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!” I 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. I’m just super glad the seller made it all the way to Peddle.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
“I think the previous owner wore sandpaper shirts”
He probably did. Roof shingle grit gets into everything so I’m guessing that’s what did it.
Whenever I am annoyed at my country requiring a safety inspection for cars every two years I think of cars like these and decide that it’s probably worth the hassle after all.
Great read and what a tale, SWG!
Those brakes are a shocker, people like this must be why 75% of the billboards I saw in LA were for injury lawyers!
So glad we don’t have the same weird fixation on original paper titles for vehicles here.
What a rollercoaster of emotions. Sounds like everyone came out ahead after a little elbow crease and poetic license with bureaucracy.
Glad to see another SWG article. Always enjoyable. I am glad the Tundra turned out well. I saw the ad when you posted it and it was gone quick.. Good on you for fixing a problem post sale!
SWG – have you checked with Peddle about their interest in a 500SL?
TIL you can avoid the Toyota tax by buying über sketchy from the über sketchy. Big congrats on pulling off your signature win with your signature winning attitude, persistence, and abilities. At 62 those days are long gone for me, and no way would I return to the heartbreak hotel.
Quite an inspirational tale. Once you’re truly prepared for a mechanical rock-bottom, any wins you get are pleasant surprises.
Just think of how many assholes like the original seller are out there on the road now, driving on basically a single brake and a prayer, zero thought to endangering everyone else.
and they could not care care less. even after they hit you.
Many years ago I was chatting in a parking lot with a friend of mine after a meeting. Another person we both knew from that meeting got into her car and slowly backed into mine. My friend and I had to avoid out of the way to avoid getting hit ourselves. That driver was someone we knew to be mentally challenged and very, very careless. I knocked on her window and told her she had hit my car, could I please have her licence and insurance. She was confused and couldn’t see how she could have hit my car but gave me her licence and insurance. As she pulled out of the parking lot she did so right in front of a city bus which had to slam on its brakes to barely avoid T-boning her. I’ve never heard a bus blow its horn in anger but then I’ve never seen anyone do something that careless.
When I called her insurance company and gave her info the agent’s tone changed from polite detachment to a resigned acknowledgement; oh yes, we know HER. They knew her very well.
A few years later I was rear ended at a major intersection. The other driver took off and drove home which just happened to be on my own route anyway so I ended up inadvertently following them. I managed to get their attention and I pulled up next to the and asked them to pull over to exchange insurance. They looked at me wild eyed and denied anything had happened (this was within a few minutes of the collision). They again drove off. They drove home which again was along my own route. So when they pulled into their driveway I pulled up and demanded their licence and insurance. After some argument I got the insurance info. The insurance card was for coverage that had been dropped. They were driving dirty.
I went to the cops to file a hit and run. The cop I spoke to was very polite but seemed more concerned that I had followed this person. I explained I did so only through sheer coincidence and that seemed to satisfy that. As to the report it was explained to me this did not qualify as a hit and run since I had managed to get the info even though it was false. A report would in their opinion go nowhere.
Thankfully the damage was minor and my own insurance covered it without a rate hike.
So yeah, they could not care care less even after they hit you because they shouldn’t be on the road at all but the system lets them drive without consequences because *reasons*.
i think many F250 size monster trucks are purchased for protection OR intimidation.
Or both. And why not? The only personal consequense is the cost of gas while everyone else has to put up with sharing the road with yet another Canyonero
i might join them.
That story gave me terrible angryxiety, including law enforcement being completely bumfuzzled by the notion that they enforce the law.
You and me both.
Perhaps a simpler plan on the title. NC will replace a lost title for the registered owner. In fact, if you and the owner show up to the plate agency without a title, they can simultaneously take care of the title problem and get the vehicle in your name (that’s form MVR-4.) So if the guys old title that was ‘incorrectly’ signed over happened to be destroyed in say a small fire, you and him could go down to the plate agency, do the MVR-4 thing and boom, you’re done.
A slightly more complicated method is to befriend a tow truck company. They have ways of getting titles to vehicles that have title issues, as they can get a mechanic’s lien for the cost of towing and storage fees, and then after a very short time can get the title for non-payment of ‘storage fees’.
Which brings me to the point of NC needs to drop the whole PITA title and notary system. It’s way too easy to circumvent the whole notary/title thing so it’s not really protecting anyone but car dealers because it’s generally a PITA to find a notary on evenings and weekends to sign a car over (unless you live in a big city.) Let’s just switch over to the Virginia system where the seller signs the title, no notary, no problem.
Not necessarily accepted everywhere, but these days there are notaries available online. We’ve done it a few times (California) so we didn’t have to do an in person during business hours appointment, just did it via Zoom. I think the last one we used was based in Texas.
