1. Buy under time pressure.
2. Inspect the car without a friend.
3. Forego the dealer inspection.<\/p>\n
I followed all three of the steps outlined above, and started paying for it from day one.<\/p>\n
Almost as soon as I got the MR2, I noticed a weird periodic grinding noise coming from the rear. Turned out the wheel bearing needed to be replaced. Fuck. That cost about $800 in parts and labor, and I could have avoided it if I had actually taken the car to get the safety inspection done.<\/p>\n
The latest drama with the MR2 is a problem with the engine–some kind of periodic clanking sound coming from inside the block. Toyota wanted to charge me a few hundred dollars just to open up the oil pan and figure out what was wrong. Ugh. I took it to two other mechanics and they refused to work on it–the first one said to take it Toyota to get the engine overhauled, the second to get a used engine installed. My dad found a shop in K-town that would do the swap for $1500, which we figured was the best price we were going to find.<\/p>\n
Hopefully this engine swap will take care of the remaining problems and keep the car running long enough for me to sell it next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
1. Buy under time pressure.2. Inspect the car without a friend.3. Forego the dealer inspection. I followed all three of the steps outlined above, and started paying for it from day one. Almost as soon as I got the MR2, I noticed a weird periodic grinding noise coming from the rear. Turned out the wheel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/psIKy-6s","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studioglyphic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}