JoshMc
Proven Member
- 93
- 16
- Nov 18, 2015
-
Kansas City,
Missouri
I have always wanted a dsm since I was a teenager and played Need for Speed Underground for the first time on ps2, grew up in a family with drag racing in our blood, but knew I loved corners more than just going in a straight line. So in comes the dream of competing in autocross/ road-courses when I could afford it. in 2015, my senior year of high school, i knew i was getting closer to the chance of being able to compete, so I started doing research, got on dsm tuners and started looking through all the auto cross profiles I could find, looking over tons and tons of different builds, and it was one in particular that really grabbed my attention, Aaron Woloszyn was the guy who really got me hooked, read through his entire build straight through beginning to end in less than a couple hours, I found myself so hooked on it I knew I wanted a GSX and would want to convert it to a autocross monster like his one day. Fast forward to November 2015, specifically the 20th, the day I bought my first DSM, she was a 1996 Eclipse GSX with 156k miles, I was like a kid on Christmas morning when I finally got it loaded up onto the trailer and headed out. but the journey from here was very long, painful, and expensive) already getting to know the DSM life all too well.
November 12, 2015
made my very first mistake, believing what previous owner said that was done to the car, now that i got that out of the way, he said it had a fresh stock rebuild with new pistons, rods, etc, stage 3 clutch, 16g turbo, apexi exhaust, blah blah blah, sounded like a real nice car for his asking price of $2500, but sadly I believed every word he said, said the tires were brand new as well, but the only reason he was selling it, was because he broke a cam cap in half and didn't want to deal with it anymore, so I thought, " hey, that's not that hard of a fix, take the head to a machine shop and I’ll have a running car" boy was I wrong -_-
So anyways, we stay in contact over the next week and such, and it finally comes to a weekend I’m off work, so I go to my local U-Haul, rent a truck and trailer and I was on my way. So on Friday,
November 20, 2015,
I arrived in Fort Lenorwood, Missouri, where the car was located, at about 7:00pm, at this point later on I realized I had made my first mistake, Inspecting a car for the first time at night is a huge NO, figured that out the hard way after I got it back home the next day. Live and you learn I guess, (BTW this is the first vehicle I have ever purchased by myself) so I had much to learn about used car buying.
I looked it over as best I could with my phone flashlight, looked OK at best, noticed it also only had 2 decent tires on it, maybe 60%-70% at best, and the other 2 tires were pretty much bald, less than 10% left, so that kind of pissed me off, after further inspection I realized that half the trunk was missing, it was missing some interior plastics, among other things so I wasn’t to happy, and at this point after inspecting the car I wish I would have had the strength to walk away and go back home, but I didn’t as I would have had $400 in transportation costs and didn't want to make the trip back empty handed, so I did my best at haggling on price, bringing up all the issues I found, and settled on a price of $1600 for the car. Feel like I came out okay on price but i was way over my head, (I’ll get to that part a little down the road).
I finally get the eclipse onto the U-Haul trailer, said goodbye and snapped a couple pics before the drive home. Couldn’t wait to get it back home and see what I had just bought.
I drove down to Spring field Missouri to meet up with a friend of mine Kyle to see if he could help me replace the cam cap and at least get the car back together so I could hear it fire up, I arrived at my friend’s house around 10:00pm that night, and we worked till about 3:30-4:00am the next morning, being unsuccessful, we found out only 2 cylinders were getting spark, no matter what we tried, tried swapping all the working ignition components from his running 99' GST to see if that'd fix the issue, but it didn't, so we were stumped, tired, and freezing, it was about 18 degrees that night/morning before we called it quits and got some rest.
November 12, 2015
made my very first mistake, believing what previous owner said that was done to the car, now that i got that out of the way, he said it had a fresh stock rebuild with new pistons, rods, etc, stage 3 clutch, 16g turbo, apexi exhaust, blah blah blah, sounded like a real nice car for his asking price of $2500, but sadly I believed every word he said, said the tires were brand new as well, but the only reason he was selling it, was because he broke a cam cap in half and didn't want to deal with it anymore, so I thought, " hey, that's not that hard of a fix, take the head to a machine shop and I’ll have a running car" boy was I wrong -_-
So anyways, we stay in contact over the next week and such, and it finally comes to a weekend I’m off work, so I go to my local U-Haul, rent a truck and trailer and I was on my way. So on Friday,
November 20, 2015,
I arrived in Fort Lenorwood, Missouri, where the car was located, at about 7:00pm, at this point later on I realized I had made my first mistake, Inspecting a car for the first time at night is a huge NO, figured that out the hard way after I got it back home the next day. Live and you learn I guess, (BTW this is the first vehicle I have ever purchased by myself) so I had much to learn about used car buying.
I looked it over as best I could with my phone flashlight, looked OK at best, noticed it also only had 2 decent tires on it, maybe 60%-70% at best, and the other 2 tires were pretty much bald, less than 10% left, so that kind of pissed me off, after further inspection I realized that half the trunk was missing, it was missing some interior plastics, among other things so I wasn’t to happy, and at this point after inspecting the car I wish I would have had the strength to walk away and go back home, but I didn’t as I would have had $400 in transportation costs and didn't want to make the trip back empty handed, so I did my best at haggling on price, bringing up all the issues I found, and settled on a price of $1600 for the car. Feel like I came out okay on price but i was way over my head, (I’ll get to that part a little down the road).
I finally get the eclipse onto the U-Haul trailer, said goodbye and snapped a couple pics before the drive home. Couldn’t wait to get it back home and see what I had just bought.
I drove down to Spring field Missouri to meet up with a friend of mine Kyle to see if he could help me replace the cam cap and at least get the car back together so I could hear it fire up, I arrived at my friend’s house around 10:00pm that night, and we worked till about 3:30-4:00am the next morning, being unsuccessful, we found out only 2 cylinders were getting spark, no matter what we tried, tried swapping all the working ignition components from his running 99' GST to see if that'd fix the issue, but it didn't, so we were stumped, tired, and freezing, it was about 18 degrees that night/morning before we called it quits and got some rest.
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