Baaazzerrrppttt! My phone buzzed in my pocket, indicating an incoming text message. The number appeared on the lock screen (Android, y’all), showing a number that I didn’t have saved, nor recognize.
“Who the hell is this!?”I wondered, while setting down my tools and stopping the work I was doing. You see, it was Saturday morning and every Saturday, for the last 15+ years, I head to my local Pick n’ Pull to “do a few laps” around the yard to see what there is to see.
“Hey, is this still Steve Gossin’s phone number? I sold you a couple cars a few years ago and have another if you’re interested.”
I usually buy about 5 cars a year (that’s not a flex; most are <$500 and junkyard-bound), so I have ~20% likelihood of guessing who this person is. After some polite conversational probing, I found out that the caller was the same gentleman who sold me the Juke I covered in this tale of woe and humor back in December of 2023!
He is a landlord who has a history of money-challenged tenants leaving broken cars on his property after they vacate. Knowing an Autopian like me that is less scared and more willing to approach a vehicle in that state of sorrow was apparently important enough for the guy to save my number for the last 2.5 years (the amount of time since the above piece was published).
At first, my initial reaction was hard-pass, no matter what. I already have far too many cars on hand and a very tenuous parking situation – nobody likes street-parked car collections. I have 13 cars of my own right now, which is about two too many, so taking on another would stretch my limited time and resources even further. “Finish the projects you already have, first!” my inner voice chirped while on the phone.
After telling him that I wasn’t really interested (and also kindly touching on the fact that I was royally burned the last time I purchased a car from him), I asked what kind of truck it was, just to be polite, before ending the conversation and the call.
“Uhhh, I’m not sure. Some type of Toyota, I think? It looks pretty nice. I think he only wants like $3K for it. I just need it off my property.”
At this moment, I got that feeling you get in your belly when it feels like you’re leaving money on the table, when you shouldn’t just say goodnight and end the date without trying to make a move, when you should double-down and hit on that 13 you were dealt on that hand of Blackjack. The feeling hit me hard like an early-run 1st Gen Chrysler LH 42LE transmission with a bad underdrive clutch pack coming to a violent stop. When the desire to win is stronger than the desire to reduce.
This is a story of hidden secrets and of how sometimes, in order to move forward, you have to bend (but not break) the rules to win the day.
I set up a time to check it out the following day.
Some People are Just Bad To Cars, And That Hurts My Soul
On my lunch break the next day, I drove the mile around Greenfield Lake in beautiful Wilmington NC, to see the stationary 2008 Toyota Tundra and meet the seller. He had promised me that it:
A) Starts, runs, and drives, and
B) He had the title for it
… of course, neither was accurate. Upon pulling up to a beautiful-looking pearl-white stunner of a truck, I found the seller frantically trying to jump a dead-as-a-doornail battery on a truck that looked like it was sitting for months. He was using his co-worker’s roofing truck to have it started before I arrived; he failed. The battery in the Tundra was just too dead to be jumped.
I told him that I was fine with not hearing it start or run as long as the price was right. He then immediately lopped $600 off the price. The truck really did look wicked good and far too nice for a $2400 vehicle. In my head, I started thinking about all those weirdo, rabid, borderline-obsessive REI/Patagonia/Tech-bro vest/boat-shoe-wearing Toyota fans that pay massive sums for everything Toyota (other than the BZ4S) and how even if this Tundra had a bad engine, transmission, rear end, or such, that it would still be worth $2400 in parts. I couldn’t lose!
The seller (who was about 20 years my junior) told me that it didn’t have any brakes, and he was driving it to and from his job as a roofer on the e-brake, while pouring a jug of brake fluid in the master cylinder every trip – there were three jugs in the cab of the truck. The exhaust tailpipe was bungee-corded to the frame, the battery was dead, and he assured me he didn’t care about nor want any of his personal things inside the truck, which were plenty. Holy. Shit.
I started to put the puzzle pieces of this character portrait together in my head. Buying and selling used cars is just as much about reading the other party as it is about evaluating the machine at hand, and my diagnosis on this dude was that he was a maniac.
Driving 5,000+lbs of truck at speed with only the e-brake and a fleeting amount of remaining brake fluid is an incredibly foolish, selfish, and dangerous thing to do. There are other people who like not to get plowed into by a Tundra sharing the roads with you. If you can’t afford to fix it, then get a bus ticket/Uber/ride from a friend/bicycle until you can. My respect for this gentleman was instantly diminished. Little did I know that it would be diminished further in the upcoming 24 hours.
Wait, Where’s The Title?
We shook hands on the $2400 price, and I agreed to get the truck towed out of there that week. It was at this point that the seller told me that there was a “small issue” with the title. Apparently he was enticed by the promise of a simple, no-hassle selling experience and chose to utilize Peddle.com to sell the truck the prior week. Well, since the truck was still parked at his house and not with Peddle, you can probably surmise how well that went.
