Jinxed Cars

[toy86]

Is my car Jinxed??? the 3 year and many $1000's of dollars later question????

I have had my GTR for over 3 years now and it seams I am doomed not to drive the car.

In the three years the car has only run for a collective 4 days

I will eventualy sell the car and end my misary but i thought i would share my story for a good laugh at my own expense and see if anyone has similar stories.

I set out to buy the stockest and cleanest R32 GTR i could afford, and after 6 months of looking at cars all over the country I found a super clean stock GTR with conflicting KM's (odo said 77,000 km and timing belt sticker said 88,000km) but i figured the interior and the body were in exceptionally good nick for its age that even if it had done 188,000kms it would have been kept in good condition.

After driving the car half way from sydney to melbourne the motor died. Tthe motor started to make the death rattle noise so i turned it off at the nearest service station and waiting there. i ended up stuck in the middle of F**K knows where "translated to Gundagai" with a dead GTR and some major anger issues. Anyways back to the story, I managed to get i tow with a guy and his girlfriend who were going to sydney from melbourne with a car trailer to pick up his own project. so we got a lift to the nearest town with a pub so we could snooze for the night. we ended up in Yas which is 1 hour by taxi to canberra which is a 45 minute flight home to melbourne.

Me and my mate who unfortunately for him volunteered for the road trip slept there for the night and could the first flight to melbourne, my car arrived on the back of an RACV towee 2 days later.

When i could finally afford to pull the motor down for a rebuild we found what we think where small fragment of the turbo, which had managed to mash the last three cylinder walls and pistons.

It ended up taking me 2 years to afford to fix it, i ended up building it with a forged bottom end and had the head built to take alot more power than i would have or will ever tune it for, but thought i would go through the effort while it was all stripped. "Do it once, do it right" so the saying goes...

Around 4 months ago i got the motor finished and was about to put it in but due to some back luck i did my back, so i dropped it off at a mechanic to finish it off. while the car was at the mechanics having the engine installed a customer reversed his very nice looking car into the rear of my car, and took out my rear bumper.

As if that was not bad enough i finally got the car running, ran it in on the dyno, started to drive it home and as I was on my way home, this being the first time in 2.5 years i have driven the car, the engine dies again. Turns out that the idler pulley bolt snapped and the timing belt loosened up causing the cams not to turn while the motor turned over bending the valved, so i now have 12 hour old bent oversized stainless steel valves.

So this is the story so far ....

I guess the upside to all of this is the customer who hit my car has offered to pay for the damage, and the engine builder is fixing the motor for the second time but he is doing it at his cost.

so there is light at the end of the tunnel..

now i am wondering if its me or the car,

has anyone has similar experiences with jinxed cars

please tell me i am not the only one

[[200]]

No car will ever be jinxed. Perhaps you bought one that wasn't properly maintained and looked after either over in Japan or when it came to our shores. I have blown a forged motor before, when I started looking into the car I realised how stupid I was in buying it. I have learnt NEVER to buy a modified car again. I am sure when you have it all sorted it will put a big smile on your face.

The joys of owning a car...

[jay1]

ive been like this my car spent 12 months in the shop

[Slow S13]

I rebuilt my old sr after popping it.....ran it in for 1500kms and then would some boost into it....THEN,

BANG

Next time ill double check the flow of my fuel pump..

It happens...

[TezGT-R]

Bought my GT-R, 40 mins later my rear diff is fcked. The car yard agrees to fix it no problems, but its friday afternoon before christmas so no parts available. Got it back 2 weeks later. For some reason the car makes a strange jingling sound while driving but it stops when I put the brakes on. Some douchebag in japan has replaced the rotor and put the wrong ones on so it doesnt fit and MOVES AROUND. I go out and buy some DBA rotors, no problems until the tyres start going flat overnight. found the valves on 2 tyres were fcked and because theyre nismo LMGT3's its hard to find a valve that fits. also found a third rim was buckled on the inside lip causing a slow leak. fixed all this, then crashed it. 4 months and several thousand $ later its going again, and wtf, theres coolant all over my driveway. New water pump gets put in and while in there it needs a timing belt. Then I'm thinking nothing else can go wrong and while tootling along in traffic, BANG, no clutch. Snapped the pivot bolt. After pulling out the box in the shed we go to remove the bolt and instead the thread puller digs in hard, cracking the casing. Now I've organised replacement parts, should arrive this week (thanks GTRBOS). Thats my bad luck so far. Fingers crossed its over and I can enjoy it now.....

[madbung]

Have you caressed the car gently while whispering loving words?

I think the car might be having issues with your self confessed anger problem.

Love the car, hate the guy who sold it to you, shake your fist at the bad driver who killed the rear bar and frown at the bloody idler pulley bolt that let go....Buy your mechanic a beer when it's going good.

Love...yes...Love

[VB-]

hahaha i own a VL, none of what any of you have said stands out in any way....

