Ownership Verified: Hardcore Sellin’ Out – gaasc’s 2013 Corolla

Provided that nobody in my bank fucks up tomorrow, Dorito the Corolla will be fully paid off in < 24h.
 
The good news is that nobody screwed up.

The bad news is apparently it takes them five business days to type the piece of paper that says I indeed don't owe them a penny anymore.
 
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While we wait for them to finally figure out how to write that document (yes it hasn't happened yet) Why don't we take a look at what has been happening to the Corolla. After all we're just days away from me having owned the thing for a year, how crazy is that?

So...there were a couple of upgrades that needed to be done over the last 830 miles or so as of last fillup (we don't drive a lot anymore). I've spoken about the trunk light before. Now that we got most of the shipments from the US, I took the liberty to get some nice white LEDs for interior lights and some more standard warmer-colored bulbs for the plate lights, if all goes well it means that we do not need to worry about that for a while. The new lights can be (somewhat) seen on the images below.

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They are great. much brighter than the old ones, to the point where you can see them gradually switch on to illuminate the cockpit even through the very dark limo tint that the car's fitted with.

Next on the upgrade list are the fogflights, I was going to go for some nice Morimoto units but being how I rarely use them I couldn't justify the expense, fortunately, a facebook marketplace deal netted us some OEM Foglamps for the princely sum of $10. Some cheap trim bits from Amazon (this is fine, the trim doesn't actually hold the fog lights in any way, they literally just have the hole so the lights may shine through) and we were in business Fortunately, the people who rebuilt this thing had some sense and merely tuckered in the connections in the fenders instead of just cutting them. The image above shows them already on

And some closeups of the foglights:

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The steering wheel controls didn't work. We traced that to a cheap replacement clockspring that didn't have the connections we needed to plug them appropriately. When the airbag deploys, the rapid expansion of gases generally destroys the clockspring. A US spec donor gave us the clockspring as well as many and varied bits from the steering column, in case any of those had also been destroyed. In the end, we only did needed the clockspring. The buttons are also illuminated now, which is nice

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Then, we also acquired a ScanGauge. This seems like a good idea since this is my first car with OBD2, and it will also allow me to check my tire pressures in addition to some other useful things. This is how it looks right now.

It hasn't been a completely faultless experience. owning to some weird issues regarding its unwillingness to shut down properly or to do a hard reboot which would leave me with an illuminated but otherwise blank ScanGauge. It also kinda blocks the info screens of the dash when in my driving position. Not much can be done about the latter, The best theory that we can come up with for the former is that the central locking would trigger a CANBUS event (interior lights, preheating of O2 sensor, some other nonsense to make it go to closed loop mode ASAP), and that would trigger the ScanGauge to start and stay on even if told to stay off when it detects 0 RPM (OBD2 doesn't have Engine On/Off states so a ScanGauge guesses at it, for lack of a better word). As evidenced when I deliberately triggered it by fiddling about with the remote. Fortunately, the latest software revisions from Linear Logic has a new setting which switches it off depending on voltage. It was put in after some SkyActiv Mazda engines exhibited similar behaviors. What it does for my particular vehicle is switch off the ScanGauge when the battery registers a voltage under 13 volts. 12.7 being the standard voltage for a battery with the engine off. So even if it switches on due to the central locking/something else I don't know, it will detect the battery is not charging and promptly switch off (promptly being about 10-15 seconds). It also seems to have solved the crash issue.

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It didn't solve the fact that one of my TPMS sensors seems to be a bit...off...

Otherwise, It has a car cover, and it has needed nothing else. Which is good, as it is expected to not need anything else. I'm happy with it.
 
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ScanGauge is something I expected in a car with a huge turbo, running on ethanol...
 
Interesting that the LED:s dim. Typically, LED bulbs need so little power to light up that they flash and play stroboscope on startup when the car does the bulb check.
 
Interesting that the LED:s dim. Typically, LED bulbs need so little power to light up that they flash and play stroboscope on startup when the car does the bulb check.

Apparently the solution to this problem (on my car at least), is to use CANBUS-rated LEDs. So far as I can tell, those are just a normal LED bulb with an additional resistor on it. I should also point out that while they work for this application, the particulars I bought were labeled as inadequate to be used for blinkers, most likely because the resistor still wouldn't correct Hyperflashing.
 
And now, after exactly 362 days of dealing with banking nonsense, everyone has acknowledged that the car is mine and I don't owe any money for it to anyone.
 
I didn't realize your car had a sunroof! Nice!
 
What does it say about my car history when I no longer consider a sunroof (or any opening roof mechanism) a luxury and just see it as a place to leak water?

Also I'd love to see a tyre at -14PSI or whatever that is in an actual measurement of vacuum.
 
I've managed to only have one car with a sunroof ever. A Sierra, two decades ago. It never leaked.
I've also, for some reason, never owned a car with an alarm. Thankfully.
 
The Volvo has an alarm, which goes off on its own if activated. Or maybe it doesn't do that anymore and just gives the error message. It's down to a depleted battery in the alarm system. I never use it because there's no point.
 
ScanGauge is something I expected in a car with a huge turbo, running on ethanol...
As it turns out, they have advantages even on normal ordinary vehicles. For instance...

BATTERIES! The car battery, that thing that nobody thinks about until one day they come out of their house to find their car is a potato which makes a clickly noise when you attempt to start it. I certainly did not think much about the one fitted to the corolla when I bought it, it started the car reliably and that's about it. It even did so when I didn't touch the car for months because it didn't have any ATF on it.

Well, as I kept looking for solutions for the scangauge's intermittent failures, I noticed that my battery was reporting about 10.8 volts. At first I thought it was the scangauge staying on for hours on end that did it in, but that theory was quickly dispeled when I sat on my car waiting for someone for half an hour. The car reported charging it at 13.8-13.9V all the time, reported 12.x or something when I switched it off. and 10.1 when I got bored and pushed the check button on the scangauge. An examination the next day revealed that my 550CA rated battery was doing more like...128. So I got a new ACDelco S85S26L rated for 700CA. A bit overkill perhaps, but it will work magnificently.

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Naturally, immediately after I got this, the one on the impala went bust. Such are the vagaries of having four lawn ornaments. it also now needs new battery terminals. It never ends with these things. Still it's better on the wallet than the constant suspension rebuilds...marginally.
 
Maybe worth investing in small solar panels to keep them topped up, I had an 18W one on Bugsy to combat the small parasitic drain it had somewhere and it was good enough for that big battery with our weather, I imagine in your climate and a smaller battery you would see even better results. They're cheaper than replacement batteries and you never have to worry.
 
Maybe worth investing in small solar panels to keep them topped up, I had an 18W one on Bugsy to combat the small parasitic drain it had somewhere and it was good enough for that big battery with our weather, I imagine in your climate and a smaller battery you would see even better results. They're cheaper than replacement batteries and you never have to worry.

I have thought about those. My main concern is not the car cover or plugging it into the cigarrette lighter or finding a sunny place. It's the mean time between stealings could probably be calculated in days
 
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I have thought about those. My main concern is not the car cover or plugging it into the cigarrette lighter or finding a sunny place. It's the mean time between stealings could probably be calculated in days
Wrap solar panel in foil and hook a car battery to it. ??‍♂️
 
Wrap solar panel in foil and hook a car battery to it. ??‍♂️
How would you charge the second car battery? Another solar panel?! :p

I hadn't considered theft, there isn't really a way around that unfortunately.
 
Or that...
 
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