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I should start out by telling you that when we went looking for that car, I knew nothing about cars at all. I could put gas in the tank, air in the tires, and I was relatively competent in working the radio – but that was about it. Though he probably wouldn’t have admitted it, my father’s knowledge of cars was not much deeper than my own. This brings up the first lesson:

When You are Shopping for a Car, Go With Someone Who Knows Something About Cars

To our credit, we didn’t buy the first car we saw. In retrospect we probably would’ve been better off if we had. We looked at a lot of different ‘65 Mustangs – some really nice ones, some old and abused ones, one hot rod, complete with lowered front wheels, a racing cam, and wide racing slicks on the back.

I’ll give you one guess which car we bought.

It was the hot rod. The roar of that engine and the sparkling blue paint job seduced us both. It is a genuine shame too – we passed up a beautifully restored Mustang that was being offered for over a thousand dollars less than we ended up paying for the adrenaline pumping muscle car. This brings up my second point:

Don’t Make an Offer on the Spot

Go home and think about it. When it comes to buying a car, or making any major purchase, spend at least a night pondering your decision. We got juiced up by the chug-a-lug of the idling Pony, and downright stoked on the roar of that engine, and we ended up paying full asking price, in cash, on the spot. Idiots. I am happy to say this was almost 20 years ago – I was a different, much dumber person at the time.

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Anyway, we got the car home. To my credit, the first thing I did was take off the racing tires and raise the car back up to its original, stock height. It turned out that the guy who’d sold us the car had lowered the suspension be simply cutting the front springs. I’ll tell you what, compressing springs and then releasing them in the wheel well is one sketchy operation. The next time I have to raise a car up, I’m thinking I might leave that for a mechanic. Point three:

Get to Know a Good Mechanic!

Or be a good mechanic yourself. If you are going to own a classic car, you either need to be a grease-monkey, or have a pile of money that you don’t care much about.

The car was great fun – it had tremendous acceleration and very poor handling. It was also louder than hell – my friends could hear me coming from miles away. I had some good times in that car. I was driving with a beautiful woman who would later become my college sweetheart when I learned another lesson:

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You Gotta Put Oil in the Engine!

I learned this while driving up Interstate 5 and I learned it when the car’s power suddenly came to a grinding halt. I had to ease it into the emergency lane, then run across four lanes of traffic in order to get to an emergency telephone. The upside of this whole ordeal was that I spend a week “getting to know” this stunning woman while the engine was being repaired. The downside was about $2,000.

Well the new engine seemed to work fine, and gas at the time was pretty cheap – so for another few years the car worked just fine. But I still hadn’t gotten my head around the oil issue, and I blew up a second engine, again on the side of the freeway. This time I was so enraged that I kicked the car’s rear fender. Interestingly, instead of creating a dent, my foot traveled right through the car’s body. This was when I realized that the car’s body was comprised of a little metal, a lot of rust, and a lot of Bondo. Which brings up another tip:

Use a Magnet to Discover any Peculiarities in the Car’s Body

This probably won’t do you much good with a lot of the modern fiber-glass cars, but for classics, running a magnet along the car’s body will reveal where there are areas not comprised of metal. I learned this from the guy who came and bought my non-running ‘65 Mustang for $700. All in all I lost a lot more money than I care to admit over the several years I owned and drove that car. It was fun while it lasted, but if you are going to get into owning and driving classic cars, be forewarned by my story.

Here’s to hoping that your car-buying experiences work out better than this one! Cheers.