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JessN16

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    344
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  • Location
    Prattville, Ala.
  • Gender
    Male

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Previous Fields

  • Zip Code
    36066
  • Model
    Starion
  • Type
    ESI
  • Model Year
    1987
  • Transmission Type
    Manual
  • Factory Color
    Serbia Black
  • Interior Color
    Black
  • Status
    On the road

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  1. Sorry for the lag in getting back to you guys. Been busy at work but will contact you both by the end of the Memorial Day weekend. Jess
  2. 1987 Starion ESI 5-speed for sale, asking $2500 OBO. The good: * Southern car with no frame rust. * Suspension Techniques lowering springs and Tokico Blue struts. * Brand-new Yokohama S-Drive tires. Less than 100 miles on the whole set. * About $2,000 in stereo equipment comes with it, including an Xtant amplifier, Kenwood double-DIN radio with 12-disc changer, and Sirius Satellite Radio with active subscription, as well as a pair of Boston Z7 speakers. * Rebuilt steering rack, still in the box I ordered it in (factory one is fine, it just leaks a little) * New factory clutch (less than 1,000 miles) * Tinted windows * Functioning A/C (although it's stuck in dash mode, no foot vents) * Custom adjustable Zirgo cooling fans and new radiator * BSE elimination * Alabama non-JV head * 16G turbo (will need rebuild soon but it's not imminent) * 1988 igniter upgrade * MOMO steering wheel and real carbon-fiber MOMO shift knob, as well as carbon-fiber instrument cluster gauge surround and see-through gauges * Slotted rotors and race-level performance brake pads * Upgraded to 88 flywheel The bad: * Shifter needs to be rebuilt. Will access all gears but only goes in 1, 3 and 5 easily. This must be addressed pretty quickly, and is the reason the car has been parked the last four months. * Needs an exhaust system update. The stock exhaust is still on the car (precat has been deleted) and the muffler is pretty much gone. * Seat leather is hard. * Most of the gauge cluster is non-functioning, including the speedo, oil and water gauges. Odometer still works, though. * Although it has no frame rust, there is one piece of surface rust that needs to be addressed. Something hit the hood, either a rock or a hailstone, a few years ago. It cracked the paint there and now there's a spot about 2-3 inches across, circular, that has surface rust only. The full hood will need to be stripped and painted. * High mileage (207k, I think) * Original 87 airdam is still on the car but just barely. This is absolutely a perfect car for someone wanting to do a motor swap. There's nothing wrong with the block in this car, but the sheer mileage may put some people off. The shifter issue is the only gotta-fix-it-no-matter-what problem it has right now. The car wasn't just running when I parked it, it was my daily driver. Car is located in central Alabama. Jess
  3. Obviously, it's looking like a no-go for rebooting the "Scottsboro Meet" this year. There is a chance it could take place sometime in the summer, but more likely we're looking at 2012. Also, if it does take place later in 2011, there's a chance it could run parallel with the British Motoring Club of Central Alabama (I'm a member of that club as well, and when someone found out I planned meets in the Scottsboro area, I have a feeling I'm going to get drafted). Whatever happens, I won't be in a StarQuest when I come, so I hope that'll be OK with you guys. Sorry for the lack of updates to this point but quite frankly, I've had a lot of stuff to deal with since November and very little of it has been good. Jess
  4. A friend of mine worked some crap job in college and his boss told him, "There are two ways, my way or the highway ... actually, there's just my way. There is no highway." I thought that was so over-the-top, and yes, I'm going to use it on someone some day just to watch them ignite. Even better that Mr. No Highway, about a month after the above event, was arrested for having both an underage girl and some drugs in the car simultaneously. Not good, not good... Jess
  5. I used to have one. I owned #2417. Great thing about the serial numbers on that car were that they were sequential. You could introduce yourself to other Bricklin owners as "Hi, I'm #2417." The car was one of the safest ever built. Doors had massive crash beams in them and the window only opened down to your shoulder. Car had a full roll cage and I think if an 18-wheeler hit it from behind, it would total the truck. The problem was that they were seriously overweight, had a borderline-dangerous rear suspension and the brakes weren't nearly enough. I owned one of the 351 Windsor cars, which were the most common and the least desirable, since they only came with an FMX 3-speed transmission. Noisy, leaked water all over during a rainstorm. But all you had to do was hit the door switch, and on a car like mine that had been converted over from hydraulic to air doors (reason? with hydro-doors, if your battery went dead, you were stuck in the car or outside it), and you'd hear "PSSSHH!!" and people would come from miles around. Including the girls. Rear end in all the cars is out of the AMC Javelin. A lot of Bricklin owners financed some improvements by switching out the rear end to a Ford Nine and then selling the stock rear end to Javelin collectors. Lift the hood and you'd see parts from every manufacturer: Ford motor, AMC washer fluid basket, GM steering column, etc. The cars were not painted. They were acrylic overlays on top of fiberglass, making a composite sandwich. The color was mixed into the acrylic batch from the get-go. If you scratched the car, no big deal -- the stuff underneath was body color. Mine had been repainted over the factory color. The original motors were the 360 Javelin, and you could get them with either a 4-speed stick or an auto. Not a lot of AMC cars with the auto trans in them. Designer steering wheel and rims. If you've got factory steering wheel and rims, you probably could sell them and buy an entire car. O-60 on my car was around 10 seconds. The poor Windsor could only make 150-175 hp with all that emissions gear. For some reason, the AMC engine didn't have to have it, and it made 200+ HP and the car would move. High-speed cornering, though, was basically done by the Hail Mary method. And those cars wouldn't drive for ^$ in the rain. I miss mine, but they're a full-time job. And you MUST have a garage, or the sun will heat-warp the body panels and then it will leak all over you. Always right over the crotch, too. And about five years ago, State Farm quit writing insurance for them, so the only option left is collector car insurance. Jess
