thoughtnot

I almost bought a truck today. It was a beautiful, baby-blue 1969 Ford F100 Ranger, with a 360 4-barrell engine and only 60,000 original miles. It was in great shape, had a new paint job, and really would have been nice.

The operative word there, of course, is almost. Until after taxes are done, we really didn’t wan’t to spend more than $3500. Unfortunately, that’s not going to get me far right now on a truck of that caliber. Most in good condition like that are selling for $5-6k, sometimes way more. This particular set of wheels was for sale on eBay. I bid it up to $3200, and would have gone to $3401, but that was it. The biggest problem was that it was located just north of Salt Lake City, Utah, meaning I would have had to ship it here or fly out there and drive it home. That would have cost me another $800-1000, easy. It ended up selling for $4250, which was a steal for whomever bought it. I hope they enjoy it as much as I would have.

We also spent the early half of the day doing the curly shuffle with the tires on our cars. Our van needed new tires (the front two were bald!), and my Intrepid had brand new 60k-mile tires with only 2500 miles on them. Since the van had two tires with some life left in them, I had the new tires pulled off the Intrepid and put on the van. I then put the two used tires on the Intrepid, and bought two (cheap) new ones. Hopefully that’ll get both cars by for less than half the cost of new ones. Hopefully the Intrepid will keep on running for a bit longer. Now that I have non-matching tire brands, I think I just need to primer the hood to qualify for Kentucky residency.

In the mean time, wish me luck in my truck search, which probably won’t resume in earnest until after taxes have been figured up. And if anyone spies a 1960’s or early 70’s model F100 for sale, and it’s in really good clean condition, please let me know! I’m partial to powder blue for (personal) historical reasons, but that’s not a requirement. =)