Within three weeks, I had spent an additional $2,600 on repairs.  Two months later, I was twisting two wires together to turn on the headlights.  After six months, I had gotten so good at replacing broken throttle cables that I could do it at night without a flashlight.  Eight months after I bought the car, I finally got tired of crawling under it every day to re-attach the muffler/tail-pipe assembly, so I just threw the whole exhaust system away.    

Right around that time, most of the teeth broke off the flywheel ring-gear, so the process of starting the car worked like this:    

• Turn the key and hear an awful screeching sound.
• Put it in gear, stick a foot out the door and push it backward a few inches.
• Turn the key again; hear the screeching again.
• Repeat as necessary until the one remaining tooth on the flywheel is rotated into position next to the starter.

Anyway, the car finally died...  The "clunk-clunk-clunk" rod noise that I'd been hearing for a couple weeks became a "BANG-BANG-BANG". I managed to limp back to my garage and park it... It stayed there for about 5 months.    

When I moved out of my apartment in San Clemente, I figured I'd move the car to my girlfriend's house in Carlsbad and store it in her garage while I attempted to sell it for its body panels... They were the one portion of the car that still worked.     

Since the car wouldn't run, I rented a U-Haul truck and an auto dolly (you know... one of those two-wheeled things).  It took two hours for me and my girlfriend to push the front wheels of the car up onto the dolly... Of course, I'd waited until my moving-out day to transport the car, and it was pouring rain.    

I made sure the car was out of gear and the handbrake was off (since the dolly only supported the TR7's front wheels, leaving the rear wheels on the ground), then we began our 30-mile drive.    

Halfway through Camp Pendleton, the truck seemed to be losing power -- I couldn't go faster than 45 MPH -- and the dolly started fishtailing a bit.  We pulled off the highway at a rest-stop and I checked to make sure that the car was still secure.  It was, so we continued on.    

When we got to her condo, I tried to back the dolly into her garage... We'd done enough pushing for the day, so I didn't want to just unload the car and push it in by hand.  I put the truck in reverse, and the thing wouldn't back up!  The dolly actually lifted up into the air... It was as though the TR7's rear brakes were on.    

So... I took another look at the car and discovered that both rear tires were completely shredded and the rear wheels had been ground flat.  Apparently, the car's differential had frozen up during the trip, locking the rear wheels.  If the roads hadn't been so wet, I wouldn't have been able to tow the car at all.    

Sigh...  

I parked the truck and dolly, advertised the car in the local paper, explained the twin grooves in the parking-lot asphalt to the maintenance people,  and sold the car a week later for $300 to a guy who'd wrapped his TR8 around a tree and needed the body panels.    

I figure I made out like a bandit on the deal.

The thing was great... It had anti-lock brakes (couldn't lock the wheels no matter how hard you pressed on the pedal), really agile handling (on the freeway, it would suddenly change lanes even before the thought of turning the wheel crossed your mind), and a self-flushing cooling system.  It sounded great, too... Who needs Supertrapps when you can get the same effect by just allowing the muffler to rust through?    

And... Unlike nearly all so-called "high-end" cars, it actually appreciated in value:  I bought it for $200 and sold it a year and a half later for $250.    

All in all, it was a remarkable car.

For general info on the NSX, visit David Hwang's NSXchange, at http://www.stellatetechnologies.com/nsx/nsx.html... It's a great site, even if its name does sound like "NS Sex-Change".   

There's a whole hierarchy of NSX mailing lists run by David Hwang; to subscribe, see the instructions on his web site.  Personally, I couldn't deal with the endless, pointless chatter on the "main" NSX list, so I unsubscribed last year; currently, I'm subscribed only to the "NSX-SoCal" list and the "NSX-Tech" list.

It's for sale -- cheap.  For information and a picture, click on the "for sale" link at the top of this page.   

The best online source for Porsche-specific information and conversation is the PorscheList mailing list... The list is split into a number of sub-lists (one for each model, plus general-interest and racing-specific lists); to subscribe, visit the PorscheList home page at http://www.porschelist.org.

It's a black short-bed with tinted windows and a decent stereo... Except for the fact that it can tow a horse trailer, driving it is nothing like what I'd imagined driving a truck would be.  

There's a very active ram-truck mailing list; to subscribe, send a message to ramtruck-d-request@vcs.org, with the single word "subscribe" in the body of the message (the message subject is unimportant).

As soon as the prices for these things drop to a reasonable level, I'm getting me one.

One of these days, she'll find a used Durango that's priced right, and she'll trade the Ram for it.