The 5SFE is "normal Toyota", reliable, gets you places, but otherwise not worth mentioning. If I get another Mk2, it'll be far in the future and with a V6 swapped in; aluminum-block 1MZ-FE if possible, 3VZ (the one Woodsport swears by) if necessary.
When I was in Scotland last September, I had a two hour ride in a V6'ed Mk2 - with the 1MZ-FE. Awesome. Seriously, seriously awesome. Again, the engine the car should've had to have been a proper tourer.
And the sound... makes you do a sex wee every time the loud pedal is pressed... even if you're only a passenger!
But enough about me. What do you plan on doing to this car, after the cleaning and, er, reviving? Or is it too early to be worrying about that?
Haha... Ummm, it's kind of too early to be worrying about it as it still depends on a number of factors, but I may as well sum up the options on here as they currently stand.
I'm still a student, so I can't justify running three cars, particularly as I don't need to drive
that much. However, I live on a farm at the moment, with a mud track that becomes a bog in heavy rain. The Peugeot has proven to be awesome for driving on the farm in winter, and I'd be worried about mud sticking to the underside of a low MR2, so really I'd like to keep a 'winter car' if at all possible.
Therefore, thinking with my mind for a minute, the plan was & is to fix and sell. After all, the point of buying this car was to possibly fix it and make a bit of money and learn a lot about engines... or to break it into bits if unfixable and recoup my costs.
Unfortunately I don't normally stick to plans like that. I'm already considering spending more money on the engine rebuild than originally planned so that this engine should prove to be a reliable engine once I'm finished with it.
But that could mean I'd then lose money if I sold it...!
The problem with making decisions just yet is that the engine is still an unknown factor... I still don't know if the engine in there is okay - I really need to check it before making up my mind one way or the other. Make sure it's not warped.
If it's warped, then it's scrap. If it's not, then I rebuild it and put it back in the car... and decide where to go from there.
If the engine is scrap, I'm toying with the idea of putting a V6 in the car (I really love the V6'd Mk1 I've been in and really want one!!! LOL). But this depends on the state of the rest of the car.
Unfortunately I recently discovered more rust at the rear of the car when some paint & filler fell out. I've been wanting to practice my welding for a while, but it's not great so I'm not sure how pretty it'll be.
Really, I can't make a decision until I inspect the engine properly which will happen soon hopefully.
From there, I have to decide what condition the rest of the car is in - if poor, then do I rebuild the engine and keep/sell the car as a track car, or do I fix it to make it decent.
Or, do I just part out the good bits on the car (including the rebuilt engine) and send the sell to the scrap man. I'd really really rather not do this as there's already enough of these cars going to scrap and I've been working hard to save this car already, but unfortunately it really is suffering from neglect.
So, yeah, it's all up in the air at the moment. This was bought as a project car with the intention of learning more about cars and how to repair them than I could've done with the others. But time and money constraints are forcing things to change slightly... meaning things like learning how to use the paint spraying equipment may have to go out the window for now.
Plus, I've still gotta sort out the other Mk1 as well...
So, in short... Gotta determine whether the engine is salvageable or not and go from there. Watch this space!