One More Newbie

[SnowGull]

Hi All!

I'm somewhat the patient type. When I first saw an SC400 in 1992 I figured I would never have the money to own one.

Still not too rich, I recently got a 1996 SC400 with 80k miles on it, few if any winter miles on it, darn near mint condition.

It runs pretty good so far, I'm easing into it, I expected it to be a bit slow off the mark but fine on the highway, a lot like my old 4.6L, 1994 T-Bird actually but a more solid, well built automobile.

I'm also easing into finding about what are the normal qwirks of this car and what are abnormal behaviours.

I have 18 inch wheels on it now and I have the stock mags at home.

I suspect I would get a bit better gas mileage with the stock wheels and rubber though but I'm not in a hurry to switch them around.

So far I have three relatively minor issues bugging me and would appreciate comments on these;

1) Body color is a dark metallic blue, still in pretty good shape since the car was rarely if ever winter driven.

The outside mirrors though have a slightly purplish tinge to them. I wonder if this is due to the fact that they are encased in a plastic shell and that somehow the paint would age differently than the rest of the car. Or, they've simply been replaced and come from another model year which didn't have the exact same dark metallic blue color?

So that's it for question one.

2) A more annoying behaviour is that I can't lock or unlock the doors with the remote key/remote unit . It seems that the remote unit wasn't yet built into the key head in 1996. I put a new battery into the unit, no difference. Also once I get into the car in the morning, I hear what would seem to be doorlock noises acting up but no actual doorlock action. Actually the behavious is somewhat erratic, sometimes I can unlock the passenger door from the driver's side, sometimes I can't. It's a bit weird. I end up unlocking the passenger side door manually from the inside most of the time. It does wonders for stretching my abdominal muscles but I could do without it.

3) The radio is Nakamichi and it actually sounds pretty good, except when I try to fade the sound front to back to my liking, I find that only the subwoofer seems to be doing anything in the rear. In other words, if I fade everything to the back, I only hear the subwoofer and maybe 5% of the rest of the audio signal. My thinking is that if the subwoofer is working, then the amp must be OK! But it seems strange that I would have two completely dead rear speakers .

Pretty long winded for such minor issues ...! Imagine when I get to changing the torque converter :)

Anyway, I love this car and actually think I made a pretty good deal on it. Cars take a beating up here in the Great White North with the cold and especially all that salt we spread around, so finding a near mint car is a rare thing indeed.

Any thoughts you may have on these minor issues are most welcome!

[schott1984]

I have the same concern as your question 3 on my 93 SC400. What's up with those speakers?