New from Canada Eh! Options

[OnAllFours]

Hello all! My name is Dan, I'm an apprentice mechanic in southern Ontario and last fall I got my hands on the car of my dreams! I hope to learn as much as I can from everyone here and in turn I'm planning on creating my own guides for performing general maintenance and mechanical repairs as a way to contribute back to the community.

Let me first tell you what my history is with Celicas, when I was about 5 or 6 I was at my aunt/uncle's house in So-Cal and they had a tape of the Monte Carlo Rally 1995 on TV and I immediately adored the stand out looks and loud growl from the TTE Celicas. I was always into cars as a kid even though none of my close relatives were, and I just basically went and learned as much as I could with nobody to keep me grounded to a certain style/genre of cars. In high school I didn't plan on doing anything car related as a career, I found it much more of a hobby as other kids who grew up around cars seemed miles ahead of me in shop class. The big turning point was stumbling on a Japanese export site while slacking off in computers class. I'd seen Skylines, FDs, and such in the Fast and Furious movies, but spending hours going over the export listings really caught me on to the Japanese sports cars. Then back to rallying I learned that my cousin was going to be competing in some of the Rally America races down in Cali, so I got into that as well. Then I got offered a job and apprenticeship through some other connections and even though I was so green to wrenching I couldn't pass it up. After my first year of work I started looking for a car and bought a high mileage 5spd '92 Accord, but while I was searching online for cars I stumbled upon a fantastic 5th Gen GT-Four which was out of my price range but still a fantastic deal. When I was tired of the Accord I wanted to go to the next step and since I'd been working my butt off I wanted a nice JDM import, and lo-and-behold the listing for the 5th Gen was still up (this was the next spring)! I pounced on it, and despite a snow storm the night before I drove up to Toronto to pick it up. I dug it out of the snow drift, boosted it and in my excitement tried to drive out with the e-brake still on . Unfortunately for me the previous owner had managed to hide a transmission issue and by that summer it came apparent that I would need to either replace the tranny ($$$) or give up on my baby. I started pricing out a full ST205 engine/tranny swap and realized that the 6th Gens being 15 yrs/o I would be better off to simply get the full step up instead. I found a fantastic importer who found me a great car and fast forward a couple months and a bank loan later and the car of my dreams arrived at my doorstep !








So, what I'm thinking is, everytime I do something on my car (oil change, brakes, timing belt, w/e) I'll take pics and give a step by step guide for doing it, a long with a difficulty rating so less experienced people don't get in over their heads. My reason for this is that because these cars were never sold here, those who have them may not be able to find people to work on them or may not be able to find repair manuals/part listings. I will figure this stuff out on my own and with my friends at work and then pass on my findings to the rest of us .

Let me know what you think!