i finally laid my hands on a dream terc (aka one with manual steering and no sunroof). this one was up for sale here back in early july of '14 for $600 by the original owner. it had 382,000 km on it. i narrowly missed it, and was bummed.
fast forward to two weeks ago. my wife and i got home late from a vacation in hawaii and i couldn't sleep yet so i indulged in my old habit of tercel searching. found the very car i had missed out on, now just 5 minutes down the road from me, albeit with 9000 km more on it and now for $1300 at a used car dealership. dang. oh well, a dream terc is a dream terc. so i went and checked it out.
the driver seat is torn to hell but the rest of the interior is mint. even has the ever elusive cargo cover. heater sucks, only blows slightly warmer than ice cold so going to mess around with that asap. exterior has had lots of amateur bondo done so it looks pretty good from a distance but not so hot close up. that's fine by me. the original owner was obviously super diligent about staying on top of the rust and did a great job keeping it at bay. the trans shifts wonderfully, it's the smoothest i've owned. however it has a CV seal leak so i checked the level and it was low by about 1 liter so i topped it up and am parking with the offending side high until i can replace it. just got the seal today so will do it soon. the carb and engine run really smooth and strong, no visible smoking, but there is some pinging under load. also, the worst news so far, i did a compression test today. the plugs all looked pretty good but the compression results were 165, 140, 110, and 170. i didn't think to do a dribble down test but will do that soon. depending on the results, i may try using restore to bring the compression up since it worked so well on our truck. the car has a few clunks and rattles, like the classic shift clunk which i believe will be the strut mounts but i'm not going to get into that stuff until i decide to keep or sell the car.
here are the pics from the ad last july.


so it has officially begun: my head to head 4wd tercel vs 4wd corolla competition that will decide which one i keep. i've been looking forward to this for a long time so i'm excited to finally get to it.