1975...(I was 16) I bought a 1964 Volvo 1800S that wasn't running(brakes did), my dad towed it home with a chain (me riding the brake gently to keep it taught.
I've posted this before... me and a friend replacing my 2nd Volvo 1800S engine with the engine from the first one......
The first car I had as my own was a hand me down from my parents. 1988 Chevy Nova. Real hot rod there...I beat the piss out of it daily. Had it off and on for 5 years, and it finally blew a head gasket and I sent it to the great salvage yard in the sky.
First car I bought with my own money was an '81 Subaru DL wagon 5spd. I think it was $250. It was red when new, but the sun turned it orange. The stereo was some $10 job from K-Mart with one speaker just laying in the back of the hatch...the wire ran between the seats. It lasted about a year until it blew a head gasket (ironcally a few weeks before the Nova did) and I sent it to the same salvage yard in the sky.
When I was 13, my dad mentioned that his buddy was going to junk a 64 Cadillac because the freeze plugs had blown out. The guy was willing to take $45.00 for the car, but my dad thought it was too much money. I somehow managed to scrape together $45.00 and begged my dad to let me have the car.
To my surprise the car showed up a week later. The tow truck driver carefully lowered the Palomino green Coupe de Ville, unhooked and drove away. My dad arrived a short time later with a bag of parts and we set about replacing the freeze plugs with expandable rubber stoppers. A new set of points and plugs had to be installed before the tired 429 coughed back into life. Blue smoke billowed from the tail pipe as the engine fought it's resurrection. Within a few minutes the ragged sounding engine smoothed out and settled down to quiet idle. Eventually the mammoth engine built up enough heat for the thermostat to open and we filled the rest of the cooling system with fresh antifreeze. … the radiator swallowed every last drop and wanted more. Out came the garden hose and yet more water was added. At some point my dad realize something wasn’t kosher and pulled the dip stick ….OH E36 M3.
Fast forward a little bit and the engine was sitting on the dirt upside down with the oil pan off. We all marveled at the huge crack that ran along the bottom of the water jacket into the oil sump. Engine was toast
I spent the next two years working on the Caddy every moment I could. I paid for all the parts with paper rout money. In the end the Caddy never ran again. The Cadillac continues to give me nightmares 33 years later.
Anyway, the Cadillac had an interesting face and my sister was inspired to do an abstract charcoal drawing of the metal monster. The drawing created quite a stir and won a first place in some regional contest. Incredibly the drawing was shipped off to Washington DC and hung in the library of congress or something like that for about a year or so. The drawing was aptly titled “$45.00 Cadillac”. Eventually the artwork was returned and my sister gave it to me.
The picture proudly hangs on my dining room wall.
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This is the left side of the Caddy's nose with the headlight bucket removed. Very abstract.
I'll be the odd man out - due to my older twin sisters many tickets and accidents my dad announced I would NOT be owning my own car until I was 18 and he allowed me to "borrow" their VW bug when they weren't using it.
I worked construction year round for a builder over 4 years and saved $10,000 (making $2.25 per hour) and headed over to Datsun when I turned 18 to purchase a new Datsun 310GX for $5,500. Later I bought some American Wheels along with a new set of Phoenix Stahlflex 3011(?) tires. I proceeded to drive 120,000 miles in 4 years as I attended college locally.
I didn't buy my first car until I was 19. For the most part I could get where I needed to go by walking or bicycling, and when I couldn't my dad would let me borrow his 98 Mazda MPV. My first car was a total basket-case of a 1992 Nissan 240SX SE coupe, which I bought for the princely sum of $500. The odometer was stuck at 250K, the HUD speedometer and dash lights didn't work, the engine only ran on three cylinders at best, it had a spark plug seized in the head, it smoked like a chimney, it consumed coolant AND oil at an alarming rate, the body was rusty as hell, the autotragic shunted hard between gears, and the interior was grody. I still loved it. I really think the S13 cemented my preference for RWD, even after I once spun it into a ditch trying to do some mad tyte dorifutos. It put up with my abuse for a year before the overheating finally took its toll on the engine.
