Even if you’ve never had the pleasure of waking up with someone you didn’t know (or even worse someone you do know) and wondering what happened and why, I think we’ve all seen the movie scene a few times. The problem with buying a car is no matter how ugly things look in the morning, you are generally stuck with it to at least a certain point. So did this 26 year old Celica make us want to chew our arm off? Sorta.
After a trip through the local car wash it was apparent the previous owner knew what to do to make the aging paint look better than it is. As the dust of the gravel roads came off so did the shine on a lot of the car. We’ll see what our normal Chemical Guys concoction can do to bring some life back to it.
Mechanically is the bigger concern here, so lets take a look:
The exhaust leak is a multipart problem. The manifold has what appears to be a rather long crack in it, but was also missing bolts. Both the pictured one above and the that holds support brace to the manifold were missing. You know the one that would have probably kept this crack from appearing in the first place. I replaced both bolts, but I’m not sure what sounds less frustrating. Tracking down a used (new is discontinued) un cracked manifold or welding up cast iron with 250k on it.
The under side is a mix of good and bad. The ripped open CV boots are the first in the line of bad. They didn’t click yet, and they don’t appear to be original Toyota parts anymore anyway, so we’ll probably just reboot them and cross our fingers. Braided brake lines were a good surprise. The poly bushings, well at least they’ve been replaced. They squeak like crazy, but better than clunking! I haven’t confirmed if the sway bars really are the Suspension Techniques parts that were advertised, but they aren’t falling off so we will worry about those later. The healthy coating of oil underneath would have really sucked if I wanted a show car. For a car that plans to see a Nebraska winter? We call that undercoating!
