Horay for spending money!, The Yelli Celi story.. Options

[95CelicaST]

Originally I started this thread in Off-Topic, but it's Celica related, so I moved it to the Engine forum, but it isn't really about that, so I moved to Electrical, but its more than that, so I have decided this will reside in General Discussion.

So a while back I bought the Yelli Celi. All was great. Aside from the terrible steering wheel the car was awesome.


Then it went downhill.


I was driving down the road and the car completely shut off on me. I pulled onto a side street and attempted to start it back up. No dice. So I had it towed to my shop and had a look-see. I wasn't getting any spark. I checked the distributor and it was fine. The coil was fine along with the igniter. I was ultimately able to trace it down to the EFI relay. I went and bought a new EFI relay and also a new starter relay because I was having symptoms of a failing starter and wanted to experiment with this. Surprise! The car runs fine and no more starting problems. This is good news.... kinda - car works now, but I have an electrical problem. A couple weeks went by and all was great, then it did it all over again. Car won't start. Replace the EFI relay. Car starts.

It goes on and on and on and up until recently it has been happening at least once a week. Now the car runs fine, but the battery drains out, so it has been out of commission for about a week. I drove it down to the local speed shop "Drift Office" and had the owner, Bob, come out and look at it, as he has an AE86 with a Silvertop running Blacktop electronics - just like me. We took a spin around town at different RPM's and driving styles and he said that the car is wired up all wrong. The car has no torque below 4500 RPM's and after VVT kicks in, it runs as it should. This is caused partly by the MAP sensor only being tapped into the #2 cylinder, but also because of the whole wiring setup....great.

So he gave me a quote to make the proper harness from scratch and tuck it away again like it is now, except that the fuse box is going to be relocated once more to a safer place (when it rains the fuse box fills up with water... not fun), and he is going to properly setup what is more commonly referred to as the "power steering loopback" that Coomer had originally attempted. Basically they route the P/S lines around and back into the rack to make it easier to turn, as reverting to power steering is no longer an option for me.

In the end, I'm going to be spending $1000 to get it all road worthy again. So much for a good Christmas.

In other news, I'm looking around at a few '02 WRX. I need something else to get me around. Something newer and more reliable More money...

Discuss.

This post has been edited by 95CelicaST: Nov 28, 2007 - 1:10 AM

[jason]

80% of cars in the US are purchased via loans... just the mentality people have here, the rest of the world has an "if i dont have it, i dont get it" mentality which i live by myself, and for the accident/stolen/vandal situation where an insurance company would total the car, and say you were upside down on it, you can get gap insurance to avoid your friends situation, where the car is worth 10k, you still owe 15k on it, the insurance pays the 10k and the gap insurance picks up the "gap" left behind instead of you shelling out the 5k to payoff your loan

on another note!! good luck with the new car, i myself am going to be following your footsteps somewhat soon when all my parts come in for the celica.

another financial note... id just pay it ahead 1 month and then make the normal payments, instead of double or triple payments, to help built up a nice credit history, especially if your young, you'll pay and extra $6-800 in interest over the course of the loan, but you get all that nice history! and as long as you stay a month ahead you dont have to worry about late charges, or bad hits on your credit