BLOG: jcobz28's Blog - Why I bought this car.

[Bruce Nunnally]

This is really too bad that this blog feature wasn't available when I first bought this car 8 months ago, because I could have filled 100 blog pages with the things I have to say about it. But here is a quick "summary" of my Cadillac saga...

In July of 2006, I was recently married and just purchased my first home. Aww, how sweet. Being a wrench-turning garage monkey most of my teenage and early 20-some years, I longed for the day when I owned my first garage. No more father yelling at me to get my latest project out of the garage and clean up my oil stains of the floor. No more rented out U-haul storage lockers down at college, filled with torn apart cars. No, I really had my very own garage.

Well, it didn't take long for me to decide it was time for a project. In November 2006, I found this 1996 Cadillac Seville SLS on ebay. All it had wrong, according to the poster (who I know realize must have been Satan himself), was a blown headgasket. Using my experience of working on other cars, such as Camaros, Talons, Civics, Corvettes, Buicks, etc., I figured a headgasket was a fairly moderate job, to be accomplished over a weekend or two. I proceeded to buy this Seville for what I felt was a bargain price of $1,000. Towed it home, read up on the internet on how to do the headgasket on this car. Oh.. crap. You gotta do what?!?! Pull the motor? DRILL OUT THE BLOCK?!? What in the world are these things they call "Timeserts"??

Not to be defeated, I undertook the project. Time warp 8 months later, 50-some posts on Caddyinfo.com, about 100 hrs of labor, millions of cusswords, and I got the car back together. Crank the motor, and whatdya know, it actually runs. No leaks. Motor runs great. What ignorant bliss that morning about 2 weeks ago was. Believing my hard work had paid off, and now I could sell this car for about $4,000 Blue Book and turn a tidy profit.

But it was all a cruel cruel joke. As I pulled out of the driveway and drove down the street, on comes the "Sevice Transmission" message. What?!? I thought "all that is wrong is a blown head gasket". No, the dreaded P0717 message appears, granting my dying wish to pull the car right back in the garage so I can now drop the transmission for repair!

A few futile efforts to clean the trans harness connector temporarily appeared to alleviate the problem, only for the darned code to reappear the following day.

Thus is the history, of the previous 8 months. Read Full Article and/or Comment/Reply