
        • Melborne to Saint Augustine
        • Florida to home
    • Mom's Memories, Ruth Wilcox >
      • Early twentieth century life 1
      • Early twentieth century life 2
      • Early twentieth century life 3
      • Early twentieth century life 4
      • My memories of Mom
      • Carol's memories of Mom
      • Memories of Grandma and Grandpa
    • Galveston County Rodeo
    • The Playground
    • Amie's Love Story
    • Going to the Circus
    • The medical blizzard
    • Trebuchets for fun and games
    • Alex's trip
    • Birthday Dilemma
  • Our farm and animals
    • New Arrivals
    • Links for donkey pages
    • Donkeys and other critters >
      • Eeyore >
        • Blue - The Herd Matriarch
        • Eeyore and the sheep
        • Eeyore and the girls
        • Why we became Llama Ranchers
        • More Llama Tales
        • A donkey named Houdini
        • The Farrier Visits
        • The Homecoming
        • More cute baby pictures
        • Glad that's over
        • Where the girls are
        • How the herd does grow.
        • Feeding the Family
    • Crape Myrtles and other stuff
    • All about our goats >
      • Making a Goat Shelter
      • Bodacious
      • Setting the table
      • Funeral, on the farm
      • Never too old
      • Remodeling the Nursery
    • Tail of Two Dogs >
      • The Odd Couple
      • Bob gets a haircut
      • Security goes rogue.
      • Bob slows down a little
    • Birds >
      • Adoption, Parrot Style >
        • Living with kiwi and skittles
        • When your parrots get bored.
        • Parrots at Play
        • The Weaning
        • Who owns who?
        • Baby (Bird) Sitting
      • The turkey looking b
      • Alfalfa
      • Our 2 Knotheads
      • A New Deputy
      • Changing of the Guard
      • Egg Hunts
      • Weathervanes
      • New Landscape Crew
      • Motherhood, or something like it
      • The Muscovy Chronicles >
        • Displaced Ducklings
        • Tall Dark Stranger
        • Tall Dark Stranger starts a family (sortakinda)
        • The Extra Duckling
        • It takes a village
        • Don't mess with Mama Duck
        • Gang of Eight
        • The Natural Method
        • Determination
        • Mission Barely Possible
        • They aren't Muscoveys
        • Peep Peep
      • Our (chicken) melting pot
  • Flotsam and Jetsam
    • Join the Navy, he said
    • Submarines, Targets, and other Navy Stuff >
      • Nuke Down
      • Subs: My first boat (SS343)
      • My second boat
      • Shipwreck and survival
      • Tragedy averted, the Seawolf
      • Dizzying Change 1945-1965
      • Submarine Life or Living in a sewer pipe.
      • Navy Unit, Fort Detrick
      • My favorite shore station
      • A voice from the past
      • 2017 New Orleans
      • Connections
    • Special Education Classes Can't do that! >
      • Almost Free, our classroom Hybrid EV
    • Vehicles >
      • Hard working Wheels
      • My love affair with Nissan
      • Class Project, Art Car
      • 59 Chevy Viking School Bus
      • My first new car
      • The do whatever project
      • Hillbilly Art Car
      • Handicapped?
      • Convoys to Mexico
      • The Perfect Getaway Car
      • Warm weather cars
      • Unidentified old car
      • Just use what you have
      • RV Man Cave
      • Goodbye Old Paint
      • A girl and her truck
      • Old dog learns new tricks
      • Smorgasbord
      • Unrequitted Love, 2002 Saturn Vue
      • Going Cheap
      • Never too many trailers
      • Hillbilly Hilton, Revisited
      • Off Road Anybody? >
        • Jeep Gladiator
        • Jeep Comanche
        • Very Rare, 1951 W.O. Jeepster
        • Off Road Lincoln
        • Stasi Van spotted in Conroe
    • Chimneys 101
    • Redneck Engineering >
      • My Swan Song
      • Confessions of a Faux Farmer >
        • Handling Hay
        • Donkey or Goat Fencing Guide
        • Doing Barbed Wire Cheaply
        • The Great Escape
        • Establishing Boundaries
        • Scraping the Ditch
        • Making a Fancy Fence >
          • Finally, done with fencing >
            • Faux Farmer Fabricates Feckless Feeders
        • Rain, rain, go away >
          • If a tree falls
          • Directory of Homeless Posts
          • Starting all over (gardening)
        • Texas welcomes new lake >
          • A day at the bank (of the pond)
          • Farm ponds do not require upkeep, right?
      • Redneck Engineering, The Porch Bench
      • Redneck Engineering, the next step >
        • Making it Livable
      • More concrete
      • Very Messy Muscovies
      • Improving the Gene Pool
      • The art of hanging a gate
      • Free Lumber
    • AC and Heating 101 >
      • A few basic concepts
      • Air Conditioning Systems
      • Free Passive Cooling
      • More Basic Stuff
  • Directory of Homeless Stories
    • For I was hungry
    • Your Government at Work
    • Evolution of a Little House of Care
    • The Beginning
    • Invisiible
    • Conroe Texas 2018
    • Directory of Homeless Stories
  • Justice anyone?
  • 5 Years In

Unrequited Love, 2002 Saturn Vue

11/17/2015

2 Comments

 
PictureGoogle Image, 2002 Saturn Vue
This is a google image but it sure looks like ours. We bought it in about May of 2002.

