Thread: Saved one from the wrecker *UPDATED 5/24/11*

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine told me his co-worker had a 92 SE-R he wanted to get rid of, so I went and checked it out. This thing was filthy and neglected, and the guy was the original owner and loved the car, but just didn't have the motivation to fix it and was going to send it to the wrecking yard.

To make a long story short, last weekend I borrowed my brother-in-law's F150, swung by U-Haul to pick up a car dolly, and towed her home.

The good:
- 117k miles
- Bone stock
- Bought it for practically nothing
- AC, cruise, sunroof (all the options I want for a DD) work fine
- Despite the horrible exterior, the interior is clean, complete, and not smelly
- Never been in an accident
- New tires
- Trunk torsion bars intact!
- No rust anywhere surprisingly

The bad:
- Rod knock
- Looks like fried. $h!t.
- Pine needles piled up in every crevice
- Both outer CV boots torn and passenger side joint is knocking
- Cracked windshield
- Idles fine, but stalls when you give it throttle
- Sorta big dent on driver's side. Like it got pushed in by something.
- I now have two Classics sitting around in my garage taking up space

Plans:
I plan to sell my '97 Maxima 5-speed and use this as my DD, which means just fixing the issues mentioned above and keeping it close to stock and comfortable. Mods, if any, won't go much beyond intake, header, flywheel, clutch, short shifter. I might even keep the stock wheels on LOL

good save

paint looks like it should clean up

Yeah give it a wash and a wax and it'll be good.

How come i never come across anything like that lol. Good luck with it.

Not bad!



This is like the unmentioned problem. Everyone seems to know about it but no one talks about it. =]

wash,claybar,washclaybar,was somemore claybar then wax the **** outa the ser...nice find what color is it??black?

Hahaha yeah it's supposed to be black.

I washed it, hosed out the engine bay, and dug all the pine needles out from around the trunklid and that spot in the quarterpanel by the door hinge. It's looking better already, and I think I should be able to bring the paint back with some clay, polish, and wax. The stickers on the back window came off nice and easy too, thank god.

Last night I tackled the stalling issue. I forgot what a pain in the ass swapping fuel filters is! I got the old one off and blew through it and sure enough it was clogged. Put in a new one from NAPA and then broke out the mulitmeter. BTW, I don't remember fuel filters for this car being so expensive...this one was $15! Anyway, I measured the resistance of each injector and they all read 11.4 ohms except for injector #3 which read 43 ohms! Pulled it out and swapped in one from a spare set I have laying around.

That fixed the stalling issue, so now I'm onto rod knock. At least I think it's rod knock. I thought that if you pulled the spark plug wire on the cylinder that was knocking the knocking would stop? At least that's what I read. Well, I tried that for each of the cylinders and that didn't work, so I don't know which rod it is, or if it's even rod knock at all. I'm guessing it is because it's loud as hell and gets louder and faster when you rev.

Any advice here? I'm going to pull the pans and replace all of them anyway I guess, so maybe it doesn't matter, but I hope I'm not doing all this for nothing.

Nice save. It'll look like new with some love.

I need a deal like that.Nice save.Looks like it will clean up nice.