BY JON WOODS AND GARY NUGENT

Let's say you have a 10 or 15-year-old car and finally your engine gives out. Considering the price of buying a new car, you decide to have a rebuilt engine installed. You now have a new car, right? Wrong! You now have an old car that you just replaced about 10 percent of the mechanical things that can go bad...not a new car. Still very old are the transmission, suspension, final drive, electrical system, air conditioning, power steering, cruise control - the list is almost endless. So does this mean that no one should ever get a rebuilt engine? Of course not. What it means is that when the time comes, or if you can predict when the time will come, for you to replace the engine, you should evaluate your options and the cost verses benefits of such an expensive operation.

For instance, if over the last year or so you already spent big bucks replacing a transmission and power steering system, and just last month you had the brakes and air conditioning gone completely through, then most likely you should replace the engine because in this scenario, you're already a third of the way toward restoring your car. But if your car has 200,000 miles on it and "I've never had to do a darn thing to this car but change the oil" say "sayonara". If, on the other hand, your car only has 100,000 miles on it and you've maintained it properly (not just oil changes) then it would probably be a good idea to put a new motor in it because the rest of the mechanical things will probably last another 50,000 miles or so and hopefully you won't have to pump too much more money in the beast while you're trying to get your money's worth out of the engine investment. And that's exactly what it's like, an investment. By putting your money into an engine replacement, you're hoping that nothing else of significance will go wrong for a long time because if it does, you will be obliged to put more money into the car to protect your investment in the engine. So before you dump some pretty big bucks into an engine replacement, have the rest of the car checked out to see if anything else is about to blow. If there's nothing else about to go wrong but your car has 200,000 miles on it, you might consider installing a used engine. It probably won't last as long as a rebuilt would, but big deal, the rest of the car isn't going to last that long either.

By the way, the term "rebuilt engine" refers to what's called a "long block" when installing a "rebuilt engine" your mechanic will remove your old engine from the car, take off all of the peripheral things like the fuel system, intake and exhaust systems, mounts, brackets, emission control devices, electrical devices, etc. and bolt them onto the new "rebuilt" engine or "long block" which is just the "basic" engine. So keep in mind that all these peripheral things will still be very old (unless they have been replaced) and if any of them go bad after the engine change, you will have to replace them otherwise your "new" engine won't run right. And one last thing, don't junk your car and then go out and buy another old-but-still-running car. That other old car will probably put you right back into the same position you're in now. If you can't afford to replace the car that needs the engine with a new or at least much younger car, then you would be better off in the long run fixing the car you have now. Car Guys.