I seem to not have any luck with money these last few weeks. The Three Woes of a car are the starter motor, the alternator, and the distributor. Today for me it was the starter motor. It couldn’t have happened at a better time, now with all the money that I was going to use to pay my uni fees now go straight to buying a new starter motor. But the money trouble didn’t start there. When I discovered that my car wouldn’t start, there was only one option, NRMA Roadside Assistance. Now I had membership with them before. BUT my membership expired a good 3 months ago. Therefore $81 straight to NRMA to pay for membership and for them to send out Roadside Assistance.
Its a good thing that this happened after peak hour morning traffic. I would hate to think how long I would be waiting for but it only turned out to be 40 minutes at most. Thus sitting around doing nothing but playing Initial D on my PSP (kinda ironic huh, playing a car game in my broken down car) until my saviour arrived. After a few minutes of tinkering around that is when we discovered the problem. But afterwards it turned out I could still start the car, and it’s something I learnt today, and that was with a clutch start. Simply all you do is have the car facing one direction, preferbly not towards a gutter or you’ll be pushing all day. Have one person in the drivers seat, and one pushing. Leave the gear in 1st gear but with the clutch depressed. Now get the 2nd person to push and when you get a bit of speed, pop the clutch up and it should start. BUT to remember to push it back down once it or does you’ll stall the car. Though this works in a manual car, I’m not sure how you would go about starting an automatic.
Now with the car running I decided to drop uni for the day and headed for home. Can you imagine doing a clutch start at uni? Not easy since there is hardly room to push a car around. Thus getting home, rang up a few places and decided on a place that was situated right behind the exhaust place where I got my exhaust system fitted. All in all I’m getting this problem fixed tomorrow. All at a cost of $280AU for a brand new starter motor, and roughly $44AU for installation. Better than my price quote from a Nissan $tealership which quoted a ridiculous $910 just for the part. So it looks like I’ll be living of minimal amount of food again once again this week. And paying my uni fees will be done another day. At this rate it seems like I’ll be doomed to stay at uni for a whole semester. But I pray that does not happen.
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