MG Midget. Total rust bucket with no top that got me past the first summer of car ownership.This would be like 1975. Sold for a profit in the fall. Have not been without at least one MG ever since.
1989 Volvo 745GL. White on black leather, with a manual crank sunroof. Dad bought it new in an attempt to keep my brother and I safe as children, and it did the job...ended up going face first into a toll booth and backward into a brick wall and still returned to serve me through high school and college. Learned how to change a water pump, oil and countless other things on that car. Dreamed of putting an LSX into it one day. A few days after I left the state for medical school, dad called up the junkyard and had it hauled off. Still intend to build the Volvette of my dreams one day.
My first rig was a grey '89 toyota Hilux 4x4, standard cab, short bed with a 22re and a 5 speed. It was purchased new by my father in '88 and he ran it as a dd until '94 at which point it started service as a vehicle to bring trash to the dump and teach my older sister to drive. My sister hated it and wanted something more stylish, with more capacity for carrying friends, so when I came of age, being just fine with the styling and the fact that I could use it to climb sandpits and blast through the woods, gladly purchased it from them at a very reasonable price. I had a vision of turning it into a long travel desert truck with fiberglass panels, but at the time aftermarket support was not particularly strong, and neither was my budget as a part time freelance auto detailer. I picked away at the things I could do on my budget. I started with a pair of recaro seats from "the Want Advertiser" mounted on new brackets from recaro (amazingly they made them for my application) and a momo steering wheel, then a decent for the time stereo (a clarion that was the pinnacle of '95 head unit tech and some polk audio speakers). The 22re power was insufficient to satisfy my 16 year old need to smoke the tires off on a weekly basis without power braking so my pursuit of power led me to a 4.3 vortec swap, using (another want ad procured part) brand new crate motor. The engine was dressed with edelbrock TES headers, intake manifold and 500cfm carb, cam and high comp pistons and an msd ignition system. I rebuilt a th700r4 tranny with b&m internals set up for full manual control and adapted it to the truck with downey's kit. The suspension and steering needed a little freshening to hang with the newfound power so I went to town on it, I replaced all the bushings with an energy suspension kit and threw on some bilstein sport dampers, I replaced the rubber steering isolators with some billet 7075 to improve steering feel and refit the factory 4 pot calipers with goodridge lines and hawk pads. I replaced the rear leaves with custom (softer) ferrara spring works ones to focus the rear on keeping the tire on the road rather than load carrying. I played with sways of several configurations (hard rear/ hard front, hard front/ no rear, hard rear soft front, and finally no rear/ no front) finally settling on no rear/ no front, which was the most neutral. At this time I also decided new rubber was in order so I searched the want ads once again, finding some borbet cws with very nice 31/10.50/15 bf ATs on them. A little more dry storage as well as imagined aero improvement from a tonneau cover came from covercraft. I swapped on the sleeker '93 style front end with some hella vision plus e codes and made a custom light bar for the front. It was a fun little truck in this state of tune and I drove it in a manner that would horrify any sane person.
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The truck is still in my possession and is currently in the process of receiving an independent rear suspension with unequal length control arms and 13" of travel front and rear as well as a new driveline that is more appropriate for a toyota (build thread coming soon) 
carbon wrote: The truck is still in my possession and is currently in the process of receiving an independent rear suspension with unequal length control arms and 13" of travel front and rear as well as a new driveline that is more appropriate for a toyota (build thread coming soon)
Your truck is awesome, it reminds me of the black one from Back to the Future.
My first car was a Plymouth Laser with a 4G63 turbo engine, I raced everything I could find and it led me into a life of cars and racing, that engine was bullet proof for the 8 years that I beat on it eventually running 12.7 with it.
First car: 1971 Mercury Comet. Fire breathing 170 ci straight 6, 3 spd automatic. Power nothing (maybe brakes).
Cost: a whopping $150 back in 1988.
