It was listed at a thousand dollars. The seller took five hundred and fifty, which should have been the first clue, and the fur was the second.
Every surface had it. The seats, the carpets, the headlining, the gaps between the seat rails where no vacuum has ever reached. A previous life had clearly involved a large and very content dog, and the car had absorbed it entirely.
The stated fault was overheating, and I could find nothing obviously wrong standing in the driveway looking at a cold engine. Which is the usual problem: an intermittent fault will not perform for an audience. So I stopped inspecting and started provoking. I loaded the car up, filled a container with water, and drove it at hills until it misbehaved.
It took a while. Then the needle climbed exactly as promised, and with the engine hot and under load the leak finally showed itself at the top of the radiator, where it had been hiding while cold and idle.
A good second hand radiator fixed it completely. Nothing else was wrong with the car at all.
Faults do not reveal themselves to patient observation. They reveal themselves under load, which is true of rather more than cars.
