I bought a 1994 Toyota Celica a few weeks ago.
My family had gone down to one car. I was getting to work on my bicycle mostly, and occasionally riding my Yamaha XS400 motorcycle when the weather was nice.
Then I started grad school, and the prospect of a snowy Colorado winter started to loom. Between work, school, studying, family life, and sleeping, I found it difficult to cleave an extra 15 minutes out of my day to pop on my bicycle.
My motorcycle does a fine job of commuting duty when it's above 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and the roads are not icy...but that's not the case throughout the winter in Fort Collins...So, I started to look for a good car.
I wanted something that was fun to drive, handled well, had a standard transmission, was cheap, economical, easy to work on, not ostentatious, and not some anonymous $#*t box.
Now, despite being very pro-bicycle, and often against an auto-centric society, I dig cars. My wife and I looked around and we eventually found a really nice, silver 1996 Celica hatchback at a used car lot. We drove it and loved it, but they were asking a crazy amount of money for it ($7000, I believe).
So, we kept our eyes open on Craigslist, and eventually found a white 1994 Celica ST with a manual transmission in awesome shape with pretty nice-looking Enki rims and new tires. The owners seemed nice, trustworthy, and completely ignorant about cars. They claimed that the car had a brand new engine installed 40K miles ago. My wife and I fell in love with this Celica instantly.
Unfortunately, on the way home, I started to hear a rattle...is that detonation?? No...IT WAS A ROD KNOCK! To be continued...
My family had gone down to one car. I was getting to work on my bicycle mostly, and occasionally riding my Yamaha XS400 motorcycle when the weather was nice.
Then I started grad school, and the prospect of a snowy Colorado winter started to loom. Between work, school, studying, family life, and sleeping, I found it difficult to cleave an extra 15 minutes out of my day to pop on my bicycle.
My motorcycle does a fine job of commuting duty when it's above 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and the roads are not icy...but that's not the case throughout the winter in Fort Collins...So, I started to look for a good car.
I wanted something that was fun to drive, handled well, had a standard transmission, was cheap, economical, easy to work on, not ostentatious, and not some anonymous $#*t box.
Now, despite being very pro-bicycle, and often against an auto-centric society, I dig cars. My wife and I looked around and we eventually found a really nice, silver 1996 Celica hatchback at a used car lot. We drove it and loved it, but they were asking a crazy amount of money for it ($7000, I believe).
So, we kept our eyes open on Craigslist, and eventually found a white 1994 Celica ST with a manual transmission in awesome shape with pretty nice-looking Enki rims and new tires. The owners seemed nice, trustworthy, and completely ignorant about cars. They claimed that the car had a brand new engine installed 40K miles ago. My wife and I fell in love with this Celica instantly.
Unfortunately, on the way home, I started to hear a rattle...is that detonation?? No...IT WAS A ROD KNOCK! To be continued...