It was the first car I installed a stereo in (cheapest cassette deck and 6x9's I could get from Pep Boys).
I drove the car for about 6 months until the inspection was due, we took it to our family mechanic and he failed it due to shock-tower rust, handing the keys back to me saying, "I wouldn't go over 45 mph when you drive home. You could hit a pot hole and end up with no front wheels..."
Shortly after that, I got my Subaru 4WD wagon. The Comet was unceremoniously towed away.
My first car was a hand me down 70 superbee with a 383 and automatic. My Dad took over payments from a friend who brought it new but couldn't afford it. My Mom drove it to work for 12 years or so. Then my two older brothers had there turn. I took my drivers test in it . Had it two weeks before I had the keys taken away for doing 130 mph or something?
I had an uncle who thought he was the fifth Beetle. He had a 1969 GT6+ that he parked in my grandparents garage around 1976 or 1977. When I turned 14 I started begging for the car. It took about a year and a half but I finally won. At that point it was just parked and untouched for 7 years. When I wasn't working or in school I would sneak over there and work on it without my parents knowing. By the time I turned 16 it moved under its own power. I drove it to the gas station I worked at and they helped me with the rest. I drove it through high school until one night I lost the rear breaks and slid under a 1981 regal. I parked it back in the garage until I sold it last year. That was a fun car I would love to get another some day.
I started off driving a 1995 Taurus. It was a hand me down from my parents and the transmission slipped every time I would accelerate around a corner, so I never did anything mechanically to it other than pop the air filter lid off sometimes to make it sound better. Indiana has tons of corn fields divided up by gravel roads, so I spent a ton of time cranking the old boat sideways with the e-brake locked and avoiding DNR officers and farmers and learned a lot about car control out there... And occasionally about the fairer sex...
Anyway, the transmission was junk in it. One time I was hanging out at a popular spot for live music and an 03-04 Cobra power shifted when it went by and it barked second, which to a teenager in the 200x's without much exposure to muscle cars, was mind blowing. I went to leave a bit later in the Tear-ass and when I went to pull out, the transmission slipped out of gear. Instead of letting out while the tranny decide whether or not it wanted to have any meaning in life like I normally would, I kept my foot down. The RPM's shot up right when it decided to go into gear, resulting in a beautiful one tire fire around 15 mph. I don't know if anyone watching cared, but my friend and I had a good laugh about how the little Taurus that could and its little AXOD that couldn't tried to show a Mustang up.
This was several years ago. The transmission still hasn't been out of the car and my sister has been driving it just fine. I'd secretly like to buy it and do a junkyard SHO/MTX swap to it but other projects and better judgment tell me to just let it remain a fond memory and a lesson to stay away from slushboxes.
1991 Mercury Capri. That I picked over a 1985 MR2 for the same money 
because it was a convertable and sorta had a back seat with a good sized trunk. The car guy in me wants to go back and kick myself hard for that one, but I have good memories from that wouldn't not have been possible in the much smaller interior of the MR2.
It really wasn't a bad car, but it had a lot of little mechanical crap wrong with it and I didn't know how or have the money to fix any of it. The roof leaked in the rain, it liked to stop running randomly, and the brakes were soft, but the top came off and it drove kinda well and really that's all that mattered. I miss it occasionally, especially when I see one on the road.
