77 Celica ST
 

Hey everyone,

Figured I'd introduce myself to the board (EDIT: Turns out I've had an account here before, which explains why I had trouble registering. Looks like I posted about some of my truck problems). I'm a mechanic in Arizona who bought a 1986 4x4 pickup (4x4, 5 speed, carbed 22r) as my first car. Darn thing sucked up money just as well as uncle sam ever could. It was a fun truck, but I ended up selling it after doing the clutch and having the alternator go out and the radiator spring a leak on the drive home from putting that clutch in. I think the truck hated me because I spent more on parts than I would have making payments on a new Taco. Definitely an adventure though. All that work was done in the parking lot of my apartment complex. You haven't lived until you've dropped the gas tank in a parking lot at 3am knowing you had to drive it to work in 4 hours.

Fast forward 5 years and I now have reliable transportation and my own garage. An ad pops up on craigslist for a 1977 Celica ST and I jumped on it. Runs and drives (20R with an A40 automatic) but the interior is thrashed (welcome to Arizona). And its been desmogged. That's where my headaches began. I need to get it smogged to register it. I've been slowly piecing together the emissions kit and trying to rig up a few things to work that aren't supposed to.
At any rate, I'm going to do my best to restore it as much as practical. I didn't buy it as a race car but I figure it should make a fun little cruiser. Once it passes emissions, first two things are to have the gauges repaired where needed and to get the interior reupholstered. The inside is tan. any suggestions on colors or schemes that will go well with the brown dash?
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Valve cover and carb off for cleaning. This thing came with a weber 32/32 (not a 36mm secondary) and it ran so rich that fuel was coming out of the exhaust. I had to put a stock carb on and remove three nonfunctional electric fuel pumps and replace them with a stock in-tank one. bleh.
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Just got the new carb on. Needs some serious tuning before its driveable again. Notice the half installed smog crap near the battery. Its all I could find on ebay so I'm going to try to make it work...
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Gas tank before I had a pound of rust flakes boiled out of it. I wish I had pics of the stock fuel pump that was in there. I poked the pickup screen with my finger and it burst. It was full of rust flakes like some kind of splenda packet from hell. Thankfully that was the only rust anywhere on the car.