I've had the 1st-gen Liftback Celica on my mental list of cars I'd love to own for awhile, and recently purely by happenstance I stumbled across two of them near by (coincidentally both white RA29s). Scooped up one almost immediately for a steal, and got a pretty decent deal on the other.
My hope is that between the two I'll be able to restore one to a nice looking and running condition. What's left of the other one could become a 24 Hours of LeMons contender.
This will be my first attempt at any serious body restoration work, but it's a skill me and a friend have wanted to start developing for a while. Hopefully by going slow and planning carefully we'll be able to produce a nice result eventually!The first RA29 has a body in pretty rough shape. There's advanced rust in several places, and while it's probably restorable by someone with some serious skills, me and my restoration partner have more or less deemed it a parts and bodywork practice car. Most of the chassis and suspension bits are actually in pretty good shape, however, and it actually runs and drives with some serious convincing (the carburetion is messed up, especially the idle circuit, but the motor seems pretty solid). It has the original 20R motor and an automatic (A40?) transmission. While it does drive, it also leaks about a gallon of coolant per mile due to a busted radiator and a leaking high pressure hose, so it will be towed to its destination. There's a decent amount of parts worth using on this car, and for the little I paid for it I have no complaints.
The second RA29 has a much better body, and its chassis and suspension look in even better shape. There's definitely rust to be dealt with, but much of it is surface or inner wheel well rust (hopefully! we'll see when the paint starts coming off). The worst part from a repair standpoint is probably the hatchback, which has some bad rust on its inner reenforcement metal. I have a few ideas for dealing with this, but I won't be certain what might work until I start stripping things down. This one doesn't run, however. The previous owner pulled a 22R-TE from a 4Runner and swapped it in, mated with some 5 speed Celica transmission (not sure which one as yet... maybe the W50?). He hit a wall with the wiring (not his forte, apparently) and hasn't touched it since. It would be nice to get the 22R-TE motor wired up and running, but that's a concern for later. I think I'd like to stick with an R motor of some sort to keep the expense in the realm of sanity, so it would be nice to have the stout 22R-TE if possible. The car comes with an extra hood in good shape, another 5 speed transmission (presumably the same type that's currently in it), louvers, and some other odds and ends. This one will most likely be the car that gets restored.
I'm really excited about this project, since the RA29 is such a cool looking car and is so unique (it's just too cliche to pick 60s American muscle for restoration...). Hopefully we won't bash our brains out too badly as we learn body and rust repair (at the very least our welding skills should improve!). I'll definitely be asking a lot of questions and hunting for parts on here as we get into it. Sorry for the lack of photos in this post, but I'll update tomorrow after I've taken a bunch of pictures.
One question for now: is there anything useful that can be gleaned from the VINs on these cars? I googled around but couldn't find much in the way of a decoder. Or is everything after the RA29 simply a serial number? Here are the two numbers:
RA29139640
RA29088200
Here are some photos I took yesterday when we were towing the Celicas.