Here’s how the process usually goes with the dot-coms that promise a simple easy way to sell your car: you send them some pictures, they send you a purchase price, you disclose all the information and condition you have on the vehicle, then they send either one of their branded tow trucks or a subcontractor to pick up your vehicle, its keys, and the title, and then hand you a check.
Well, the seller of this Toyota Tundra got all the way up to the last step, but filled out the “Seller’s/Buyer’s” information on the title incorrectly and then had it notarized. Having it notarized was the kiss of death, since once it’s stamped, you can no longer alter or adjust any of the information in NC. Peddle’s subcontracted local tow driver took one look at the title, declared Peddle wouldn’t accept it, and then took off.
I won’t go into document specifics, but since the title was filled out wrong with “Peddle” listed as the Buyer and then notarized, it was officially their truck in the eyes of the NC DMV.
I suggested that we go to the DMV to hopefully find a solution. Once we got there, we were informed in a surprisingly curt tone that it was now Peddle’s truck, and only Peddle can sign it over to me, through a DMV reassignment form, which also has to be notarized, and no, it cannot be faxed. We quickly called up Peddle, who informed us that they were just a dot-com with all its employees in an office in Texas, and that there was no way for them to sign the title back over to us.
This highlights a huge risk and gamble associated with selling your car online. If the paperwork gets messed up, you’re stuck dealing with someone on a 1-800 Help Line that is hundreds or thousands of miles away, sitting behind a website, while also having to navigate the specific unbending rules and procedures of your state’s DMV.
Peddle pretty much said there’s nothing they could do to help, they didn’t want the truck, and they were “so sorry about our inconvenience.” They pretty much eviscerated any remaining value that truck had outside of being a parts donor, but yeah, glad they’re sorry for that inconvenience. The truck was now in “Title Limbo” (a Gossin Motors Backyard Auto Rescue term), which usually leads to a vehicle becoming a parts car. Wicked not-great.
Needless to say, the seller was beside himself as he realized the full scope of the situation he was in. He began nervously pacing back and forth in the parking lot of the DMV that afternoon, over-vaping and trying to rationalize/explain/persuade me that $2400 is also a good price for a parts truck in hopes of completing the sale without the title.
I’ve been doing this for over 30 years, and I’ve had 163 vehicles, so the added hassle of finding parking and trying to sell a Toyota truck without a title for parts was simply not something I was interested in. I told him that I wasn’t buying the truck under those circumstances.
“If only you could get someone from Peddle to sign that Title Reassignment form,” he said. I saw something wash over his face at that moment. “Without checking an employee ID badge, how would the DMV even know if the person that signs this form works at Peddle or not?! Peddle has never even touched or been anywhere near this truck outside of a few emailed photos. If I can get Peddle to sign this form, would you then buy the truck?”
I started picking up on what he was putting down with the above. I just told him that I have no idea who’s currently on the Peddle payroll, and as long as all the forms are filled out correctly, I was good on my end.
About 90 minutes later, he came back with the form signed and notarized. I handed him $2,400 and became the proud owner of my first Toyota truck, vehicle #161 for Gossin Motors Backyard Auto Rescue. Cutting through red tape, indeed.
First Looks: Not Great
I currently have way too many cars in my possession and very, extremely limited parking, so I reached out to Reina, a long-time dear family friend, local hero, and all-around superstar who runs Laws Motors out of Downtown Wilmington NC. Reina is the current owner of David Tracy’s old Nash Metropolitan, and you’ve seen her pop up here and be referenced there on The Autopian over the years. She’s great.
Anyway, Reina offered to park the Tundra in her lot (short-term) so that I could start working on getting it back to life. Out of the 163 cars I’ve rescued, zero of them were Toyotas. They are just too popular, well-built, long-lasting, and hold their value too well to have fit into the Venn diagram of the kind of cars that I usually rescue. This was going to be a first for me, and I was wicked excited.
Initial diagnostics showed there was definitely some work to be done! There was the no-brakes issue, a cracked side tow mirror, a ripped driver’s seat, a very noisy right door lock module, and a Christmas tree dash: CEL, ABS, VSC, Maint Required, jingle all the way.
Let’s Wrench: Brakes
In order to correctly diagnose brake issues, you just have to put the clues together. Remember a few paragraphs up, where I said that the seller was pouring jug after jug of brake fluid into the system to get him to work each day? That means that there is a leak in the brake system, of course. The easiest way to spot leaks is to look for drips and puddles.
Well, it was very obvious that the leak was coming from the right front wheel, as the lake of brake fluid above attests. Upon closer investigation, it was specifically coming from the sheared-in-half metal line that is sandwiched between the caliper and the rubber flex line.
