1977 Celica GT Liftback Ad on Craigslist

One of the Celicas being advertised was in (barely) running condition, albeit with poor cosmetics, a leaky cooling system, and carburetion issues.  However, the seller was willing to part with it for almost nothing.  The second was in much better cosmetic shape, but did not run due to a half-completed swap of a 22R-TE motor (a somewhat rare turbocharged variant of Toyota’s fuel-injected 22R-E).  After some negotiating, I bought both of them for pretty reasonable prices.

Ryan securing the rustier of the two Celicas

A couple days later, me and a friend (Ryan) set out with a truck and a car dolly to pick up both cars and bring them to his house in Eden where we’ll be working on them.  The running Celica proved little trouble, as we simply drove it onto the dolly, disconnected the drive shaft, and rode off into the sunset.  The non-running one was rather more troublesome.  Ryan suggested we try using ratcheting tie-downs to haul the car up onto the dolly.  It seemed such a simple idea in theory, but the tie downs I had were light duty and the ratchet mechanisms certainly not designed for bearing the kind of load we tortured them with.  After about an hour (in the rain) of laboriously tightening ratchets a single tooth at a time, moving and swapping tie downs, ruefully evaluating the per-centimeter progress up the ramps, and muttering muffled expletives, the second Celica was ready to go and made the trip to Eden with no further issues.

Less rusty Celica stares down a deceptively long distance for ratcheting tie strap hauling technology to overcome

The current plan is to start stripping down the “better” of the two Celicas and assess how much rust damage it has, then start repairing the body.  Hopefully we’ll be able to restore it to a nice looking and running condition.  In the mean time, we hope to get the rustier RA29 running smoothly for future use as a parts source and possible LeMons race car.  Whatever pans out, we sure will be developing a lot of experience doing body work and rust repair, and hopefully without inspiring too much head-bashing frustration.  More photos of the Great Celica Retrieval of 2009 follow.

T-T-T-TURBOVAN

At least, that’s the back story I prefer to believe in…  Otherwise this is pretty stupid.

Steering stem tightening procedure from the SV1000 service manual

Not so helpfully, the tools mentioned cost about $140 + shipping from the cheapest supplier.  Finding this preposterous, I went to the local Suzuki dealer in hopes of borrowing the tool for a day.  Oddly, they couldn’t find the exact tool to fit the nuts and suggested I might use a spanner wrench instead (um… no).  So it was time to get creative.

Not about to shell out $150 for a single-purpose tool, I picked up a $6 1.25 inch deep socket from good ‘ol Northern Tool and some heavy duty Dremel cutting wheels.  After an hour and a half of bathing in a shower of incandescent sparks, I had this:

Home made Suzuki steering stem socket

Take that, obscure expensive proprietary Suzuki tool!

Mountain twisties near Hanging Rock Park, NC.

Our trip took us up Highway 89 and back down Highway 66 into Winston-Salem, with a brief diversion into Hanging Rock Park for some fun on a few steep hairpin curves.  My co-worker went his own way after we reached Winston-Salem, and I re-traced the route backwards to get home (certainly the long way, but far more fun than Interstate 40).  Highway 89 is fantastic as long as you don’t get stuck behind (or cannot pass) cars in one of the handful of little towns it meanders through.  Highway 66 also has some great curves, though for much of it the road quality is somewhat poor, and the uneven pavement and potholes can be somewhat unnerving when you’re pinned in a tight turn.  It’s still a worthwhile stretch of road, just one which you might want to tackle at a slightly slower pace than normal.  Next time I’d like to take Highway 89 all the way out to Mount Airy and see how the curves measure up.  Here’s a link to the route on Google Maps, good for as long as Google doesn’t change the map URL API.

I didn’t bring a camera with me this time, so no obligatory photograph of me in my riding regalia against a scenic backdrop.  However I did take this photo of my throttle hand soon after arriving home (no that’s not leather color from my gloves).

War wounds sustained during six hours of pounding mountain curves.