Again, as always, loving the SWG articles!
Did most of my house closing online here in NC, but I think the backwater DMV system we have here still requires things to be signed in front of the notary.
Yeah, the notary thing seems yet another way to make a title transfer overly complicated. I understand that they want to be sure that the proper person is selling the vehicle, but still. Maybe there was a big notary lobby back in the day.
I’m pretty sure that lobby is the Association of Auto Dealers in this state. It’s also a side hustle for the notaries that work at the plate agencies, as they get 5+ in cash for every title they process.
Another amazing repair, another amazing article.
And kudos for helping the new owner after the sale. Not many would do that.
I’m not in the US but I’d be happy to buy a car from you
Hell yes! Score for SWG. Atta boy
Great stuff as usual Stephen. In this adventure you not only saved a truck from life in a junkyard, but you got something dangerous off the road. Well done!
Love these SWG blogs. 100% fun 100% of the time. Please never quit.
I’m also here for Torch and Adrian content. Yo Adrian!!!
My family had some distant relatives who no matter what kind of car they got always ended up being a mechanical mess. I doubt they ever followed any maintenance. On the seat, that was a nice job, have a local upholstery place fix a ripped seem on a Ranger for $150 and it looked new. If you have damaged seats, its not that expensive to get them fixed.
Title shenanigans! In college I bought a 70’s dirtbike from the second owner, who only had the first owner’s name on the title/bill of sale, and discovered the VIN was reported as stolen after filing my DMV paperwork. Turns out the six-digit VIN on the (small, gold, two-stroke) motorcycle was the same as a stolen vintage pickup and the DMV hadn’t even checked if the vehicle descriptions matched. Then they lost the title (how?) and issued me a new one.
A couple months later I ran the wrong kind of oil and trashed the motor, ending my motorcycle ownership, sending my motorcycle ownership up in a puff of (white) smoke.
Holy hell him driving only on stopping with a parking brake? Crazy. I thought I was dumb when I lost a front caliber on my D250 around Columbus Ohio and still drove it back to North West Indiana a mistake because at one point I questioned if I could make a light and thought I could not slammed on the brakes and the rear brakes locked up and I lost control and went into a grads median and smashed a wrong way sign. But at least I still had rear brakes and my truck is stick so I was engine braking a ton also but parking brake only? Yeesh
Thanks for sharing. If there were more SWGs in the world, we’d live in a better place.
Cheers
When I bought my 97 f150, it was in the names of a couple. The daughter was selling the truck, and her dad was deceased. I let her sign her mom’s name on the title so we didn’t have to drive an hour for her to do it. Got to the BMV and since the deceased’s name was still on the title, they needed a death certificate. And it had to be a physical, printed off copy. I got some poor quality photos of the certificate from the widow, by the time I printed them they were hard to read.
The BMV said they weren’t sure if my printout was enough, since some of the very edges of the certificate were cut off. But thankfully they got a manager and did some kind of override to push it through the system. I was told I might have to come back with a better copy of the death certificate, but thankfully I received my (historic) plates in the mail the next week.
When clearing her stuff out of the truck, the previous owner pulled a short wooden club out of the door pocket and said “can’t forget my bitch beater!” She also kept taking about her AI boyfriend.
People who treat vehicles this way makes you wonder how they manage the rest of their life. Got to be a mess.
It’s funny the way people treat their cars vs their homes, for example. I detailed cars for over 15 years, many for people I know personally. Their houses would be immaculate, they wore nice, expensive clothes, and they drove around in a rolling pigstye. No one would just throw trash on the floor of their home, but people do it all the time in their cars.
My mother-in-law is not that bad, but is in the same vein. Their house is always clean and tidy, she cleans anything up immediately. Their car is always dusty, dirty, and messy. They don’t throw things on the floor, but it is never cleaned. I don’t understand it, as the car is just another living space, why wouldn’t you want it tidy too?
I am a little bit of the opposite, where my cars are cleaner than my house. But that is because I find it much easier to keep the car clean than the house. I’m not generating any trash in the car. Kids aren’t spreading toys all over the place. When I get out, I take whatever I had with me. All it takes to keep it clean is to vacuum and wipe down surfaces every 2 months or so.
I broke my rule of commenting before reading the article.
But just needed to say that a SWG article makes my day.
I saw the picture/tag-line: got excited, got fresh coffee, sit down for a fun read.
Thanks a ton for the kind words, my friend! Hope you enjoyed it.
Always love your stories Stephen. The brakes had my laughing a bit for 2 reasons. 1, my current passion project/money pit is an 89 4Runner that had been 5vz swapped. Love the thing. The metal/rubber/metal brake line thing is a long running Toyota truck setup. No idea why, but it’s infuriating, especially when the rotor carriers the hub and wheel bearings.