This was a unique setup, as I have never really seen a master cylinder –> metal line –> rubber line –> metal line –> caliper setup before. My best guess was that the previous owner or a buddy of his attempted to pull the caliper off and bent or broke the metal line.
This was great news, as you can get a set of the metal lines on Amazon for about 12 bucks! Apparently this design is prone to breaking when handled, since there seems to be a very deep aftermarket for that specific metal line.
I was over the moon. If I could get the brakes on this truck working for $12 that would be a wicked massive score! About 5 days later, the parts came in, and I quickly installed them on the truck, filled it up with brake fluid, and presto! I had a softer pedal than I should have. Dammit.
A peek under the truck revealed a fresh puddle of brake fluid forming at the right rear wheel, apparently coming from the caliper this time. Upon removing the wheel, I noticed that the front pad was down to the metal backing plate, and that the inboard pad was gone. Not like gone as in “worn out” but gone as in consumed. Not there. Nonexistent.
Apparently the previous owner had run the brakes for so long that he wore the metal backing plate into a thin sliver of metal, which slid out of the caliper, leaving the piston to push directly against the rotor.
In 31 years of doing this, I’ve never seen anything that bad or anything remotely like that.
I learned my lesson with using junkyard calipers when the rear brakes of my old Grand Cherokee caught on fire as told in this epic adventure, so I was not going to make that mistake again. Off to the local parts shops for a not-cheap ($135) rebuilt rear caliper.
Once the caliper was installed and the brakes bled (again), I still didn’t have that great of a pedal! This made sense though, because if the previous owner let the rear brakes go that far on the backing plates, the other corners of the truck were probably just as bad (spoiler: they were). I found sorry-ass pads at the other three corners. They weren’t nearly as bad as the right-rear, but still wicked bad. I popped in fresh pads and finally had a firm pedal and safe, working brakes: score one for The Good Guys!
Let’s Keep Wrenching: Gross Interior, Busted Mirror, and Hanging Exhaust.
One of the first things I noticed when approaching this truck and opening the door was the ripped-up driver’s seat. This was an instant bummer and severely degraded the truck before I even got in it. This cannot stand.
A quick trip over to my good buddy Brian at Cape Fear Custom Upholstery and a couple hundred bucks later, and I had one of the best-looking 2008 Toyota Tundra driver seats in town!
I can’t sew, and Brian’s a pro, so knowing when to outsource is huge. Speaking of sourcing, exhaust is also always better when left to the pros, especially since it’s not that expensive. A quick trip in the truck over to Corky’s Mufflers on Carolina Beach Road in Wilmington had the tailpipe from the muffler back welded back on complete with new hangers, and the Tundra was looking and sounding great!
Back to in-sourcing. I got the truck back from the exhaust shop, popped the right door panel off, and installed a used door-lock module that I liberated from the local Pick-n-Pull. The original unit’s plastic gears had stripped, so every time I locked or unlocked the truck, I heard a cacophony of plastic scraping sounds. The replacement unit only took about 10 minutes to install.
While the door panel was off, I also popped in a new right-side tow mirror that I found online for about 75 bucks to replace the busted one, and man, did it look so much better!
Cleaning Up My Act
Now that pretty much everything that needed to be repaired was taken care of, next up was to wash off all of the dirt the truck had been accumulating from months of sitting. Two washes and a whole lot of scrubbing really made a huge difference and brought the Pearl paint back to a shine.
Since I already have my $1,200 Nissan Titan pickup truck (that saved The Autopian Cab here), I have no need for another truck, so once the Tundra was fixed up and cleaned, I posted it for sale. I started getting hits within an hour of posting it!
The first person who messaged me said they wanted to look at it that afternoon, and the entire transaction was described in the beginning of this story. To summarize, he offered me a Ford Explorer on trade, which I accepted. You can read about the Explorer’s rescue at the link.
There Are More Dark Secrets Hiding
About a week and a half after selling the truck, and while I was writing my Explorer piece mentioned above, I received a text from the Tundra buyer letting me know that the Check Engine Light had come on for both secondary air pumps. Gossin Motors Backyard Auto Rescue doesn’t deal in crookery, and we certainly don’t roll like that, so I told him to swing the truck back on by whenever he had a chance and that I would order some replacement pumps online, and then we could put them on together, and they would only take about an hour on a Saturday afternoon.
The buyer was super thrilled to hear that, and took me up on my offer. One week later, we were standing in my driveway in oppressive heat installing two new secondary air pumps on the 4.7 V8. Apparently this is a known fail point on these trucks, so parts weren’t too bad at about $120 bucks for the pair, and labor only took about an hour or so.
Nate, the Tundra buyer, drove away without a CEL glowing in his face as the happy owner of his first Toyota truck, looking great and standing tall. Wicked nice guy. We exchanged numbers, and I told him that I hoped we crossed paths again in the future, and I sincerely hope that we do.
