Banshee365

Hey fellas. I'm a hobbyist mechanic and have wrenched on LS400's quite a bit. Always loved those cars. I found a 1997 ES300 for $700 with a blown head gasket or two. It was overheated apparently. The car seems to be in better than average shape although I don't know the miles yet. It's probably still drivable to test the trans but he said the AC works well and it may be a good car after I replace the gaskets.

Since my labor is free are these old fancy Camry's worth getting at that price to fix up to replace an old Toyota Paseo beater I drove to keep miles off our nicer vehicles?

DRACO A5OG

Hopefully it is only the gasket and not warped heads, that would be costly and you also need to be careful not to over cut it to affect the compression ratio. While you are there I would do the valve seals as they will go pretty soon and burn allot of oil.

I would say Yes, great car, a TANK really if well maintained.

speedkar9

The ES300 is a very nice car. $700 seems like a lot (here in Canada at least) for a ~20 year old ES300 with a blown head gasket. There are fully running ones for sale here for $1000.

And +1 on the warped heads. Most likely if it was overheated, you'll be dealing with warped heads. In that case you might be better off starting with a parts car and swap over the motors.

The 1997-98 is a good model to work on. Its got the same exact motor and transmission as the Camry and Solara which gives you a lot of choices to pull parts from, whereas the 99-01's used a newer transmission and VVT-i engine not found in the Camry / Solara.

Banshee365

I ended up passing on the car. It was a shady used car dealers car and it just didn't work out for me. He wouldn't budge off $700. The interior wasn't very good. The front seats were grey and the rear were beige. There was a random piece of carpet cut out of the back floor for some reason. The pass front door panel was trashed. Right rear widow regulator didn't work. All of the fuses were robbed out of it. The battery terminals were literally cut off insulation and clamped into generic terminals. The rad fans ran any time the key was on. The front right window poked out of its top track. The spare was in place of a missing alloy wheel. There was straight water in the cooling system. The radio display was totally oxidized over. The hood scraped both fenders as it went down. I'm sure that's not all of it.

They told me to not even bother low balling them so I said well I better not say anything. It was worth free to me, that's about it.

mmatheny

Good decision!

speedkar9

Wow that car sounds like trash.

I'm pretty sure he bought it for next to nothing being a dealer and will probably make $100 off of it selling it to a scrapper. Look out for it at your local scrapyard in a few weeks lol