  6. I see that thing and all I can think about is how many sets of front tires you'd go through given all that camber. Jess
  7. If you're serious about investing, always take the lump sum. You'll end up making more in the long run because your interest will be compounding on your investments. Plus, on a lot of these lotteries that pay in the form of an annuity (i.e., a certain amount over a 20- or 30- year period), those payments stop on your death. They do not necessarily transfer to your survivors. So if you punt off after a couple of years, away goes the money. Always read the fine print. Now, if you don't care about trying to play the game of can-I-use-compounding-interest-to-beat-the-annuity-payment, you can take $20 million lump, just invest it into a bunch of tax-free municipal bonds at 5 percent (very doable right now) and end up taking home $1 million federal and state tax-free (provided you invested in bonds from your home state, or a U.S. territory) every year for the rest of your life (you'd have to reinvest every time a bond got called, but that's not a big deal). I think I can live off $1 million tax free forever, by the way. So now we've turned $20 million lump into a series of $1 million tax-free annual payments, and assuming I live to 70, even though inflation is eating into my take-home (bond interest doesn't index for inflation), getting $40 million tax-free over that time period, I promise you I feel good about my standard of living. And I just kept myself from blowing it all on the front end by locking it into a laddered bond structure. Jess
  8. Shelby, You'll be happy to know that I do, indeed, own an ohm meter now. Exactly how to use it, well, that's another story. But I do have one. Jess
  9. Did a lot more testing with it today and now I'm not sure that I don't have an exhaust leak. I definitely have at least one and as many as three ticking lifters. One is ticking all the time. The other two come and go, and when they're all three singing together, it's hard to hear anything else. But I heard what sounded like a big exhaust leak this morning after a 30-mile trip, and it showed up again after the return trip. I got out, popped the hood, let the car cool down a little and the leak seemed to go away. However, I also have more information from the A/F gauge that supports an electrical problem: On a completely cold motor, my A/F readings are very precise. There is only one or two LEDs lit up at any given time. But when the car gets very warm, and the running/driving problems begin to show up, the A/F gauge goes somewhat nuts, with five or six LEDs lit up at the same time, and everything is very erratic. So here's where we're at in terms of what I think is causing this: 1) CTS 2) Lifter set 3) Exhaust leak? 4) TPS 5) Bad 02 sensor At this point, I'm going to swap in a new CTS, check my codes and that's about as far as I can go. I need more experienced ears to listen to the noises it's making before I go tearing down the hot side of the motor looking for a leak. Jess
  10. Beats me, Shelby. This car has always run a little warm. And it's already got a 180 t-stat. Jess
  11. It didn't start when we re-did the fans. The fans and radiator were done about seven years ago, at the same time we did the BSE on this car. These running/driving problems started about two years ago. Then, the car quit running for other reasons and it stayed parked until earlier this year. We fixed those other electrical problems, but the crappy running condition is still with us. Jess
  12. I've had those other things (gasket, bad manifolds, etc.). This is definitely a lifter. We installed this head nearly six years ago and it was a little noisy from the start. There are some good aspects of this lifter -- if you're a half-quart low on oil, it gets loud. I guess I don't even need to use a dipstick anymore. Sounds like someone hitting a piece of pot metal with a small ball hammer when it starts making racket. Let the engine get warm enough or the oil lower than that, and at least one other lifter gets into the party, too. Jess
  13. Update from tonight... Swapped the wires on the CTS, took it for a spin, no change. It's definitely temperature-related. And I'm in a good position to know pretty much exactly what temp is causing the problem: A few years ago, Grant (pure_insanity) and I installed a new radiator and changed the factory fan system out, installing aftermarket Zirgo fans. For the primary fan, we wired it to come on with a temp sensor at 180. For the secondary fan, we put in a variable control, so I could make it come on at whatever temperature I needed it. It's currently set between 190-195, and I wired up status lights on my dashboard so I could see precisely when it kicked in. Well, the problems come right before the secondary (195) fan kicks in. Starts running like crap all through the powerband, but worse on boost when the engine is loaded up, as described before. I made my last run tonight very late, when air temps had cooled into the upper 70s. I could never get the car to warm above 195, so the problems only came in very faintly. But earlier in the evening, when the air was still warm and the car could get a good heat in it, it ran like utter crap. And, the warmer the engine gets, the louder those lifters get. When engine temp is below 195, I barely hear the lifter. So something is happening here that is directly tied to a temperature of 195 degrees F. Either the TPS is having a resistance issue, 195 just happens to be when the lifters can't get a good oil supply/start failing, or an injector starts going downhill at that temp. Or maybe the CTS is just flat-out bad no matter how it's wired. I'll be checking codes in the next day or two and that should give more info. But I'm encouraged that I'm getting good work done here in regards to eliminating possibilities. Jess
  14. AutoBodyGod, I'm sure the head needs it, but any kind of motor work is WAY above my comfort zone as a shadetree StarQuest owner. What you suggest will have to wait awhile, I'm afraid. Jimmy, you're right, my CTS is two individual wires. I may flip them tomorrow and go for a spin and see what I get. Jess
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