Secrets And Rules
Looking back, I’m so wicked glad that I got the urge in my belly to take on this truck when I received the call about it at the beginning of the story. I had no idea about the secrets that the truck was hiding, with the three-pronged brake repair, or the air pump check engine light that was digitally lurking under the surface, to show itself at a later time.
There are hidden secrets everywhere, and they’re just an aspect of wrenching life (and life in general) that you can’t plan for. You just have to do your best when you uncover them or when they are presented to you. They’re the Rumsfeldian “known unknowns.”
There are also rules to everything in life. Sometimes, a little ingenuity can go a long way. I’m not going to sit here and tell her no one to break any rules, but this truck was dangerously close to never driving on a public road ever again and was facing an almost certain future of being parted out and living a short life.
Im just super glad the seller made it all the way to Peddlel.com HQ in Austin Texas and back to Wilmington in 90 minutes in his girlfriend’s borrowed Subaru. Dude is a hell of a driver.”
88mph into the future.
All photos by Stephen Walter Gossin
- I Took On A Bad GM Design In A Hail-Mary Attempt To Fix My Friends Broken Suburban But It Was Too Little Too Late
- Sparking Joy And Plugs: How To Repurpose A 31-Year-Old Junk Buick
- What I Learned Restoring A $600 Dodge Ram With A Burned Up Transmission And Ruined Interior
- How I Bought A Broken Version Of My Dream Car For $300, Then Nursed It Back To Glory And Let It Free
- Proof That A $700 Car Saved From The Junkyard Can Make Someone As Happy As A New Lambo Can
- How I Saved My Buddys’ SUV After It Died At The Most Embarrassing Possible Time
- Rescuing A 75-Year-Old Car From An Older Car Enthusiast Reminded Me How Important Every Minute We Get Doing This Truly Is
- How I Rescued A Long-Neglected Citroen 2CV Covered With Bullet Holes
- Kumho Flew Me To The Mojave To See If Their New ‘R/T’ Tires Are As Good As They Claim
- How Learning Saxophone in 1990 Led Me To Rescue A Dead Xterra From A Bouncer’s Driveway
Good work! Also you really ought to get a headlight restoration done before you list these. Headlights are like the eyes of the vehicle, hazy ones make it look tired and old. It’s 20 bucks of sandpaper and clear to make you another $500+.
Note: The ending of the story changed – check out the last paragraph once more.
Thanks for the tip!
Those cheap calipers on ebay are actually good 🙂
I wonder if the previous owner of that truck had a bad tenant he was trying to evict and he slashed the brakes something…
Also, Coverking and Iggee seat covers are awesome.
Note: The ending of the story changed – check out the last paragraph once more.
Thanks for the hot tip on the seat covers and for reading!
I don’t understand the prices some exhaust shops charge. I had a shop custom bend / weld / install an exhaust for $170 once on a Lemons race car, and the cheapest I was able to source the piping alone for that project was $140. I’ve gone back to them many times since simply to buy tubing or have them bend it for me as it’s unreasonably cheap.
They buy in bulk, generic/universal mufflers/pipes, and exhaust fabrication is basically the same in any car as far as they’re concerned, just weld some parts together and hang them on the car.
Buying exhaust parts and mufflers at retail is more expensive since the cost of shipping large parts is high.
Always great to read another of your used vehicle adventures. Love a happy ending!
Toyota put the starter under the intake on the Tundra! Usually good for 200k tho!
Hoping to be around for your 200th vehicle story!
Note: The ending of the story changed – check out the last paragraph once more.
Thanks for reading and for the kind words!
Wicked Job
My man!
Note: The ending of the story changed – check out the last paragraph once more.
> In 31 years of doing this, I’ve never seen anything that bad or anything remotely like that.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know how. I was at Firestone pretty much six months flat and saw this on cars I worked on twice, and numerous other times on other tech’s cars. In fact I went back to hang out for a little bit last week and there was one in the shop that had been using piston-to-rotor contact to slow itself.
Maybe I’m lucky?
Thanks for reading and for the comment Mechjaz!
Note: The ending of the story changed – check out the last paragraph once more.
As an owner of an ’08 Tundra (but with 5.7) they are pretty much unkillable.
But a factory replacement alternator is not for the faint of heart, both financially and as a home mechanic-wise.
Honestly the only repair needed in 18 years besides the normal maintenance.
Thanks for reading and for the comment, Salty Nuts!
Note: The ending of the story changed – check out the last paragraph once more.
Hope that title chicanery doesn’t come back to bite you. Probably won’t, since the peddle.com guy said they don’t want the truck
Remember, Peddle refused to take possession of the truck over the title error. They pulled any claim they had to the vehicle at that point.
The Seller was still in possession of the title, keys and truck. Red tape, indeed!