Friday Fun Thread:First Car

[Fuzz]

There was a little chatter in the automotive thread about this, so I thought this would be a good Friday distraction. Lets hear about your first car, or truck, or motorbike. We don't need a full listing of every vehicle you ever owned, just the first special one. That being said, I'm making the thread so I get to break that rule because my first one wasn't really a daily driver, and I only owned half of it.

Spoiler!

Behold, a really really bad picture of the '79 Chevy Vandura. When my friend and I graduated high school, we decided to take some time off and do a road trip. So we bought this thing, sometime around June 1996 for $3750. Mechanically it didn't need much work(though we would later have all 4 tires blow on us due to cracking and age) but the interior needed a little customizing. It already had a U-bench seat/bed a counter and a sink. No fridge, furnace, water tank or any mechanical, just a drain pipe out the side. So we put in an upper bunk, laid some sweet brown carpet, gave the topper a fresh coat of paint and installed a booming system. We used a Coleman stove(outside) and a BBQ for cooking. had a cooler and a big water jug. We brought our bikes on the back and a propane tank. Pretty minimal. Oh, it also had the 4 barrel carburetor, so when you stepped on it it's dump fuel form a fire hose. It was always a delicate balance of going fast enough, but not opening those extra 2 barrels. One cool feature for its age was intermittent wipers. No other features, but those were neat!

We spent the fall from the end of September to mid December touring the US. It was awesome. When we were done, we kept it for a few years for various camping and ski trips. Surferguy came on one to Fernie! Good times. Eventually we both needed money and sold it for $3250.
____________

Spoiler!

So my first real car was a 1987 Chevy Corsica with the 2.8l V6. One of the shop mechanics had bought it for $800 from the original owner as a bit of a deal for work done, and was going to be his daily driver. He knew I desperately needed a car, and sold it to me for the same $800. He later regretted that, and told me every day how great a car I had gotten. This thing was a great little sedan. One of my favourite quirks was that the aftermarket cruise control buttons had stopped working. I pulled it from the mount and realized I could engage it through various combinations of the 4 wires. So I would be cruising down the highway, pull up a few wires and spark them together in front of friends. I eventually installed a toggle switch down to the left of the driver seat, which was very convenient. The car had loads of power and a great sounding engine for what it was. It also had a low coolant light on the dash that was always on. I called it my A-OK light. as long as it was on, everything was A-OK.

I had that for about 4 years, but the fuel lines eventually rusted through. Replacing them meant dropping the fuel tank, which had rusty bolts and rusty straps. It was bound to turn into more work and more problems than it was worth.

[CMPunk]

Purple 86 Mercury Capri. Got it in Grade 12. Parents paid for half so I could get to work and so I could drive my brother around.

[KTrain]

Gold 1989 Honda Accord. Parents sold it to me after high school for $1 when they moved away, leaving me in Calgary to go to university.

[InglewoodFan]

I bought a 1979 Olds Omega coupe the summer after first year university (1988) as I got a summer job working roughneck and needed to get out to Fox Creek asap. In retrospect, I should have got a pickup but I pounded that car up and down lease roads all over the province. Got it stuck on a muddy lease out near Drumheller at one point and had to have it dragged out. But it had cruise and a tape deck and it took me a lot of miles.

Eventually the hatch was being held down with some rope as it wouldn't latch and reverse stopped working. I talked a girl I met at Curly's one night into helping me push it out of a parking spot so I could give her a ride home. Probably got a good three years out of that car which for a couple of grand wasn't bad.

[ken0042]

1977 Pontiac Astre. Paid $1100 for it when it was probably worth closer to $500. Got suckered in by a co-worker. Gutless, always breaking down. I bought it just after being grounded from using my parents' car.

[Table 5]

I bought my first car at around 28 or so...it was a 1999 Saab 9-3 Turbo with a stick. I think I paid around 3k. I eventually sold it back to the same dealer for around the same price, 2 years later.


Not the most reliable car out there, but it had some personality to it. I wish Saab was still around.

[manwiches]

1991 Dodge Colt. My parents told me I had $5000 to spend, so my dream of getting that new Honda Prelude was out the window. They ended up finding this for me from a friend, and paid $1000 instead. lol

I 'Canadian Tired' that thing like crazy (all the cheap 'mods' i could do). And much to my wife's (girlfriend at the time) chagrin, I threw a decal on the back driver window.



I ended up selling it, and 'upgrading' to a 1989 Acura Integra, with the pop up lights. Sold the Colt for $1000, and bought the Integra from a family friend for a fish tank and $1. No joke. My dad did the negotiation. lol Still a car I miss severely.

