My 'new' car!

[Self-employed-swami]

Bought for $575!  I need to go to pick-your-part tomorrow and buy a passenger mirror, as it is broken, but that's all in the fun!

It's a 1995 Tercel, incase anyone is wondering :D

[Dee18]

Congratulations!  My first car was a 1982 Tercel.  I kept it 14 years and loved it.

[Self-employed-swami]

We had a 1986 tercel wagon when my husband and I were in university.  It was glorious!

[Paul der Krake]

Jealous, my $1200 95 Celica sounds like a ripoff now. Tercels have amazing gas mileage, bloody well done. What's the story behind this?

[Self-employed-swami]

An shade-tree mechanic type bought it for the body, when someone hit him from behind in his tercel, so he spent all winter tinkering with it, trying to get the engine and transmission from his car, to work in this one.  It was cold early last year though so he gave up and bought himself one that ran for the winter, (he got it running a few weeks ago), and his wife wanted it off the lawn!

Someone broke the glass off the passenger mirror, and taped a piece of reflective plastic on it, and the windshield wipers are a little dried out, so I'm going to see if I can get a mirror from the junkyard tomorrow. 

I got the settlement from my truck accident, and I should have my license plate back next week, so I can actually drive it then.

It was EMPTY, so we stopped and put $10 worth of gas in it, and that got me more than a 1/4 tank of gas!

[termetgirl]

Congratulations!  My first car was a 1982 Tercel.  I kept it 14 years and loved it.

My first car was also an '82 tercel! The same vintage as me :) I loved it.  It served me well for many years as a university student. I had to spend almost a whole day on the phone trying to get insurance when I first got it (I bought the car for $50). It was twenty years old at that point. It had only 4 speeds, no FM radio, and no mirror outside on the passenger side. I took such good care of it, and at first, I would use a little camping radio on the passenger seat so I could listen to FM, but soon realized that it was best to just hear the engine and drive as smoothly as humanly possible. Its (slow) death: hitting a pothole in Niagara Falls - so large that I lost AM radio, a hub cap, and the ability for the car to stay on if it wasn't accelerating. I drove it like that for a while but my home town was pretty flat, so hard to have enough movement to pop the clutch to start it without hills.

Sorry for the random old car tangent/story. Haven't thought of that car in years! :) Someone approached me once in a parking lot and offered to buy it from me for a few hundred dollars whenever I was done with it - I guess he knew a good thing when he saw it too!

Enjoy your 'new' ride!

[Self-employed-swami]

 Its (slow) death: hitting a pothole in Niagara Falls - so large that I lost AM radio, a hub cap, and the ability for the car to stay on if it wasn't accelerating. I drove it like that for a while but my home town was pretty flat, so hard to have enough movement to pop the clutch to start it without hills.

Sounds like the issue we had with the carburetor on our 86 tercel :(

[BlueMR2]

Good luck...  My wife started out in a used carb'd Tercel.  That thing was a huge moneypit.  Seemed like it spent more time on the back of a towtruck than driving it's own wheels.  She scrapped it when the engine died...  I think she owned it about 2 years.

[Self-employed-swami]

The only money I will be putting into this thing will be new wiper blades, a mirror, and a car wash!  Oh, and oil as required ;). And I have auto-club if it strands me anywhere. This is just a car for the summer.

Ooh, look at me all fancy, with a summer car!

[Paul der Krake]

For that price, hell I would rip out the roof and make it a convertible. Now *that* is a summer car. :)

[Nate R]

My wife had a 91 for a while, back in 2005 or so, I think. The 3 speed automatic version wasn't great on mileage for that small a car. I think she got about 30 MPG with mixed highway/city.

Over the time she had it, it blew a head gasket, brake lines blew out, rear springs broke (literally.). I think she put less than 20K on the car. After the head gasket blew, a rod put itself through the block shortly thereafter w/ only 116K on the odo. We didn't have good luck with ours!

[Self-employed-swami]

For that price, hell I would rip out the roof and make it a convertible. Now *that* is a summer car. :)

Ha!  I can only imagine what insurance would have to say about that!

[Self-employed-swami]

My wife had a 91 for a while, back in 2005 or so, I think. The 3 speed automatic version wasn't great on mileage for that small a car. I think she got about 30 MPG with mixed highway/city.

Over the time she had it, it blew a head gasket, brake lines blew out, rear springs broke (literally.). I think she put less than 20K on the car. After the head gasket blew, a rod put itself through the block shortly thereafter w/ only 116K on the odo. We didn't have good luck with ours!

My Dad, a Toyota mechanic, said that there were some bad years for Tercels.  That must have been one of them. 

[Nate R]

My wife had a 91 for a while, back in 2005 or so, I think. The 3 speed automatic version wasn't great on mileage for that small a car. I think she got about 30 MPG with mixed highway/city.

Over the time she had it, it blew a head gasket, brake lines blew out, rear springs broke (literally.). I think she put less than 20K on the car. After the head gasket blew, a rod put itself through the block shortly thereafter w/ only 116K on the odo. We didn't have good luck with ours!

My Dad, a Toyota mechanic, said that there were some bad years for Tercels.  That must have been one of them.

That may very well be. IIRC, that may be the first year of that generation Tercel as well, which probably doesn't help.

[Self-employed-swami]

Ah, yes.  The first year of a new model is always going to have some issues.

Anyway, I just got off the phone with insurance, and I'll count this as another win, with the yearly liability payment coming in at less than the purchase price!!! ($491/year for me)!

[Self-employed-swami]

Slight disappointment though after an afternoon at the pick-a-part lot :(

We found one tercel with a non-broken passenger mirror glass, and bought it.  We had to take the glass off, and put it into my current housing (along with the adjustable arm thing) but we broke the glass :(

So, I paid $16 to be able to adjust my broken mirror from inside the car, but I did learn a lesson on how those things come apart, and go together.  And my Dad is going to look into ordering me in a new mirror glass.  Hopefully it won't be too much $$$.

[BPA]

Congrats on the new to you car, SES.

Sorry about the mirror though.

[Self-employed-swami]

It was an interesting afternoon, so I didn't mind too much.  The hubs was pretty irritated though, when he broke it.

[capital]

My dad's car when I was growing up was a stripped-down base model 1990 Corolla that didn't come with a passenger-side mirror.

[Self-employed-swami]

My dad's car when I was growing up was a stripped-down base model 1990 Corolla that didn't come with a passenger-side mirror.

I'm not quite that badass ;)