After the first segment I now had a cheap car that needed to serve two purposes. The first and most pressing was to replace the Civic as the kids car. For that it needed to be functioning and reliable. There was a list of items that needed taking care of. For the Great Beater Challenge it was a bit of boring choice so needed a fun theme to jazz it up a bit.
The first item on the list was a rather big annoyance with the front door handle. It was broken on one side and while the previous owner’s fix with twine was workable once you mastered the correct opening technique it would soon become really old to have only one functioning door. Door handles are a known weak point on the Tercel but at least the replacement part was quite cheap. The parts were sold as a pair so I have a passenger side one ready if the need should arise.
There is a decent amount of labour time involved in the replacement as the interior window winder and door cards need to come off. There are a couple bolts behind that door that were initially frozen on. I was able to work them free. One side went smoothly but the other side dug into the plastic of the handle and just spun so I had to cut it off. Why is it that I need to use the angle grinder for every job?
The end result of a fully functioning door handle was worth the time however.
The other big snag was that it was pumping out all sorts of white smoke on startup. Not sure how I had missed this at purchase time but probably had something to do with the fact that I did not follow any good used car buying guidelines. My first thought was head gasket but the oil was filthy but free of coolant.
Sometimes a good reader is worth its weight in gold. Incidentally this Tercel was one of the first cars with OBDII.
A new EGR valve was shockingly expensive and almost as much as I payed for the whole car. A good cleaning of the intake and EGR valve was a good place to start. The throttle body had to come off for access. There is a tiny, tiny little passage in the intake that leads to the EGR valve that was completely clogged. In that bump above the throttle body is the small passage but after much awkward cleaning I was able to blow carb cleaner though it. The EGR valve was cleaned as well but happily the smoke went away.
The tires on the car were in awful condition and the next piece of the puzzle. Luckily they are very cheap on the second market if you can find them. I was able to find these “all year” winters tires in almost new condition. They are essentially longer wearing compromise tire between a traditional winter and all season. The rims are from a Corrolla SR5 but really the same as what I had on the Tercel. The cost was actually cheaper than what it would be to get a set of tires mounted on rims. They had even been recently painted. As a bit of a bonus they were wider at 175/70R13 than stock at 155/80R13.
An oil change was definitely required with whatever oil happened to be on sale at the time.
For spark plugs Toyota specified these dual electrode style plugs which took a while to track down. The Tercel has an interesting ignition set up with two coil on plugs and then a second spark plug slaved off each with a wasted spark firing. The dual electrodes are supposed to cut down on electrode wear.
With all that work done is was now time for the tough part; teaching two teenagers to drive stick shift. After many stalls and some roasting of the clutch around a new neighborhood development with roads but no houses yet they were both competent enough to be set free on public roads. My wife included this handy reminder so the car did not roll off once parked.
I am not entirely sure how we came up with the pig theme for this year’s Great Beater Challenge but I believe it started when I was driving in the Tercel with at least some of the boys and a Lamborghini passed on the other side of the road. We started coming with reasons why our Tercel was better than that Italian exotic and came around to our red paint slowing fading to pink. Pink like a pig was mentioning with the name Hamborghini being mentioned shortly after. We decided it would be one half pig, one half Lamborghini and a further one half Toyota Tercel. For those fussy on math concepts I can only state that our GBC team was using some sort of new math methods. We now had our theme in concept and just needed to make it real.
We then went shopping for an initial pig related items and the above is what we came up with. An interesting mix for sure but the flowers and wine were my wife who has to suffer though this madness.
The first step was to come up with a snout but keep it on a budget as a I am big fan of the cheap, homemade vibe on a GBC car. I looked around the garage and spied a plastic garbage can that we used to collect our bottles and cans for recycling. It was round and roughly the right size and with two holes cut for nostrils could be a snout. While buying a proper hole saw blade of the size required would have been expensive but easy I settled for drilling many small holes and then joining them together followed by a bit of smoothing out. Not perfect but certainly good enough for the purpose.
A quick color change had it look more pig like so I just needed a reasonable way to mount it without blocking access to the radiator and causing an overheating issue.
For the ears I would use these small pylons painted pink. Happily the cheap ones had holes in them for airflow and mounting.
We also needed a curly tail so I built this one from a pool noddle and a wire coat hanger.
Any self respecting Hamborghini needs to have the appearance of performance and what better for that than a giant wing? As some of you may recall I made such a wing for our 2017 GBC Civic out of pallet wood. While that wing was functional (in a purely visual manner) it was also extremely heavy and required driving several holes through the trunk lid. On top of all of that I had recycled it long ago so it was not available for re-use. I was given strict orders not the wreak the car and unfortunately replacement Tercel body panels are getting hard to find in the salvage yards around here so I wanted to re-use the stock spoiler mounts. I also wanted to spend as little money as possible so I settled on a piece of flat wood that would be bolted to the trunk lid which would serve as my platform to built the wing on. Since I live in a newer neighborhood with homes under construction there are plenty of cut down 2x4s sitting in dumpsters ripe for the picking. I was able to find four reasonably appropriate sized pieces which would provide a guide for the dimensions of the wing. I also had some spare Ikea brackets and deck screws to complete the build although I did have to buy the bolts to secure the whole thing to the trunk. So close to free.
Counter sunk holes for the deck screws to hold wing together but not scratch the paint.
Some bracket left over (I think) from an Ikea wall mount. This gave the wing some extra support in addition to the deck screws which was an improvement over the earlier Civic wing leading to an overall lower weight.
The completed wing minus paint ready to mount.
