The saga of Silverbean continues.

Okay, let me start from the beginning. I was driving along 94, and suddenly the car lost accelleration and, once I pulled over, could not be restarted. Had it towed to a trusted mechanic in Ann Arbor, Jack at Miller-Maple Marathon. He couldn't get to it that day or possibly the next, so I had it towed to another mechanic downtown. The mechanic said he couldn't get to it, but could at least squeeze in a diagnosis for me.

Before the diagnosis, the mechanic called me to let me know that they had locked my keys in the car, and when I informed them my other set was with Paul in Chicago, they informed me that they'd have to slimjim the lock and that they couldn't be responsible for any damage. (This becomes important, later.) The diagnosis came back as a broken timing belt, which is a Very Bad Thing. The rough estimate was a week in the shop and over $3K in repairs.

So, as was outlined at great length in a previous post, the car eventually went back to Kalamazoo without me, and got to my regular mechanic, Kalamazoo Imports. That was on Thursday morning, a week ago. The owner was out of town, so although they took a look at the engine, the diagnosis was "Wow, that's bad. We should wait for the owner to get back."

I decided to go ahead with exploratory surgery (so to speak) wherein it was determined that four out of eight valves in the cylinderhead were bent. This is better than having the whole head destroyed, but it'll still have to be machined out. It's currently at a local machine shop awaiting repair, which should cost about half of the $1600 that a new head would cost.

During the process of repairing the car, the owner tried to roll down my driver's side power window, and -- you guessed it! -- it jumped the track and fell straight down inside the door with a loud crack. To add insult to injury, they now have to take apart the door to see how bad the other mechanic hosed my window when trying to get the car unlocked.

But wait! The fun's not over yet! Even if we get the machined cylinderhead back, and the timing belt all replaced, and everything all put back together, the car could still fail a compression test -- and if that happens, the owner has advised me to junk the car. So there's the slim but nonzero chance I could be out about $2K in work and still have a nonfunctional car. I reeeeeeeeeally hope this doesn't happen. Mark says the bottom of the engine looks pretty okay, but there's no way to tell for sure until it's all hooked back up again.

I prepared Paul last night for the worst-case scenario: we may have to go down to a one-car household; paying the bill to repair Silverbean would bleed my savings dry and I would have to spend a couple months scraping up a down payment.

So, if anyone has any extra appendages they can cross for poor old Silverbean, it'd be much appreciated.