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Location:
South Australia
Registered:
July 2002
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Re: Looking at buying a 89 celica need some info
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Thu, 16 June 2005 01:07
 
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Hey I had huge list of stuff but then my server went 'boom'.
Basically - I've always found that the number of kays a car has done is mostly irrelevant to whether it's in good nick. Some engines are crapped after 70,000km simply because they weren't looked after properly (rings seized in, bearings/crank stuffed etc). Heck, my GT4 (ST165) blew up and it had only done 130,000km and it wasn't to do with the fact that it was turbo or the engine was unduly stressed - simply starved of oil due to me not topping the oil up (it was consuming oil at a prodigious rate though so I'm only 95% to blame).
So in effect - you should look at the condition of the engine rather than the number of k's. 3S-GEs can do around about 200,000 to 250,000km before they probably need some amount of rebuilding (valve seats, piston rings and sometimes big end bearings just for safety's sake, checking bores etc for out-of-round).
One thing you should definitely look for is whether it has the 3S-GE engine, or the 3S-FE engine. If it has the latter - then don't bother, the car is probably boring 
As for what they should look like? Just make sure they are straight and the paint is in good nick and you can't spot any rust (check rear boot hatch, the spare wheel well, and the front windscreen pillars).
Easy mods? You can do little things like new springs, shocks, maybe stick a decent exhaust on it. But after that it gets either mechanically tricky to do, or expensive to do (to be worth it).
Overall the only downfall of these cars is the fact that it's E-W lay-out, which means servicing things like timing belts can be annoying (if you haven't done it a few times before) and I've had mechanics do some shit work when I've had to return a car to them repeatedly (mainly because they CBFed doing the same things over and over again, so they decided that they might as well just leave the bolts out that are holding stuff on).
But on the plus side there's plenty of boot space (thanks to simple rear suspension layour), the rear seats are bit of a squeeze - the cars are nice and light-weight and good to get around in, quite fuel economical when driven reasonably and even from stock they have *excellent* turn in and response (I wouldn't particularly recommend lowering the car to improve the cornering, the drop in centre of gravity doesn't really make up for the change in roll centre of the suspension etc).
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