[V]

The goal was always to eliminate a car payment and lower insurance cost.

I did a lot of searching the web about the leak stop and how to flush it out. It seems my main concerns are the radiator and heater core. The rad concerned me from the beginning a when I opened the drain and barely anything came out. A new one is 100-150 from rock auto, so that would be a given as to getting a new one and not trying to flush it out. The issue is more the heater core. Its buried behind the dash and requires the console, steering column and whole dash to come out. They say its a several hour task. I refuse to go that far. With the engine out, I can easily access the hoses going to the heater core in the engine bay so I will flush it as much as I can that way. After that its just cleaning up the rest, sucking it out of the water jackets, cleaning the overflow tank, flushing out the coolant crossover and water pump, and cleaning the heads. Once running I'd do a complete coolant flush to get as much more that I missed in the block. I think I could still keep total cost under 1900 bucks.

The desired life span of this car is 7-12 months. Anything more is great. I was never planning to flip the car for a profit, was always for me to just drive. I still have my dodge ram to drive in non-snow/rain weather.


Also, issues like this were not entirely unexpected. I knew stuff would come up on a 18 year old car. That's the reason I shopped around for the cleanest, lowest mileage sts I could find and set my purchase budget at only 500.