The Binary Circumstance

It’s been just over month since my cat, Scooter, went missing.  He has not been seen since and I have not received any calls from the signs that I’ve posted in the neighborhood or the various organizations that I reported his disappearance to.

I’ve given up actively looking for him.

Yesterday, my beloved 1987 Ford Ranger pickup with four-wheel-drive was diagnosed with a blown head gasket. 

It had been acting strange for a couple of days, with a periodic loud knocking noise that was often accompanied by a loss of power.  At first I tried some STP Octane Booster and along with their Complete Fuel System Cleaner, thinking that might take care of the knocking and loss of power. But it was quickly apparent that the problem was getting worse not better.

The mechanic at my local garage, determined that I had a blown head gasket.  He said it would cost about $1300 to fix it, if there were no surprises after they opened up the engine.  He described the problem and what is involved in fixing it.

Since I only paid $1000 for the truck 15 months ago because that was its Kelly Blue Book value at the time, I told him I thought it wasn’t worth investing that kind of money in it.

He said that the truck looked basically sound and that Ford Rangers of that era can get 250,000 miles on their engines if they are well-maintained.

I suggested that he go ahead and open up the engine and if it looked like he could fix it for that much, I would go for it.  If it was going to cost a lot more, I would just stop the work and junk it.  He called back a couple of hours later and said that the cast iron head was cracked and would have to be replaced and it would take some time to find a replacement.  The estimate for the job went up to more than $2,000.

Last night I went on the Internet to educate myself on the subject of blown head gaskets.  I learned about a product called Thermagasket® that claims that it will seal the leaking gasket and any cracks in the engine block or head.  It costs $119 and does not require opening up the engine.  They claim 90% customer satisfaction.

I spoke with the owner of that company this morning and he said that the product cannot be used once the engine has been opened up.

I asked my mechanic this morning if he was aware of the product and wondered why he hadn’t suggested that as my first option.  He said he knew of it and that it didn’t work, at least not as a long-term solution.  He said that products like that also sometimes seal things they are not supposed to seal.  (This article seems to concur with him in the final paragraph.)

He invited me to come back to the garage and inspect the head and other parts they had removed.  I could clearly see they were damaged and cracked as he had told me.  It gave me much more confidence that he was being straighforward with me.

Nonetheless, I wish I had known about Thermagasket® before I gave him permission to open up the engine because given the age of the truck, I would have tried Thermagasket first.  If is didn’t work I would have just junked the truck.  If it did work, even for a few months, then I’d have continued use of the truck for a few more months without having paid for an expensive repair.

The car was running OK when I took it to the garage which is only a half-mile from my house.  That was because all the coolant had leaked out through the blown gasket and when the engine would overhead it would start to knock and lose power.  For a short trip it sounded fine.

Since I wasn’t willing to put any more money into the truck and the motor had been taken apart, and the parts were all over the garage floor, I indicated that I would try to find a charity willing to pick it up and sell it at auction for parts.  I could get a small tax deduction for that.  I’ve seen many charities that advertise that they will even pick up cars that aren’t running.

In the end, I decided to transfer the title to the mechanic as payment for the work he had already done.  He said that one of the new, young mechanics needed a truck.  Obviously mechanics can fix it cheaply for themselves because they provide free labor which I would have had to pay a lot of money for.  And given the age of the truck there is no guarantee that it will not have another serious and expensive problem a few months after this one is fixed.

At least it didn’t cost me any money for the work they had already done and I didn’t have to spend my time trying to find somebody to tow it and somebody who had a use for it.

Just out of curiosity I’d like to know if anybody has personally used the Thermagasket® product and what their experience with it was.  The Thermagasket website has many glowing testimonials but I was not able to find any independent reviews of the product online or testing results done by any independent consumer organization. 

They do have a Better Business Bureau Online Reliability logo on their home page, so I hope there is some truth to their claims.

The end of the story is that now I don’t have my cat or my truck.  Bummer.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 11:06 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Product Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.