Your Celicas Epic Story Options

[fastgt]

Ok guys lets hear just for fun.... Tell your fellow comminity members how you met you celica and how it became yours

[jgreening]

I was sitting around the house one day in December of 2003 and thinking about replacing my 1991 Acura Integra that we got brand new 13 years ago. I knew I wanted a convertible and I knew I wanted some power. Having little kids, I knew I also had to have a back seat. So, I started thinking of my options. I came up with Mustang, Camaro/Firebird, and BMW 330ci. Since my budget was only $20,000, the Beamer was out. Although I enjoyed driving the other cars, there was just something about them I didn't like - it was an image issue I guess. Plus, I have always been partial to imports.

Then, I got the idea to buy a convertible without power and swap an engine. If I was going to do that, I knew I would need to reserve some money for the engine swap so we were going to necessarily be talking about an older car. For this reason, I narrowed it down to either a Honda or Toyota. Since Honda does not make a convertible with a back seat, my available options were: 5th gen Celica, 6th gen Celica, and late 90's Solara. While the Solara actually had more interior room and potential, it would have put me over my budget. By looks alone, I settled on the 6th gen.

I then started my research looking for, and finding out about, this car. I found out that the convertible's were only offered in Black, Red and White. I thought the Black looked the best so I started looking for a black convertible with leather and a manual transmission. After some time on Autotrader, I eventually found celica.net which lead me to 6gc.

After some preliminary research, I limited my search to 98's and 99's because I had read that the 95-97 convertibles had problems with top motors. I never confirmed this. I looked everywhere and quickly learned how low the production numbers were on these cars. I seriously considered flying to Washington state to buy one that looked pristine but it was too much because it only had about 50K miles. Most of the cars that I found were either in Florida, Texas or California.

During my search, I started vigorously researching the swap. I finally located a car in Madison Wisconsin in late February. It had 95,000 miles and looked like it was in pretty good shape. I drove about 3 hours to look at it and fell in love. It had some tears in the leather but the body and rest of the car looked very very good. A 9/10 for a car with that many miles. I bought it on the spot for $9100.

Since then, I have dumped another $8,000 into the modifications listed in my profile. I plan on getting my front seats recovered (or new seats), an upgraded turbo and some clean exterior modifications this winter / spring. Then I will be done. All in all, it has been a successful project so far.