[shane_c]

81 Jeep CJ7. I believe it was around $1500 and needed some body work and a paint job which my father and I took care of. You could start it without the key and sometimes in the winter the door latches would freeze and they'd swing open on turns so I'd have to keep a rope handy to tie them together. Also the heater was miserable so I had a crazy carpet in front of the radiator which helped a bit but the inside was constantly icing up in the winter. I really enjoyed it though and drove it for a few years before upgrading to an 87 Jeep YJ.

[FLAMESRULE]

1987 Subaru RX turbo. Loved this car, but it got totaled on the way to my last exam at Univ.

[Luder]

1981 Dodge Omni, even the same color as the photo, poo brown!
She was a joy, by the end she was going through a litre or 2 of oil per day, imagine the smoke screen on Spy Hunter, it was that bad. Had a cracked head and I could follow the trail of antifreeze home in case I got lost. She was a beaut!

[ricosuave]

[Huntingwhale]

When I turned 18, my dad gave he his old 1992 Mazda 323. It was a pretty reliable little car. Other then the fact the muffler had some damage to it that made it sounds like it had an aftermarket muffler and got a ton of looks. But really it was a tiny 120hp car that survived many an adventure with a bunch of dumb teens doing dumb things.

I ''pimped out'' the audio system. Got one of the fancy new (at the time) mp3 cd deck. Got a couple 6x9 speakers installed on the doors. I then wired up an old 80s stereo house speaker and used that as my 'sub'. I found a bunch of old 4x6 speakers and nailed them to a 2x4 piece of wood, then nailed it on the roof of the inside of my car in the back. All in all, I had a 9 speaker 'system' and it all ran from my 50x4 watt deck. It actually got pretty banging!

What pissed me off the most about it was that in the last 2 weeks of it's life, I decided to max out my credit card and finally get the stupid muffler fixed. Cost me almost $1200 to have the whole exhaust system redone. 2 weeks later, a head gasket blew as I was driving through Woodbine. It looked like a smoke trail from a missile. Why couldn't this have happened 2 weeks earlier before I did those other repairs?!?

I didn't even try to sell the car. Just called the Kidney foundation who towed it for free. Got a $50 tax donation receipt, which equated to me getting back $5 on my tax refund. I just wanted to get rid of the thing and the Kidney foundation towed it for free.

Went out a couple weeks later and got a brand new car which I still have to this day.

[ericschand]

Here's mine, 1976 Chevrolet Chevette Woody, yellow just like this one. A hand me down from my parents. I found out why when I got the repair bills. All it's missing are the white stripe tires to complete the car. When you filled it with gas and some spilled, the wood stuff peeled off. It went 65mph if you floored it. Edit: And a roof rack. Mine had a roof rack!

[Galakanokis]

94 Ford Explorer Sport.

What a great little truck. Bought it for $12.5k with under 65000km on it and not even 4 years old. I decided to park it shiny side down one day though. Insurance paid me out $18k so I bought a Tacoma. I loved that truck, drove it for a decade putting 200,000 km and still sold it for half what I paid.

[Table 5]

I'm glad there are no new cars in this thread. I hate those kids.

[4X4]

Mine was an '86 Ford Tempo. I saved up $1,000 and planned to buy one at the auction. Turned out I had to work that day, so I entrusted my dad to go to the auction for me and get me something cool. Comes back with a god damn Tempo, and thought I'd be happy it was only $800. Thanks dad.

I hated that car. It was so lame, and it was always breaking down. I had to learn all the tricks, like the pencil in the carb, and DO NOT HIT PUDDLES because water would get in the distributor cap and sideline me for hours. And the worst part was that I slid into my buddy's Nova's steel bumper while following him somewhere, and cracked up my plastic front end. I rigged it back together with chicken wire, but it looked ridiculous. I was not willing to pay to fix the thing properly because the car was so ugly to begin with. Not even worth posting a pic. It was a fricken Tempo.

[troutman]

I had a 1978 white Camaro with a red interior and 8-track player. The Great White Shark. Drove it back and forth across the continent three times (saw the odometer pass 100,000 miles), and sold it for $50.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by Table 5

I'm glad there are no new cars in this thread. I hate those kids.

Yup, the fun stories are the ones of cars that just barely hold it together.

[Leeman4Gilmour]

'76 Honda Civic. Mine had way more rust. Thing was indestructible and would likely rank top in class in gas mileage against today's cars.

[undercoverbrother]

I had a very similar rig to this:



This is an '82, I think mine was in that vintage, it had the square headlights. It was bare bones, but was a beast. I use to put the seats down and throw a tarp in the back and use it for sodding.

The vehicle was unbreakable.