I wrote about my decision-making process when I bought the Nissan Frontier truck. I’d decided on a simple work truck that was inexpensive and didn’t have a lot of bells and whistles to repair. I didn’t always have vehicles like this. In fact, for about 35 years, I always drove a current model-year car and rarely put over 6,000 miles on it before getting a new one.

This started about 40 years ago when I was the service manager at Herman Cook VW in Encinitas, California. My compensation package included a company car which was a new VW out of the dealership inventory they called a demonstrator (demo) vehicle. I usually drove a Volkswagen GTI back then. In 1984, I went to work for Volkswagen of America and again, as a manager, my compensation package included a company car.

In fact, it came with a car, gasoline and car washes at the company’s expense! I always drove a new car and turned them in every 6,000 miles or so. These cars would be sent to wholesale auction listed as “executive demo.” My position also included company lease car privileges. I could lease up to four vehicles at very favorable rates. The rate would be 1% to 1.5% of the MSRP. So, a $30,000 car would cost me three or four hundred per month and it included full coverage insurance. Unlike retail leases, there were no upfront fees, just the monthly rate.

This was such a deal that I leased a car for my wife and when my daughters got their drivers licenses, I leased cars for them. It was cheaper to put them in a new car every year than it would be to buy a used car when you factor in the cost of insurance and repairs. The lease program was a 12-month term, so they were always in a current model-year car with warranty coverage. While they were in school, I paid the lease for them. They’re adults now, but they still get a new lease car every year – I don’t think they’ve ever had to buy a car for themselves.

Volkswagen offers these programs to management level employees for the benefit of the employee, but it also helps them. When they send a 12-month old car or a 6,000-mile demo to the wholesale auction, they get a good price for it. This helps keep the wholesale residual value of the cars high – which, in turn, is used to set retail lease rates. Higher residual values mean lower retail lease rates. But I don’t drive new cars anymore – just my daughters do.

Donna’s been watching for deals on stuff for our new-to-us park model home. She found a deal on a stereo system for the Arizona room. It’s old school – a Kenwood KR4400 receiver that’s circa 1974, a Pioneer CD player and a set of Celestion D4 bookshelf speakers. There was a guy here at Viewpoint Golf and RV Resort selling the system. He was the original owner and bought this stuff when he was in high school. I was a senior in 1974, but I didn’t have the money for a stereo like this. It’s good stuff.

I’ve always been a fan of Celestion speakers. They don’t make consumer speaker cabinets anymore. The company, based in Britain, makes speakers for use in PA systems or for guitar amplifier cabinets. Building vacuum tube guitar amplifiers was once a hobby of mine. I always used Celestion speakers in my cabinets that I special ordered from an outfit in Idaho called Avatar speakers.

I built several guitar amplifiers – one was a clone of a Marshall 18-watt that was a blues monster. It had that fat Marshall sound and could be pushed into a creamy distortion without blowing out your eardrums.

The amplifier was built with point-to-point wiring of all of the components. I enjoyed this work. You had to be meticulous, the wire lengths and pathways were important.

Another amp I built was based on the British Hiwatt design. This amp was loud and produced a very clean tone. It also powered an Avatar 2×12 cabinet with Celestion speakers.

There was a fairly obscure amp designer and builder back in the day named Ken Fischer. He designed a line of amps called Trainwreck and custom-made them for star entertainers. Ken passed away in 2006, but his amps are still highly sought after. I read recently that Brad Paisley acquired one. His amp circuits are complex and everything has to be precisely placed to make it do the Trainwreck thing. The thing about them is, once you have this rig set up, you can change the sound of the guitar from a clean, almost sparkly tone to a growling distortion with small adjustments of the guitar volume knob. The amplifier is very sensitive to the input voltage from the guitar pickup.

I corresponded with a few guys that were trying to copy the Trainwreck design. I found a guy in Australia, an electrical engineer that was also a musician. He experimented with building a printed circuit board (PCB) that followed Ken Fischer’s original point-to-point design. I bought a board from him and built one. It’s fantastic and also plays very loud.

I’ve been hauling the Marshall 18-watt and the Trainwreck amps in the basement of our Alpine Coach for nearly eight years. The Avatar 2×12 cabinet was lost when our trailer was stolen by those dirty, rotten thieves. I’ll have to get them out and clean them up after we move into the park model.

I was talking about deals Donna found before I got sidetracked. Donna found a small, 4.4 cubic-foot refrigerator for $75 – it cost $275 new and we bought it from the same couple that sold us the stereo. On Tuesday, Donna made a fantastic find. She was talking to our neighbor, Dean, when he mentioned another neighbor on the row behind us was selling a tow bar. I’d been looking at tow bars online – we’ll need one for the Nissan Frontier to tow it behind the coach. I was looking at the Roadmaster line, made in Vancouver, Washington. I toured their plant in 2014 and I think they have the best tow bars available.

We walked over to Jim and Gerry Jarvis’ site and what do you know – he had a Roadmaster Nighthawk tow bar with the Defender shield for sale. The Nighthawk is their top-of-the-line unit. It’s the Cadillac of tow bars. He bought it new in late 2018, used it to tow his Jeep to Oregon and back before he sold his motorhome and bought a fifth-wheel trailer.

A new Nighthawk is listed online for a price of $1140 and the Defender shield is $460. Jim sold me this $1600 set-up for just $500. Deal! Next month I’ll have a Roadmaster base plate installed on the truck and we’ll be good to go. That’ll cost about $1200, so I’ll be about $1700 into what’s about a $3,000 set-up!

The weather here in Mesa, Arizona continues to be pleasant with daily highs in the 70s and overnight lows in the 50s. We plan to go back to the Power Food Park tonight and meet up with our friends, Mike and Jodi Hall and Frank and Kelly Burk. We reserved a firepit from 6-8pm. Donna is playing in the 3.0 pickleball round robin tomorrow morning. And we’re signed up as a team for the Valentine’s pickleball tournament on Saturday.

*Just so you know, if you use this link to shop on Amazon and decide to purchase anything, you pay the same price as usual and  I’ll earn a few pennies for the referral. It’ll go into the beer fund. Thanks!