Quote:
Originally Posted by joedoh
tell me more about this mazda.. its your project thread so OT is ok haha
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The Mazda was a 1991 B2200 that we had owned since new. At the time, it had 287,000 miles on it, looming in on 300k with the original drivetrain and was still a daily driver. The plan was to re-ring the engine and rebuild the head the next coming year, as it was starting to smoke on cold starts.
I was working Day shift at the time (in 2006) and had parked in the PD parking lot. Half way through the morning, a call of an injury accident in the PD parking lot was broadcast. My first thought was that someone had been walking in the parking lot and got hit by a car, which would have most likely been at low speed, but given the unusual nature, I headed back to the office in a hurry.
When I got there, it was absolute chaos. One car had plowed in to five parked cars, the Mazda included. The driver of the car had just left his doctor's office, which was right across the street from the PD. According to his wife, he had just received some very bad news regarding his health and was driving home after leaving the office. Moments later, he suffered an aneurysm that ruptured, and braced his foot on the gas pedal as he died while driving.
His wife had never driven a car in her entire life, (this was an old couple). She didn't know what to do, so she grabbed the steering wheel and made a hard right turn in to the police and fire parking lot at roughly 55 mph. The first vehicle she hit was the brand new F150 belonging to the Records clerk. She t-boned the F150 and shoved it in to the passenger side of my Mazda. At the same time, the F150 was pushed in to three other parked cars before the car being driven came to a stop.
The Mazda caught most of the damage in the passenger door, back to the bottom right corner of the front of the bed. The passenger window didn't break, but the cab corner was crushed to the point that the door could not be opened. The blow even buckled the inner wall of the cab, yet the frame was still straight.
In the end, I sealed the gap between the door frame and the cab with expanding foam. The insurance company totaled the truck, but let us keep it. It pulled farm duty for a while and I used it to teach our daughter how to drive. She learned how to work a manual transmission while driving it in the pasture. I couldn't think of a better way to start her off since the truck had already been wrecked.
In the end, I sold it to a guy in Texas that wanted the motor and transmission for his truck. I guess he had ignored the 60k mile timing belt maintenance on his and bent some valves.
The widow survived the crash with minor injuries and when her insurance company settled out, they wrote me a check for $3500 for that old Mazda, and I got to keep the truck. To be fair, it didn't look like it had 300k on it. The interior was almost perfect and the exterior had some fading in the decal stripes, but was otherwise clean and shiny.
That's my Mazda truck story Joe.
-Joe