its only funny cause its true...who knew a 14.7 was fast?...anyway, ya im gonna post a couple pics of mines dead corpse in a little bit, by the way chris, why are you selling your car, it looks really nice

 

Nope not me... I got walked twice and I would have only got it once if they would have given me a new shortblock the first time instead of just replacing the bearings...

 

What he said, times a billion.

 

This is the turbo laser pos. I marvel at how every picture I take of the car somehow makes it look 10x better than it does in person. My camera must not have a high enough resolution to do justice to the crappiness.

 

A back shot. Not the exhaust. I still don't know what exactly that exhaust is. I think it's just a canister muffler on the stock piping. I haven't been able to get the front bolts off the cat to do a direct across-the-bore measurement, and I don't trust my circumference-and-math results. When I get the car to a muffler shop that will actually touch anything having to do with the cat, I'll have those bolts free and will know. Plus, I will be able to run open dp, which I might just do all the time.

Also notice that those wheels are not stock, and are not alloys. They are honest-to-god 14" steelies. Like, wtf? I still can't comprehend the thought process behind putting 14" steelies on a car that came stock with 16" alloys.

 

I think the last owner had to take the entire dash out to do this. He seems to have had everything painted red, the door trim is red, the little wavy trim is all red, the, lots of exterior trim that should have been black is red, I don't even think my mirrors were red before he got his hands on it. The entire exterior was repainted this bright red over an original dark red, and such a crappy job was done that it is actually flaking off, you can see that I ran a screwdriver lightly across the front indent styling line in the front bumper and it stripped all of the paint off to reveal a strip of darker red. On second thought, I really wish I hadn't done that. On third thought, I realized that it would've come off on it's own at that rate.

And yes, that's my boost gauge. It's velcro'd to the top of the steering column. I need to redo it with marine epoxy or something, as it turns out, superglue sucks. Half the velcro is peeling up, and I can wipe the residue off the plastic with spit and my finger. Not exactly living up to supergl

*edit* Yes, the car came with an a-pillar gauge pod with non-functional a/f gauge and the boost gauge. It turned out not to be a nice pod that was integrated into a replacement trim piece, but instead some cheap plastic with adhesive holding it onto the stock trim piece which had holes cut into it for the lines. Ah shoot, I just remembered the other thing I needed to look for at the junkyard, one of those trim pieces.
I don't like a pillar pods, and that one was ugly and blocked my vision, plus it sucked. So I ripped it off and now I've got just got this holey trim piece.

 

On the left is the horse cock. On the right is a shift knob I picked up for 50 cents out of a junkyard. I could have pocketed it and gotten it for free, but we didn't get much from the junkyard and we got in for free due to their lack of change for a five, so it was paid for. It's from a mazda 626. It seems to have two small soft cracks. It's still in 10x better shape than the extremely worn horse cock. What was done to wear out the horse cock in that manner, I will not speculate on.

 

Ah yes, the engine bay. This engine is pissing me off. Right now the car doesn't drive at all because I need to rebuild the clutch slave cylinder and install it, bleed the clutch system, yadda yadda. Easy, right? No. None of the parts stores had rebuild kits for the laser rs awd. Then I had the bright idea to call around for a 1992 Eclipse GSX rebuild kit, instead. Discount auto parts had it. I went, ordered it, picked it up the next day. I pulled it out of the box to color match it, I have a red piston slave cylinder. Of course the stupid aftermarket company doesn't color code it, it's silver. So I take it to my parents' place and go to put it all together. It's too big. I have to find out exactly what the hell car I have to order this part for to get the right one, take it back, and wait another day or two to get the other one in, and hope it's right.

None of that matters anyway, it has nothing to do with the engine problems. So the slave cylinder loses it's seal the friday before last, the car is flatbedded to the street in front of my parents' house, it's been sitting there since. I've been starting it up when I go over to their house every 2 or so days, letting it idle and warm up, revving the engine a little bit, seeing how the idle surge reacts to ac, no ac, etc, just boredom. Other than that, no driving. Well, first thing that is bad, I get a compression tester and test the compression. Perfect in cyls 234, 105 in cyl 1. Put some oil in there, goes up to 120. Shoot.
It's been making this ticking sound for a little bit, not like the lifter tick that seems to have gone away for the most part. This one doesn't go away when the car warms up like the lifter tick used to. It sounds like it's coming from down in the block. I'm hoping that I'm wrong and it's just lifter tick, but I want to have it checked out to make sure it's not a rod bearing or something. So there's that.
The valve cover leaks some oil as you can see from the oil in the spark plug area. That oil is only the stuff I couldn't mop up with a paper towel before taking the pic, there is usually a nice little pool of it in there.
New problem, I went to start up the car just for the heck of it when I was at my parents' last night, I installed some of those "extra white" bulbs, I don't remember what ge called them but they're supposed to be much whiter and brighter. They did seem to make a difference, which is good at 15 dollars a pop and half the lifetime. I was standing back checking out the light when I suddenly smoke started blowing through the light. "What the hell?" It smelled like oil. I went back today and started the car, let it sit in the street idling for a good 5-10 minutes and came out. Every puff of exhaust could be SEEN. Light blueish smoke. Got into the car and slowly revved the engine to 3k, looked back, a lot more smoke. Checked the oil, down about a 1/4, oil topped off not 100 miles ago- but the oil was FULL less than 25 miles of driving ago when I last filled the tank. Sucks.

So yeah, as soon as the slave cylinder is fixed, I've got to deal with:
multiple engine problems
leaking transfer case
horrid belt squeal, which I blame on improper tensioning by the non-dsm-knowing shop I had the timing belt done at back when I had just bought the car. I think it's the alternator belt, as the voltage from the alternator spikes wildly to 17.5 when it squeals or feels like squealing but isn't yet. The belts have already been retensioned once because of this problem.
Hopefully this fixes the alternator voltage problem, if not, need to deal with that.
and a million less immediately important things.

 

dude... that sucks... you should just sell it... dont you hate it when multiple problems come around and arent little things... its like gut wrenching and very troublesome when you dont know whats causing the problem and how yorue gonna fix it.


To me... i need another headache

 

Yeah, but if I sold it I'd take a loss, and if I wanted to have a car with any hope for reliability I'd have to buy like a bone stock crx or something, and it would probably still have a bunch of problems that would require a lot of money. I don't understand why the engine is having all of these problems, it only has 75000 miles on the odometer and the guy's story matched the carfax, so I think that's actually the mileage.

Whatever it is, I'm not selling it. Yeah, it sucks, especially because I only have 180 bucks in the bank and a low paying job with low winter hours, and many complications make it very difficult to get another job. I may just have to drop insurance on it and park it somewhere, unless I can get a diagnosis on it and it's not something terrible.