Possibly the end of an era

Our commuter car, Duckie, which is so lovingly named because two separate areas of the car are held together by duct tape, is near death. He had started to idle really rough, and then we noticed that he is spewing MASSIVE amounts of white smoke from the exhaust pipe.

White smoke is a *really* bad sign. That means that antifreeze is mixing into places that it shouldn't be mixing, which 9 times out of 10 means you've blown your head gasket.

Technically, near death may be an exaggerated statement. I could fix him up myself for $200-400 in parts. For a mechanic to do it would probably cost $600-1000. But if you've ever seen my car, you probably know that it would be a bad idea to put $1,000 into it. While the engine is still strong, it is fugly and has rather low re-sale value thanks to east coast rust (not to mention the duct tape). Doing the repairs myself is definitely an option I've considered. I had to do this exact same repair to Bolo (my old car from high school and college), so it is certainly in my automotive repair skill set. The problem is I don't have access to the same tools that I had back then. So I'd need to spend at least $200 in tools, plus all the extra expenses that crop up in these projects, the so-called "While it's off, I may as well..." repair creep. E.g. "... I may as well..." replace the water pump, belts, distributor, hoses, etc. The list grows and grows.

I'm not 100% convinced that this is a blown head gasket. It has the white smoke symptom, which is very telling, but it didn't have one of the other common symptoms (frothy looking oil). I'm having a real mechanic check him out later in the week, at which point I will make a final decision.

But right now, I'm strongly leaning towards not putting any money into repairing Duckie, and instead putting that money towards a newer car that we'll buy sometime in the near future (probably 4-6 months). The good news is that we have a second car to use while Duckie is out of commission. The bad news is that our backup car is an old minivan that gets rather poor gas mileage. But it's better to have that than no car at all.