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1988 Chevy Astrovan

 

I really never got any pics of the van but I do have a story to go along with the vehicle we had bough after selling the wife’s GT Mustang.

We bought this van from a friend of my brother. It was a “Choo-Choo Customs” Chevy Astrovan and it had a v6 engine with auto transmission. The van had captains chairs and lots of room, plenty for us and the kids. First thing I did was buy new tires for it and tune it all up with new wires, plugs, etc. the van ran really great, we used it to go on vacations and it never let us down. Well it got to become just a van for the wife after a year or so and she wanted something smaller. So I went to an auto auction and bought her an Oldsmobile Achieva, great car but that’s another story, this ones not over yet.

I had this friend I grew up with who’s dad owned a paint shop, got me hooked on painting and we were good friends. I had my hotrods, and he had his and we went to many events growing up. I put the van up for sale I was asking $1500, not bad considering I had well over $2K in the thing and I had just bought another new set of tires a month earlier for it, that alone was $350. it went for about a month or so with no calls when my friend was over and he said he needed a car and the van would be perfect, only one catch, he didn’t have the money up front. So being the good friend I decided I would take a down payment and he could pay me monthly til he got to the $1500. Well he paid me $400 and paid me another $200 over the course of 6 months, it had been like 3 months after that since he had paid me anything and when asked he started telling me how bad the van was and how unreliable it was. He told me the tires were shot and it was running terrible. I figured this was his way of trying to get out of our deal. To make a long story short, he filed bankruptcy on me and just gave the van back to me to resell, of course this included that he added sugar to the gas tank and ran it just to make sure it got into the engine, punched several holes in the gas tank, and sliced all four tires so I couldn’t get it home without a wrecker. But I did get it there and the damage was too extensive to repair so I just had it hauled off. Sucks but I took it in stride as I learned a valuable lesson about selling a car to a friend.