I was an obnoxious kid, asking for money to buy a car from the time I could talk. By the time I was 9, I had $500 in a bank account that was burning a hole in the pockets of my toughskins. I found a 63 Austin Healey Sprite with transmission problems. Dad agreed to go have a look. It was the color and texture of an orange-via a poor recent respray. The guy got my $500, and we hooked up the towbar. Upon getting it home, Dad jammed the gear shifter with his palm, and it magically popped out of the two gears the previous owner believed it to be stuck in. We had 948 raging cc's of sports car on our hands. I was promptly taught to drive with a huge pillow at my back, and Mom stitched up some beautiful fake leather seat covers using twine as piping. One of my fondest memories is of my father tying his ever present bandanna around his head while approaching a 90 degree blind corner on our dirt road. I was instructed to take the wheel, and as Dad hit the gas, the rear swung around. I was counter steering like a pro in an instant. The instincts we had honed on the dirt bikes were paying off. I ended up selling that car at 12, due to circumstances beyond my control, never having driven it legally, but the story is one that always brings with it a smile
Cody_D wrote:carbon wrote: The truck is still in my possession and is currently in the process of receiving an independent rear suspension with unequal length control arms and 13" of travel front and rear as well as a new driveline that is more appropriate for a toyota (build thread coming soon)Your truck is awesome, it reminds me of the black one from Back to the Future. My first car was a Plymouth Laser with a 4G63 turbo engine, I raced everything I could find and it led me into a life of cars and racing, that engine was bullet proof for the 8 years that I beat on it eventually running 12.7 with it.
Thanks man!
I like that body style dsm a lot. The world was lucky I didn't have a 12 sec 1g for a first car!
83 F100 with a 390 in it. Truck was fast enough to go through 30 gallons of fuel in 30 miles. Man I loved that thing.
Mine was a 65 mustang coupe with the raging 3.3L with less HP than a modern accent. I got it when I was 14 and we did a lot of work on it to get it restored. It had 1 option, AC which promptly broke after having it 2 years. My dad wouldn't let me get the car I wanted though, a 1971 442 with a 455 in it.
We went through the motor, rebuilt the transmission, recovered the seats, and repainted the car. It was a really good running car. It was a 3 speed with the non-syncro first gear.
I'll never forget the first time I drove it, I broke a motor mount. It was the original to the car and I had never driven an older clutch like that and I had all kinds of issues.....2 blocks away and snap, there it went. I can home and was upset. Never thought I would drive that car.
I eventually did get it.
When I turned 16, We just got back from painting it and were waiting for body gaskets for the backup lights to come in. My dad's rule was I had to pass my drivers test in that car. So I take it to the DMV, and the girl is walking around the car and stops at the back and stops for a long time at the rear of the car. I thought for sure she was going to say nope. She hops in and we literally just go around the block. Boom. I'm a licensed driver.
Drove it for 4 more years till it wasn't practical to have at college and sold it to buy my 1985 mustang GT
Wow, what a clean Truck! +1 on holding onto the thing.
In 1985 I had scraped enough money together from mowing lawns ($875 to be exact) to buy a '77 Chevrolet Monza Spyder. Red. My only question to the seller was in regards to if he thought it was faster than a '65 Mustang. You see, I had lived for 15 years listening to my dad talk about what a quick car his '65 Mustang had been. The seller's response was simply worded "son, it'll walk all over a '65 Mustang" he said. I gave my dad an incredulous look. My dad and I hopped in to give it a test drive, me riding shotgun as I was still a few months shy of that sweet 16th. We headed out a deserted two lane and dad opened it up. It sure seemed quick enough to me. "Does it have more pick-up than your Mustang did dad?" I asked. "Yup" he sheepishly responded. I had to have it. It ostensibly had the 305 SBC. I say ostensibly because it ran way better than it had any right to. Had the tiny little Dual-jet carb which gave incredibly snappy throttle response.
Fast forward a few months to spring. Being consumed with school and athletics I still hadn't gotten around to getting my driver's license. I was old enough, I just hadn't done it. Arriving home on the activity bus after spring football practice on one particularly warm day in April I found myself home alone. Mom and dad had gone out to dinner with friends. There sat the Monza just waiting. I had enough skill by this time to drive fairly well. I had developed a bad habit of sneaking cars out ever since I had been about 14. I had never been caught except for the time I sprayed my grandpa's neighbor's house with gravel while doing a doughnut in his '73 F-250 at Christmas one year. I think dad would have broken my jaw for that one had the whole extended family not been there.
Into the Monza and out on to a nearly deserted stretch of US-60 which is a snake by any standard. I know my snakes too as I've driven all over Sicily, the Dolomites, the Pyrenees, the Peloponnese, and the Andes. I lost it trying to catch up with a fully leather-clad guy on an early sport bike. I got $250 for what was left of it. My father really liked that car. My mom said he cried.