[babyskyline]

All in all just sounds like the usual stuff when it comes to owning and maintaining an older gtr thats had a hard life and a bit of thrashing and for the broken new engines and parts that just sounds like the usual human error.

My joys of owning a r33 gtr were short lived when i picked mine up and half way home the oil pump dies leading to a dead engine. Only lasted a whole of 200km's. Ended up taking it back to the bloke i bought it off saying what the hell and getting a large sum of my money back and fixing the engine. Then selling it to a mate who was keen as and who hasnt had any problems at all in the last 2 years....bastard

[Haysey]

Moral of this thread

Dont buy a GTR, they are cursed

[purple_haze]

hahaha... the only car I had major dramas with was a Commodore... been pretty lucky with imports so far.

Hope you get a chance to enjoy your car !

[midnight]

My drift car is jinxed whatever, its a 180sx, sr20 200kw. all supporting mods, sump, oil cooler, alloy rad, catch can etc etc.

over the past 2 years, any drift competitions i run in, the car breaks. Ive done countless full practice days about once a month with no problems at all, car is well maintained, but put my car in comp, run a couple of laps and something breaks,

off street masters 07, clutch failed in top 4 battle, still placed 2nd.

superdrift EC 07, boost controller solenoid broke, causing over boost, turbo gaskets blew out, causing underboost, gearbox dropped all its oil.

superdrift OP 07, split pipe in practice, massive boost leak, managed to fix for qualifying

superdrift EC 08, turbo seized in qualifying.

superdrift OP 08, hose joiner split in qualifying, taped up got out there with 15min to go, qualified around 16-20th, lost compression on cylinder 1 first corner of top 32 battle.

Edited January 6, 2009 by midnight

[joeyjoejoejuniorshabadoo]

whien i bought mine the tentioner pulley cracked and the timing belt started slapping... i pulled it off the road asap and managed to not have it slip.

the bolt snapped when i removed it and it was lodged in the block. had to get a specialist thread guy in to remove it.

the rotors that i put on it in the first week (rda) cracked

the power window switch broke

the seatbelts stopped retracting

the key snapped (thankfully not in the ignition)

i stepped on the keyless entry remote

the indicator stopped cancelling

this was all at the start... i have since had the car for 2 years and its gone from a dead stocker to a clean reliable 265rwkw car.

my theory is that when a car gets a new owner the different treatment of the car and different driving styles seems to rattle the ghosts on the machine.

[TTT]

the shorter version of the OP's story is.

"I bought a lemon, it broke, couldn't afford to rebuild it for a LOOOOOONG time, then the engine builder who built it made a mistake and it's f**ked again"

no curse, just bad luck.

[Weapon]

My mechanic couldn't piece together an RB25 that would last more than 2000km, in the 4 and a half years i had my GTST there were 5 engines in the car, the last engine was a 26 and lasted the longest with constant thrashings lol but sadly a hot day and a bad batch of fuel and no6 piston ring fractures..... i finally did what i should have just done years ago, i bought a 1997 R33 GTR .... thats now suffering from afm issues the day after i picked it up

[NZM.031]

my r32 is like that.. its just her personality... shes very high maintenance.. had a different problem every week... and its been over 2 months now.

eventually though, i will get her sorted out.. everything will be replace one by one.. and the loan on her will be paid out and i will keep her forever... may get another car and what not, but from the past 16 cars ive had... ive learnt now its better to just keep the thing, than sell it.

my 33 before was awesome till i started tinkering with it and drifting it.. then it just went to shit.

my wrx was problem free.. my vy ss had some issues but mainly problem free.. my liberty was mainly drama free.. so was the statey.. and the sss... well, i guess its just skylines that have dramas.. but they are an older high performance car so its to be expected.

cheers

Linton

[Haines]

I think you will find its becasue the car is so old

you are getting all the old car problems

1989 was a long time ago

and it was one of the reasons i never ended up with an r32 GTR

I wanted something a little newer

and because they are an old jap import the cost of repair is really high

[Slow S13]

my r32 is like that.. its just her personality... shes very high maintenance..

sound like my Mrs..

[Kinks]

I think you will find its becasue the car is so old

you are getting all the old car problems

1989 was a long time ago

and it was one of the reasons i never ended up with an r32 GTR

ditto. I was tossing up between an R32 GTR (dream car since childhood) and an R33 GTS-t (practical daily driver). Coming off the back of an R31 which already had old age issues I didn't want to go there again so I picked the R33 and haven't looked back.

Would love to have the money to get a GTR and have it as a weekender car, and just replace anything that looks old (basically a mini resto job I guess!). Maybe when I finally have the money they'll be old enough to need a real resto job!!

[Mohsen]

mebe its like dat 20z from wangan midnight

[toy86]

GTR boy- thats my thinking, but in the series he finally makes the car his own and it does not break down again, i'm hoping this day will come soon, maybe i should call my car "Devil.R"

haines & Slow S13 - it is for this reason i chose to by an October 1994 model thinking it would be in the same realm as the R33 in terms of reliability