Put a new air filter in the car.One night back around 1974 I was driving a 1962 Ford Falcon I used to own to Indiana to look at a Ford Model T car a guy had for sale.Somewhere in the middle of the night in Kentucky my car quit running just as if I had switched off the engine.The air filter was clogged up.I threw the old air filter on the rear floor board of the car.My car ran like a champ after I had removed the old air filter. cuhulin
Take your laptop so you can post questions if... ;)
Good luck! I think you'll like the car. If not, contact me before putting it on eBay!!
Well for what it's worth, the owner contacted me to say that he hears a 'knocking' in the engine. I'm still interested in the car. It has all the configurations I want(turbo, 5sp, white, targa top, TEM), and i'm not really afraid of an engine swap AFTER i get it back home. I tried talking him down on the price because of that, but I think I was too aggressive and it pissed him off. He's trying not to lose his ass on it (which I understand completely) but fact is he paid too much for the car to start with, and now it might have a sour engine. Sorry to say. Not my fault.
But oh well. I told him it's still up for negotiation. We'll see what happens. Otherwise, I'll start looking for another.
-ph
There are a number of other online and off line publications pertaining to cars/trucks/vans for sale, I don't remember the names of them.Check out the newspaper classifieds too.You might find the vehicle you want in the city you live in or nearby. cuhulin
The city I live in is in a corrosion state. I see Supras here for cheap, but they're almost always rustbuckets. I'm looking for a rust-free car to drive in the spring/summer and garage in the fall/winter.
I'm not a foreign car guy, but I do notice Supras because they're rear-drive and have a potent straight six, unlike most Japanese cars. I'm not in the rust belt, but unfortunately the ones I see around here still fall into two categories that make them undesirable: pampered and commanding a stupid-high resale price, or modified and beat-to-snot and not worth the book value of the parts the previous owner bolted on it... let alone anything for th car itself :-(
Depends on the 'knock'. A lot of knocking in the 3.0 series is fatal, and I wouldn't advise driving 650 miles with it. Then again, occasionally my
7M-GE gets a light knocking sound from the 'middle' of the engine, makes the noise for minutes or a half an hour, and then goes away. But it's a very, very light rapping noise. I've put 25,000 miles on the car this way...
Are you in the Northeast? I know of one in Amherst MA, low miles, pristeen. The guy had it on eBay with a BIN of $4500; I sent him a message asking to look at it but he wasn't available when I was. On my routine cruising around Amherst one day in mine I came to an intersection and there he was sitting. Beautiful. I never looked again to see if he sold it.
Timing and detonation, perhaps? I had a 429cj in a 65 Galaxie that would make a knocking sound when I was accelerating hard, and it turned out that the timing advance curve was wrong. And I couldn't get enough fuel into it.
This guy says that the Supra only makes the noise under acceleration, and only at certain RPMs. Never at idle. Also he's been driving the car all week and claims it hasn't gotten louder or worse. At 197,000 miles a rod isn't completely out of the question, of course. And who's to say he hasn't been out beating the snot out of it while he's got the chance. Or maybe he put the wrong fuel in it and it's just detonating like a bitch.
Call me crazy, but as long as I can get the car home I'm fine with a dying engine. I've been wanting a 'project' for some time ;-)
-ph
The girlie had (well, still has) a VW Corrado which were notorious for eating rod bearings (VW used some new heavy-duty bearings that turned out to be not nearly as durable as the old school ones for the G60 engines) anyway that noise manifested itself as a tapping noise that was most prominent under light throttle acceleration between 1500 and 2000 RPM.
At least in that car, an in-the-car replacement of the rod bearings with standard VW 1.8 bearings and the factory TTY bolts with ARP ones made all the bad noises go away. Until the supercharger went up :( Yes, you are SUPPOSED to have the rods resized when you replace the rod bolts, but I didn't. It worked fine. No guarantees, though, that you would have the same luck even if your noise is as I describe.
I'm not aware of a commonly known problem like that with the Supra engines - they're supposed to be really stout, right up there with the early VW watercooled engines and old school American V-8s in terms of strength and durability.
nate
Yeah, i was kind of thinking that... i haven't seen a 7m-gte open before, but I might be able to sneak in some new rod bearings with it still in the car. Just for the summer. Then in the fall, when I took the car off the street for climactic conditions I could pull the engine, do a complete teardown and rebuild. Etc.
-ph
This sounds more plausible. If it's only knocking under acceleration, a couple bottles of Chevron Techron should do the trick. That and using premium fuel. Since I have owned my Supra I have never put ANYTHING but premium in it, especially considering the age and mileage. Older, higher mileage cars need higher octane to overcome carbon buildup on the pistons.
Of course, I also put premium in a 1989 Subaru. Because I get about 4 more miles per gallon with it. And in my Scion. The Mazda is the only car I have ever had that did better on mid-grade.
Don't count on this! The oil pan sits right over the rack and pinion and part of the sub-frame, IIRC. All I remember for sure is that I can't remove the oil pan without lifting the engine, because I have a leak somewhere I can't seem to trace.
Remember what I said about the spark plugs. Toyota builds really good cars, but some of them could have been thought out better in terms of repairs!
Of course, you don't really have to repair them all that much, and I think they thought if you could afford $30,000 for a car in 1988, you weren't really worrying about paying for repairs!
One should pretty much use synthetic oil in a turbo engine, right?
He also says he just got an oil change. Maybe it got the wrong oil in it too?
Every car with a serious rod knock i've ever heard pounded like crazy at idle. If this one doesn't at idle, I'd like to think it's something else.
-ph
In an engine that old I would probably use a high-mileage oil. I used to be a big fan of Castrol, until an '89 Mazda I bought started making a metallic tapping noise. I did some poking around and found it has 'hydraulic lash adjusters' that fill with oil an pretty much eliminate adjusting valves. I bought a set of HLAs for $55 (you can only get 4 in a set for $55 and it has 12 of them) and also picked up some Quaker State High Mileage oil with Slick 50 mixed in. I did the oil change before ripping off the valve cover and the second start-up the tapping/clicking stopped. Have been using QS ever since, and no noise...
At 197,000 I don't think I'd try a 5W-20! 10W-30 is about as low as I'd go, and in warmer climes I'd do 10W-40.
Yeah, they make a definite noise. See if he has any method of making an MP3 and e-mailing it to you...
Well I drive down on Sunday to see/hear the car firsthand. Originally I was saying "i'm not so afraid of an engine swap or rebuild", but now that I'm looking at the cost of parts for this engine these days I'm a little discouraged. This ain't like the old muscle cars, I guess..heh...
-ph
Well I drive down on Sunday to see/hear the car firsthand. Originally I was saying "i'm not so afraid of an engine swap or rebuild", but now that I'm looking at the cost of parts for this engine these days I'm a little discouraged. This ain't like the old muscle cars, I guess..heh...
-ph
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