Vehicle #2
1979 Dodge Challenger hardtop #15548. Date of manufacture: unknown
Acquired: May 1987
Current status: Sold in the summer of 1988, presumed scrapped now.
After the '78 sedan crapped out in May of 1987 I sauntered a couple blocks east on Lincoln Way to Toyota-Dodge of Ames. There stood a beautiful blue and white '79 Challenger. It had just over 100,000 miles and they were asking $1700. Salesman Lloyd Dozier (I still have his card) seemed a little surprised at my eagerness to snap it up.
This car was the one that got away. It looked sharp, was great on the road, and cruised well over 400 miles on its huge 15.9 gallon gas tank. It had the 1.6 'Z' balance shaft engine, an incredibly smooth and quiet four-cylinder, mated to a typically excellent 5-speed. I really had hoped for a 2.6, but big deal. The bottom lip of the doors were getting rusty and I actually had them professionally repaired at Senfco in Des Moines. The car suffered from an unusually bad case of the hot-start blues in which extensive cranking was required for a summertime hot restart. Several factors conspired to bring about the sale of this car. First, the car had no A/C, which was a serious problem for the chick I was hanging out with at the time. Secondly, upon replacing the spark plugs I found that every one of them was very tight for half a rotation and easy to spin for the other half. I believed this to be an indication of a warped cylinder head. Thirdly, in the fall of 1987 I bought my first and thus far only new vehicle, a Mitsubishi Montero, and I just didn't have the space for three cars. This one had to go, and I ended up selling it to some teenage kid at whose hands it doubtlessly suffered a quick demise.