Am I lazy, stupid or both?

The engine in my car is fucked. More specifically, the cooling system is fucked. I’m not sure in what way; it could be a cracked or warped head gasket, but judging by the brown goo that regularly turns up under my radiator filler cap, I suspect something much worse, such as a hairline crack in one of the cooling chambers inside the engine block which is allowing oil and/or exhaust fumes directly into the cooling system.

This is a big problem, and I have known about it for a while, but I am not going to fix it because my car isn’t worth spending money on. It would probably cost around half the worth of the vehicle to get it repaired. Considering it already has some 260,000 kilometres on it, there’s just no point. Other big things are going to start breaking soon.

What it means for me is that I can’t drive very far and I have to fill up with water every other week. I’ve recently become very sick of doing this, so I decided to throw some Chemiweld into the system (as its name implies, its a mixture of chemicals that when heated, presumably serve to weld (in some fashion) closed holes in the cooling system) which I did today. The bottle recommends you deliberately overheat the engine so that it can go to work doing its thing.

Well, as I was adding the Chemiweld with the engine running as directed, my wonderful car started to bubble and gurgle from its radiator fill-point, which prevented me adding the remaining half bottle of Chemiweld. So, I turned the car off (against directions), added the rest, topped up the water and went for a drive. Of course, with the water topped up, the car was no longer overheating (typically it lasts about 30 km), so I decided to push the engine on my drive. I thought the best way to do this would be to go on the highway for an extended period, which is what I did.

What I shouldn’t have done, however, is decided to blip the throttle and the car up to ~115Km/h in an area known for speed cameras, which according to Karma (please forgiveth me, O great universe) in its infinite wisdom, saw fit to place a speed camera at this very portion of road, on this very day, at this very time. I hit the brakes as soon as I saw it (as every fucking wanker does, even if they aren’t speeding), but I think the radar/laser system in them only takes a half second or so to lock on and photograph you if you are indeed breaking the law.

Here’s hoping my checklist for fixing the car (if the Chemiweld does indeed work) doesn’t include a $250 speeding fine. That would turn my repair job from “cheap and easy” with a $10 bottle of liquid and a few minutes of my time, to “expensive and annoying” with a speeding fine grating against my undying belief that excessive speed is not the cause of Australias motoring problems.