To: sale-958016510@craigslist.org
Subject: For trade or sale: 1997 Suzuki Bandit 1200 (naked) - $2400 (Greensboro)
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 20:45:46 -0500
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.930.3)

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY --- AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html

I have a g5 power mac that is well worth over $3987.32. It has a 2.3
ghz dual processor, 2 gb of ram, 250gb hard drive, os x leopard
10.5.6, 20" apple cinema hd display.It has logic pro 7 fully
functional and working, ilife 08 and microsoft office 2008. All
aluminum body and upgradable to 16 gb of ram and 1 terabyte of hard
drive (1000 gb) I'm looking to trade
let me know thank

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this message was remailed to you via: sale-958016510@craigslist.org
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Neglecting the sheer oddity of even offering a PC in a trade for a motorbike when the ad leaves no doubt about what I’m willing to trade for (specific motorcycles), the Power Mac described is about 2-3 years old, and most of us know just how well computers hold their value against time as Moore’s law marches on.  Perhaps the Mac cost $4,000 brand new, but even if it did it’s worth a fraction of that now.  Upon consulting a friend and eBay, I’d expect a 2.3 GHz G5 Power Mac + cinema display to fetch a little upwards of $1,000 today (and personally I wouldn’t pay that much for three year old hardware).  Just for kicks, let’s see kind of Mac I could get through retail channels for the asking price of my bike…

Dual 2.8 GHz quad-core Xeon Mac Pro

Wow, that’s quite a lot of Mac! Oh craigslist, you’re incorrigible!

In fact, so much fun is the Bandit that I rode about 80 miles of country roads on it this afternoon!  Here’s the route I took along some nice, scenic, low-traffic highway not too far from where I live.

In the process of writing all these pages on the GT Theremin, I realized that my site layout afforded horizontal insufficient space for text given my penchant for verbosity.  Therefore I’ve updated the style sheets to give me some breathing room and hopefully make longer pages less tedious for you to read.

2000 Suzuki SV 650 (source)

Lately I’ve been hunting hard for a motorcycle, but I haven’t had much luck as yet.  I had an appointment to buy a Suzuki GS500 which I confirmed twice with the seller.  When the scheduled day came and I called the seller again, he informed me that he had sold it two days earlier.  Thanks a lot for letting me know!  It’s not like I had taken time out of my schedule and a friend’s to meet the appointment!  Sakes alive…

I really have my heart set on finding a Suzuki SV 650 (I love naked bikes), but it’s proving extremely difficult.  I found one in Atlanta but couldn’t manage to pull together the necessary arrangements to purchase it and store it for a few days.  I’ve seen two in this area, but they were both sold within a single day of being posted on Craigslist.  One was posted Sunday afternoon, I called about it this morning, and the seller had apparently sold it before he even got my message.  Oh well, the search goes on.

For even more excitement, my spider problem is still ongoing.  Apartment management has been accommodating thus far, but I haven’t yet seen a reduction in the number of recluses.  On the bright side, I caught a big live one over the weekend and took some pretty good photos of it.  I’m going to be sending some of the specimens I’ve preserved to the entomology department (under which arachnology is typically paradoxically lumped) at NCSU for a positive identification.

Update: The entomology department at NCSU confirmed that the spiders I sent are brown recluses.  Well, no surprises there.

For the past couple of months I’ve been looking for a car on-and-off.  The Civic I used to drive (it was a great car) now belongs to my brother, and I’ve been relying totally on public transportation and my family for my commuting needs the past year or so.  However, with my internship in North Carolina ever-looming, I’ve been watching the typical sources for a vehicle I might like (Auto Trader, Craigslist, newspaper, etc.).  Of course, reconciling “vehicle I like” with my budget constraints can be frustrating at times.

For a while I tried to find a 5-speed BMW E36 (1992-1998 3-series) in good condition at a sane price.  Turns out this is pretty difficult; it seems that by the time 3-series depreciate into my price bracket, a lot of ricer kiddies line up who are willing to pay way over Blue Book value for them.  That rather puts me at a disadvantage since I rarely feel compelled to pay more for a car than the various book values (there are some reasons you might, but these weren’t at play with any of the cars I looked at).  Somewhat discouraged from a month-and-a-half of searching in vain and dealing with a lot of shady, uniquely Craigslist-esque characters, I had nearly resigned myself to just finding another decent Civic or Accord.  Can’t go wrong with a well-maintained Honda, even if they are pretty bland to drive.

Well, it turns out that even the market for Civics and Accords sucks right now.  According to a friend who is in the used car business, rising fuel prices have caused a major scare, and reliable fuel-efficient cars in my price bracket ($5,000-$8,000) are rare and selling for inflated prices.  Great.  Well I figured I’d find something with my friend’s help; maybe with luck I could still pick up an okay Civic or Accord at auction for a price I could live with.  However, at this point I was rather miffed at the probability that I couldn’t even find another Civic in nearly as good condition as my last one for around the same price (immaculate 1998 white 5-speed Civic EX coupe with 72,000 miles: $7,200 in 2004).  Thanks, petroleum energy economy!

