I found out today that the owner of this truck was a 70 year old gentleman who has owned it since it was new..... and has never been off-road in his life.

I'm still sniffing around it to try to understand why. It has a new plastic-top radiator that actually looks pretty nice, but makes me suspect he had a cooling issue, perhaps thought he had to replace the radiator, maybe had the engine rebuilt and just maybe the rebuild went bad from the head bolt issue. I wanted to open the radiator and see if any oil was in the coolant, but the truck was processed before I got to look. Maybe I'll check the overflow bottle and see if there are any tell-tale signs left.

I suspect some on this board would have paid $4000 for the truck, but not many. He was looking at a truck that was worth maybe $2000 to the average guy and the taxpayers gave him $3500-4500 for it. I'm sure he didn't like the fact that he had just had it painted, but he was likely pretty aggravated to spend a bunch of money and still not have it reliable. C4C was his bailout.

I drooled on it some more today. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/cyclops.gif" alt="" />

Frank