The 2nd was when I lived in the UK and my mother in law bought a £1000 jdm Mitsubishi pajero exceed from some travelers at a pub. She’s lovely but oh so trusting. Had a ton of problems with that thing (ever seen a turbo actually blow up its cast housing?) and one of them was exactly the same. Brake pad just gone. Completely gone. Ended up putting new rotors on it and rebuilt that caliper. That thing was a turd.
A now ex-girlfriend once texted me a picture of a car part. Whats this, it just fell off my car in a parking lot? she asked. It was a brake pad. Worn down so much that it just fell out of the caliper. I didn’t know such a thing was possible.
I’ve seen missing pads – if you wear the backing plate down enough it can slide out between the caliper and the disc. Seems to usually (maybe usually because the people in my life aren’t quite at the trainwreck level as the Tundra owner) be because sliding calipers aren’t sliding and with 3 good pads left on that axel it’s not super obvious.
What’s worse is wearing through a rear brake shoe – harder to notice a rear isn’t working well, never going to see it (so hopefully you pay attention to the squealing) and once the backing starts to go it’s not long until you lose the wheel cylinder and the pedal goes straight to the floor (ask me how I know).
Another great one. Were there any other signs of “deferred” maintenance? The price was still great, but I would have worried about how long it had been since an oil change too.
Assuming that this was the 4.7 I had in my GX…tiiiiiiiming belt
This. All 4.7s have timing belts. This thing is on borrowed time.
I didn’t think the 2nd gen had the 4.7, only the 5.7?
You could get the 4.7L for maybe the first two years of this gen, although I don’t know why anybody would. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person.
Interesting, I had no idea! What about the 4.6 and 5.7? Are they belts as well?
The 4.6 as I know it is a chain. My second GX had this. I vaguely remember that the guides can be an issue but it’s not something that I heard happening much. 176k on mine before I sold it, never an issue
I completely forgot about the gx460 for some reason and by extension that it was same time period as the 2nd gen. Would love a 1uz or 1ur for my 4runner
They can be swapped in but it’s a whole thing. Not as plug and play as some people say. But I have never even attempted an engine swap. This is a retirement goal for me, find a 2door prado and swap in a V8 4.6 for the V6 that they came with everywhere for the shirt wheelbase
I have the 5vz in it already, so it’s not a huge thing to need to upgrade. V8 SWB would be awesome!
The title trouble reminds me of a Mitsubishi Eclipse that my wife bought once. It came with a signed title and a stack of hand-written bills of sale; the car had changed hands at least six times without being re-titled. I know this because we had… five bills of sale. There was at least one link missing in the chain.
The DMV obviously wanted no part of that, and the guy who sold her the car just shrugged and said “I gave you what I had.” The title was signed over to a tow yard in North Portland, where all kinds of sketchy car deals go down, but even they wouldn’t write out a bill of sale direct from them to her. The guy named on the first bill of sale, however, would. So a week later, with only two links in the chain, we went back to a different DMV office (just in case), and got it taken care of.
After that we made it a rule: If the person standing in front of you isn’t the person named on the title, don’t buy the car.
I only bought a car with different name on the title once, from a legally blind guy who was selling on behalf of a friend who owed him money. Amazingly it was all legit.
That’s a good rule.
Been there, had to walk away from a couple of cars I wanted over the years.
Startling how wide a strike zone “clean title” is to some people.
As a non-US person all this “title” stuff seems to exist solely to support a a bunch of government jobs at the expense of a huge amount of grief for everyone else.
Any system that functions worse than the UK’s DVLA is definitely broken.
NRPA: “Hold my Quilmes”
It’s all downstream of our insistence on not building national registries for anything.
The UK has one DVLA. The US has 56 different licensing/ownership authorities (plus a few more for the military, the government, the postal service… etc)
With all of that, how do you formally handle the transfer of property from one entity to another? The title system lets you have portability across state lines with no need for each state to work with the 55 other authorities.
The DVLA doesn’t handle the transfer of property, just logging the person who is responsible for speeding fines and road tax. Ownership is normally proven by keeping a receipt.
Right, but the way they log that is by someone telling them “I own this vehicle now” — and the way they *can* maintain that is by having a registry of every vehicle with a tax disc.
We also don’t have things like SORN for vehicles which might someday be returned to the roads, etc.
That’s exactly why when I lived in Ireland for a few years I had to take the Irish driving test like I was 16 again instead of just exchanging my California license for an Irish one. No way any national agency is going to try to negotiate reciprocity with 50 individual states.
I also think the car dealers like it being difficult as it makes people more like to go to a dealer for ease of the transaction.