‘Twas not to be, however, as I had checked out Craigslist again the morning prior to the day I talked to my dealer friend.  Not any promising-looking BMWs, but there were two WRXes way out I-20 West past Six Flags.  Previously I had more or less given up on finding a WRX for a number of very convincing reasons:

• People who have them usually drive them hard
• People who have them usually drive them until they cease moving due to abuse or high-speed impact with another substantive object
• People who have them usually drive them really hard
• People who take care of them usually keep them until bullet point #2 intervenes

All of this adds up to a car that is very difficult to find on the used market, and even harder to find in a condition that a sane person would wish to purchase.  The rare used WRX in good condition that does surface usually gets snapped up by someone pretty quickly (heck, even the trashed ones will sell to the right people).  Now, no matter how much fun a car is, if the drivetrain has been dogged you don’t want to touch it with a ten-foot pole.  However, after a few vicarious conversations (via my brother due to my wisdom teeth) with the owner of the 2003 silver WRX, I had built up a pretty good feeling that he was being honest and candid and that the car was in good shape.  Even better, the CARFAX report was pretty clean and agreed with what he told us (always get a CARFAX!).  The 2002 blue WRX was listed by a dealer, and while I didn’t get the same warm fuzzy feeling from him, the CARFAX also told a good story and he was located within ten minutes of the first WRX.  Both were one-owner cars with comparable mileage and asking prices within my range.  Cool!  I hoped one of these would work out, because this was realistically my last shot at getting a car I like before settling.

After rounding up my brother—an apprentice auto mechanic—and the family “expert negotiator” (you know to whom this refers if you know us), we made the hour-and-a-half trek to Douglasville to check out the cars.  After a test drive and much poking around over, under, beside, and inside the car, my brother felt that it was in pretty much the condition previously elucidated to us.  The A/C did not work, it needs a new windshield, and one of the inner C/V boots needs reworking.  However, the drivetrain felt and sounded solid, and the guy was old enough to make a convincing case that he hadn’t driven it recklessly and had mostly logged highway miles.  Of the known issues, the big kicker was the air conditioning; A/C is often something that is difficult to diagnose until you actually start fixing it.  The owner claimed that he was told it is a minor issue, but this is nearly impossible to quickly corroborate.  The compressor clutch didn’t catch when we turned the A/C on (which may in itself mean nothing), so we really had to operate on the worst-case assumption that it would need a new compressor (about $1,500 installed, though you can do better if you try).  The car wasn’t exactly immaculate either, so we decided to go see the second WRX as well.

The second (blue) one was at a storage facility for a small auto dealer.  It looked really immaculate and the A/C worked well, though in typical dealer style it had just been detailed.  It was getting dark so we skipped the in-depth look-over and test drove it.  It didn’t take very long to notice a rather loud gnawing, winding sound which started around 20 miles per hour and seemed independent of the engine revs, clutch engagement, and transmission gear.  Goody, probably the differentials or something in the AWD linkages.  Shortly thereafter I noticed that the transmission kept biting whenever I shifted into first gear, even at a dead stop.  The only way to avoid it was to engage the clutch in neutral for a few seconds before shifting into first.  Oh boy, the first-gear synchro is chewed up.  At this point we were fairly confident that we were riding in a typical “has-had-the-living-daylights-beat-out-of-it” WRX pursuant to bullet points 1 and 3 above.  We thanked the dealer for his time, and made an expedient exit.

I’m going to spare the rest of the narrative because I’ve already rambled on far longer than federal regulations likely allow.  Thanks to the expert negotiator, we bought the silver one for $700 less than the asking price, at a cost which I believe to be very fair based on book value and the assumption that the A/C is dead-in-the-water.  I’m going to replace the windshield and fix the C/V boot immediately, then get the car checked out by a Subaru dealer and assess the A/C system.  Frankly, if the A/C turns out to be worst-case then I’ll go without for awhile, as I did a few summers back with the Civic.  I took a bit of a risk not having the car fully inspected on a lift, but between the good feeling the owner gave me and my brother’s inspection, it’s one I’m willing to take (knock on wood).  I started to detail the interior today because it needed a good scrubbing, and it’s actually starting to look really nice after a bit of vacuuming, Windex, and Armor-all, though I still need to shampoo the upholstery with the trusty ‘ol Rug-Doctor as well as detail the exterior and engine bay.

How do I like it?  Love it.  How many dumb jokes will I make about the TURBO BOOSTUU gauge?  Innumerable.  How does it feel?  Let’s just say that it’s really nice to have a car that can do 70-100 effortlessly in fifth gear and still corner like a dream.    Sorry Civics and Accords, I still love you, but it’s time to see other people.