The fire extinguisher NOS made a return from the 2017 GBC edition (photo from then since I neglected to take one this year) for more simulated performance creditability. On the inside we added a coupe pig mascots. One was a very strange pig game that involved rolling a dice, pressing the pig stomach then passing around the pig while he sings until he stops and farts. Then that person looses some points or something along those lines. Since this is a Canadian market car we had a nice parcel shelf instead of a passenger side air bag to play it on. The other pig was a stuffed toy and a last minute donation from our neighbor when they saw our car.
Given the non-destructive mandate we had to get creative mounting our decorations and used rope rather than screws or bolts. If the rope looks a bit old nasty that is because it is. I believe this came in the trunk of some sort of car I had bought over the years. Load rated for highway travel no doubt.
We also added a mouth and eyes with electrical tape. Here is a preview from the night before.
I did not know how well these decorations would hold on at highway speeds and the start was in Calgary this year which is a roughly 180km (110 mile) drive away so final mounting would wait until that morning for everything except the wing as it did not fit inside. I did not mind losing a few bits during the event but it seemed a shame to lose them beforehand. As usual for me and in true GBC tradition everything would be tested for the first time while on the event. The wing did not even get a spin around the block for testing. We got quite a few puzzled looks at our big wing Tercel including one from a policeman who seemed to being thinking of reasons to pull us over before coming up short. In the next installment we will meet some of the other teams.
Full The Great Beater Challenge 2019 segments:
Vehicle Preparation and Theme – Creation of the Hamborghini
Nice!
Awesome David. Once again, these preparation reports always make me smile (or laugh out loud in the case of the coffee can exhaust tip from the Civic if memory serves).
Then comes the best part, your travelogue. It always makes me want to drive in that part of Canada, and I typically learn something, i.e. the Frank Slide. I knew nothing about that, but it ended up being a fascinating read!
Looking forward to the next installment!
I hope this year will live up to those expectations but it was certainly a fun time. A lot of the other teams (next update) were quite inventive this year as well.
Nice job! Why, you ask, do you always need to use a angle grinder on projects? Umm…maybe where you live? lol. Anyway, that beats a Heli-Coil in a spark plug hole
I’ve seen some of these pictures behind the scenes on CC and so was looking forward to your explanation. Your Hamborghini is awesome! The low budgetness of it all makes it even better. But I do insist, it would be even better with these hats –
The budget was low – very low indeed. The most expensive bit was the stuff pig for the roof (It bizarrely converts to a cow as well). The low budget vibe gives it a special charm I think.
Haha – that hat is awesome. I did buy a special mask for the occasion … coming soon.
My grandparents have a flying pig hat like that – it comes out when we play a card game called “Scum”. The loser has to wear the “Scum” pig hat and is called the scum. Pretty fun when played with 20 people! Haven’t played that in years.
Fantastic, and luckily an easy fix to stop the steam.
Can you imagine the economic possibilities for a pig that coverts to a cow? Wouldn’t be QUITE as good as bacon mind you, but it could revolutionize agriculture.
Apparently called a Flip-A-Zoo. Here is a photo of one in mid transition.
$700 finds no running cars on ListsCraig in my area, the minimum seems to be $750. All the vehicles cheaper than that mention dealkillers like warped heads, slipping transmission and so on. Three possible candidates include a Toyota Previa with 228K for $799, a $750 Sentra that’s wrecked and running and is hard to start with 162K and an $800 Explorer with 154K.
Then there’s the ‘project’ Jaguar that “works and runs but has issues needs breaks” and they want $750…no mileage disclosure, but mileage doesn’t seem to be a factor when it comes to Jag reliability 🙂
Hey, give this Jaguar a brake!
Jaguars break by themselves, the last thing they need is more breaks…
I’ll bet if you walked up any of those four driveways with $400 in cash you’d be pushing all of them onto your trailer within three minutes.
Dude, is that a Hambo?!
It’s a bit scary to say this and and must obviously be taken in the context of the last few years but this one is starting to look, dare I say it, professionally built! (Remember, context is everything..) No paint tray on the car but you managed to colormatch the wood etc.
Looking forward to seeing you make this pig squeal across the prairies…
The paint was not supposed to match! The wing is pink, the car red but somehow it matched.
That looks pretty good David. If it holds up well on the race maybe you should tell the boys you’re going to keep it in all its Hamborghini finery permanently.
Ahem… I’m sure they would be happy to show off Dad’s handy work 😵😵
If the snout gets scraped up, just apply a little oinkment.
Very cool it will probably keep going for years once you remove the wank wing the fuel consumption should improve too, These elcheapo bombs pop up every now and then on trademe good cars that with a bit of fettling will go for years for little money I found one on the weekend, 95 Pug 306 sedan diesel turbo with leaking injector pump that will scare most people away (you can remove the pump without disturbing the cambelt) or feed it a bottle of Moreys diesel fuel conditioner that usually works and for $350 you got a nice little runner, I dont need it theres no great beater challenge to enter hereabouts.
I love Mom’s note on the dash! But we all know that the only way someone *really* learns to put it in gear or set the brake is when the car rolls away from you once.
I presume it handles like a pig? And how are the seats? You will be doing a lot of driving and wouldn’t want to get tenderloins.
Nice wing!
If you decide to keep it you should cut it down to where the height matches that of the Tercel’s roof.
Voila! You instantly have a rack for lumber runs to the home center/centre, canoes…the possibilities are endless.
Not a bad idea – I already use it as our substitute truck as it does all the dump/recycling runs.
What a fun beater/project! And there’s the corollary benefit of teaching your children how to drive a stick shift. They might be the last generation of drivers that gets to learn and enjoy one!
You are my hero! I’m looking forward to the next reports!!!!
” We decided it would be one half pig, one half Lamborghini and a further one half Toyota Tercel”
The perfect car for manbearpig!
Looks like a good car after the extensive cleanup & rehab. I’m looking forward to reading about the GBC (as I slowly read my way towards the present).