All of us kids learned to drive in the '74 El Camino my dad used to tow his ice racer with. Once we were licensed, we got to use the El Camino until the next kid was ready to learn. At that point, the kid graduating from El Camino Academy was issued a Honda Civic.
My dad bought his first Civic new in 1974. Starting in around 1980 he had a knack for finding non-runner Civics ('73-79, 1200cc non-CVCC), getting them for next to nothing, making them functional and either selling them off or using them as ice racers. This continued into the middle '80s. He had a '78 hatchback with no engine and it was destined to be an ice racer, but then reconsidered since it was "too good" so it would be mine. He built an engine and I was off and running. I was charged $500 and the terms were $20/week, which I paid by check. If I missed a week he'd taunt me yelling CHECK CHECK CHECK when I came home from school.
These Civics were perfect for young drivers. They handled well, got great mileage, and were slow enough to keep young racer wanna-bes from getting in trouble. Mine was loud, since it still had its straight pipe exhaust from its almost-race-car prep. And while it started out brown, we painted it '73 Corvette yellow which I thought was just awesome.
But Hondas rust, and in Massachusetts they're temporary possessions. I think I got two years out of the yellow Civic before it started eating front tires at an alarming rate. After going through all my dad's junk tires, he sent me to Sears to have a couple of $20 tires put on. The Sears guys called me into the shop to show me something: a six inch-long crack in the front crossmember. "Drive this home VERY slowly," he said, "and never drive it again." And that's exactly what I did. The car went home and we stripped it down like the rest of the rustbuckets. The good parts went into the stash of spares in the basement and the rest went to the crusher.
It had the wrong front bumper: it was a BIG plastic bumper off a bigger car, sectioned in the middle to fit, and we used turn signals off an older Civic. Me and a buddy used to use that bumper a LOT. We'd go to supermarket parking lots late on Sunday nights hoping they didn't put all the shopping carts away. If one was out loose, I'd line up a hundred feet or so behind it and hit it at 30 MPH or so and see how far we could make it roll. Good times.
You guys all had way cooler cars than me. Mine was a hand me down (thanks grandma!) 1975 Mercury Monarch. Stuck me with an American boat that didn't even have the decency of having a V8 in it, only a pathetic V6. Loose power steering, but manual brakes.
No redeeming qualities at all, other than I did fit my entire water polo team and our gear in it. 14 guys and 28 backpacks, hit a bump and the back bumper bounced off the road.
No nostalgia about that car at all, no desire to go find one and build it. Ever.
1975 Duster with a 250 slant 6, and a 3spd manual transmission. Grey paint with a classy red interior. I bought it when i turned 16 for $400 dollars back in 1998. I taught myself how to drive a stick in a gravel lot where i had the owner meet me when i bought it.
It had shackles on the rear with tall studded tires, and was raked like a Funny Car. Sandbags made it sit close to level and do suprisingly well in the snow. My High School girlfriend thought it was cool that me and Happy Gilmore had the same car.
How about the "almost" first car? Would have been a '74 Datsun Z just restored, in 1985 while just starting in the Navy. If the bank would have given the loan for that, instead of the '77 Grand Prix, just think where I might have gone with sports cars vs crappy American psuedo "muscle" like the two '84 Camaros.
I can recall two almost-first cars. One was a '72 or 73 Mustang "Grande" that was sitting and rotting in a family friend's backyard. It was gold with matching vinyl top and actually didn't look too bad from the outside, but underneath it was all rotten and it didn't run.
The other one I was really burning for even though I never saw it in person. One of dad's friends was about to retire his Showroom Stock C 1984 Civic S in favor of a new Civic Si. I wanted that retired racer. How cool would it be to show up at school in a car with a full cage? I even explained to my dad that it was probably already pre-dinged, perfect for a newish driver who will probably make some mistakes here and there. But the plan never materialized and I was quite disappointed.
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