Trailer Towing question

snowman · Oct 26, 2002

"When I was truck shopping, I thought I remembered something about the truck coming with a brake controller, but searching the ford vehicle & towing guide websites, I came up empty. Maybe it came wired for the controller."

Kind of late, but for what it's worth, my 99 Expedition manual says "an electrical connector is provided under the instrument panel for installing a customer supplied electric brake controller".

Jeff396 · Oct 26, 2002

<font color=blue>Why? (just curious)</font color=blue>

Started to write a reply to this question a couple of times now. It's hard to explain but here goes.

1. We didn't seem to mesh too well with the Corvette club people. They are nice but most own newer cars which is a completely different mind set than when you own an older one. In our T-bird club there were no newer cars (until just recently) so everyone was trying to work out the same problems with their cars which made for a lot of fun.

2. The obsessive need to have correct dated and numbered parts took a lot of the fun out of it for me. Now you could just ignore that part of it but then you are driving the value of your car down. Recently when I swapped out the starter on the Vette I had to choose between one from Autozone ($30.00) or a correct date coded one through mailorder which I would have to wait 3 to 4 weeks for at $200.00. The cheaper one would be just fine but you'd also like to correct that one part when the need arises.

3. Since the value of these cars are so high when they are correct there is an extremely high number of fraudulant cars out there. When I was selling my car a man from California who was big into NCRS (National Corvette Restorers Society) said that there was an owner survey out there from the early 80's that claims my car was originally maroon with a black vinyl interior. Now I have no way to verify or disprove this info but in light of that the car will never be an NCRS candidate. In order to pull this off, the restoring company would have had to forge the trim plate in the car and the protecto plate in the warranty book. As luck would have it, this didn't hurt me too much because I ended up selling it back to the place I got it from for about what I paid for it. The guy from California was so serious about the car he was having a guy from Iowa fly out to look at it before he got on a plane. After discovering my cars problem the guy from Iowa tells me about his '63 tanker coupe that he got a while back for a good sum of money. Tankers were Vettes that came with a 36 gallon fuel tank specifically for racing and are pretty rare. He said that only 4 months ago he found out that it was a "created" car. This kind of thing is all too common with the Corvettes. I know this happens to a degree with other cars but the Corvette group seem to have perfected it. For instance, I'm told there are a mysteriously high number of Pontiac GTO's out there while there are only e few Lemans in existance. Of course most of those GTO's are fakes created from Lemans.

4. It's only a two seater. In the six years I owned the car I had only put about 6000 miles on it. I think in that time my wife has only been in the car 6 or 8 times. It's really no better than our Harleys were when you have a family of 4.

I guess that about sums it up. I really liked the car itself as I think it's one of the best cars from a styling standpoint to come out of the 60's. The only car from that era I think is better looking is the Jaguar XKE.......but that's British.

Jeff

Gary_in_Indiana · Oct 27, 2002

<font color=blue>"Recently when I swapped out the starter on the Vette I had to choose between one from Autozone ($30.00) or a correct date coded one through mailorder which I would have to wait 3 to 4 weeks for at $200.00. The cheaper one would be just fine but you'd also like to correct that one part when the need arises."</font color=blue>

Around here I'd have gone ahead and just had the original starter rebuilt at one of the local starter/alternator rebuild shops. They'd have it done and back to me in under a week for about the same money as you'd pay for the AutoZone starter and you'd have the right numbers and a working starter. Just a thought... /w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

Jeff396 · Oct 27, 2002

Whether the starter in the car was the correct one was the first thing I checked once I removed it. If it had been I also would have had it rebuilt but it wasn't. So, I went of the Autozone starter since I was going to sell it anyway.

A while back I was having trouble with the cars voltage regulator. This time I decided to spend the buck and get a date stamped correct replacement for about $80.00. Well, this thing never did work right no matter how I adjusted it. I ended up getting so frustrated that I went to the local auto parts and bought one for about $20.00 and put it in. This thing worked right without any adjustment. It kinda dimmed my spirits for getting "correct" parts.

Jeff

Gary_in_Indiana · Oct 27, 2002

That's more my mentality. I'm not going to buy a vehicle for an investment. I deal with vehicles all day every day so it's not my idea of a great hobby. If I buy another Corvette I'll buy one without matching numbers and sell it without matching numbers. The dollars, while lower at the sale, will be commensurately lower on the purchase as well.

Another advantage of this is that, as you said, you can get yourself parts for your car that work best without concern for matching numbers, etc. I don't want one with perfect paint, either. I want one I can drive without worrying about it. Having a car like a Corvette should be fun, not a job. /w3tcompact/icons/wink.gif

Jeff396 · Oct 28, 2002

Unfortunately a lesson I had to learn the hard way. New rule of thumb....Never buy a car that I wouldn't feel comfortable sitting on its hood./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif Like my Bird.

Jeff