I saw it, told my wife about it, and we agreed. Common sense lost out,  we just had to have it.

​She picked out the color and I think she chose well. We found common ground on the drive train. We wanted the four cylinder and that was no problem. The salesman tried to sell us the transmission of the future (CVT) and I told him that was a deal breaker. We wound up with a manual five speed and I have to say we were both pretty pleased. It was the first manual I ever drove that had cruise control. It would pull 30 mpg on the highway and pretty close to that with what constitutes city driving for us. 
​

Picture
We used it for the family car and we had a pretty active life style. I think this picture is from 2004. The first big trip was in 2002 when we drove from Houston to Victoria, British Columbia. The second was when we pulled this rig from Houston to Michigan for a family reunion. We spent most of the 2-3 weeks vacation camping out in the state parks. We especially liked the Michigan upper peninsula although crossing the Macinac Bridge did give some pause for thought. Our favorite park was right at the foot of the northern end. 

Picture
This was a typical campsite. I don’t recall us doing anything quite this primitive since.

It was a fairly heavy load and the car did just great. I remember that trip as one of the most fun that Sally and I ever had. It certainly was the longest time spent without a real bed. ​

Picture
The closest we came to a casualty was the spare tire shown in this picture. The trailer threw that shoe in central Missouri. We fielded a lot of questions about the car and how it was holding up. Had to answer even more on the trailer.

Picture
An abscessed tooth put me in a hotel in Munising (upper peninsula) and after treatment we headed back to Texas.

​All of us have heard about marriages that were fine at the start but turned bad. If I remember correctly, this one began to turn really sour before 50k miles.

PictureGoogle Image of Palo Duro Canyon. Near Amarillo, Texas.
This is where it started to go bad. Palo Duro Canyon. This picture absolutely does it an injustice. Wikipedia lists it as the second largest canyon in the United States. We decided to visit it while on a business trip to the Amarillo area. We were appropriately impressed.

There is a long winding road (6,000 feet) to the bottom and the instructions are explicit. Place your vehicle in first gear and use your engine as well as your brakes while heading down. We were not towing a trailer, nor were we otherwise heavily loaded. I followed instructions and the transmission started howling. It kept being loud and by the time we got back to Houston it didn’t want to stay in low gear. 


Saturn kept trying to say it sounded fine (still under warranty) but it popped out of gear with the mechanic in the car and he couldn’t un-see that. 

Not long after that  we started leaking clutch fluid and it was diagnosed as a bad slave cylinder. Unfortunately the design meant that what cost less than 50 bucks on my Nissan Truck was about $600 with Saturn. The bell housing had to be removed to get to the cylinder. We were assured that the clutch package all looked fine so we left it.

PictureGoogle Image
This is how I prefer to remember this beauty. A very roomy interior that was ideal for trips. The passenger can stretch out and relax. Right about here is the point we decided Sally needed to be in something more reliable but we still liked the brand. We liked it a lot. We bought a new 2007 Saturn Vue with a Honda V6 drive train. 

PictureGoogle Image
Since we had now replaced a transmission, clutch cylinder and a couple computers, we thought it would be dependable enough for me to drive. This image of the rear interior shows why it was desirable to me. In addition to the interior being very handy, it had a good air conditioner (we had replaced the compressor before it’s time) and radio. Those were things that were unusual for me. Then the “certified to be good” clutch went out. ​

PictureGoogle Image
The thing that killed it for me happened at about 180k miles. 2002 was the first year for the Vue. I am told that the Ecotec engine from 2002-2003 had an oil hole that was too small. It caused poor oil flow and premature wear on the timing chain. Mine snapped on the way to work one morning.

If I heard it once, I heard it a dozen times: They had this fixed by 2004. That ranges from computers to timing chains.


Picture
​We had poured enough money into this one way relationship and decided to cut bait. We also rid ourselves of the 2007 although it had not done one thing wrong.

​When our Vue was running it convinced me that an SUV with a trailer is more versatile and appropriate for our life style than a pickup. I think the features were outstanding and the concept served so well that I desperately wanted it to work. Sometimes it did but I would hate to see a tally of cost per mile.

A second go round with an Olds Bravada caused me to forego General Motors mid size SUVs from that point on. We have had Nissan and Toyota vehicles since and I have no desire to go back. This 4Runner has 205k miles on the odometer and I drove it for a year with no speedometer. The 4wd causes me to get less fuel economy but it doesn't seem to break.The engine is Non-interference if the timing belt goes. Dogs go in the back seat and tools go in the trailer. Nothing like this is permanent but life is good.

2 Comments

    Author

    Sometimes you see something you just gotta have. Sometimes the best answer is no.

    Archives

    November 2015

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly