smaggs

After a long search, I finally came across an IS300 that fit all my requirements....5 speed, one of the colors i wanted, relatively low mileage, good condition!

It's an '02 GGP. It already has TTE coilovers and exhaust installed which is nice. The previous owner was just a middle aged guy that didn't really know what was installed and didn't drive it hard at all so that was a nice bonus when i found out.

A nice upgrade from my Acura, here's the two together before I sold the old car...









First mods to the car were replacing the brakes and some bulbs. I got some Mountain rotors and Akebono pads for the car. Hadn't used either brand before and so far I got no complaints. No heavy driving yet so i can't comment on them under pressure but for daily driving they're great.




Picked up some headrests for the seats at one the local mall-autoparts stores:




They were a bit boring as is so brought my hidden sewing skills and threw some L patches on them:




Kind of awkward to get a decent photo of them in the car...




That's all on the car for now. I'm still selling a few parts from my old car to free up garage room and add some cash to the car mod pot so until then, nothing too crazy happening. I've jumped ship from my Honda past so I'm still familiarizing myself with the Toyota/Lexus community and common vendors. If all goes well, will try to get cosmetics and wheels done this year and then look at some performance mods next year.

Any comments as to the go-to vendors is appreciated... I got a pretty good list building up. I'm also trying to find a duckbill style trunk spoiler that molds to the trunk but cant seem to find anything for our car. Does anyone know of one? It seems there's lots for ISx50's but not for ours. Example of what I want:

orangete27

nice to see that you got found what your looking for. enjoy it.

Meatball

While you were shopping for this car, what were some of the issues you looked for? I am starting the process of researching the IS300, and want to know where the problem areas are.

MIS300

Somewhere I read that the 2jz's are not very forgiving when it comes to cooling issues. I'm sure if you find a car that you're really interested in, you could take it to a trusted mechanic (or convince the owner to let you do it yourself) and run a compression test and cooling system check.

I have an 01 for sale right now that I just replaced the engine and trans on because the previous owner ran it hot and destroyed the engine. Apparently, they took it to a shop because the guage wasn't reading the temperature. The shop replaced the radiator with a new, Toyota unit and the bottom end tank blew out on the way home. The radiator is the transmission fluid cooler as well and burned the fluid in it. It is possible that the engine ran hot for other reasons and over pressurized the radiator, causing it to blow out, but my head hurts when I start thinking that hard.

Meatball

Do the manual trans. cars run a trans cooler as well? And if so, is it also plumbed through the radiator?

I am very familiar with Toyota 4Runners, especially the 3.4 L V6 that I swapped into my '91. I know that the '96-02 4Runners ran a trans cooler in the radiator and that was not the brightest move for Yota, and a lot of guys re-route it to a separate cooler to keep the systems apart.

I'm not afraid of getting my knuckles scraped working on a car. I'm just looking for what might be detrimental issues that would be a sign to walk away from the car.

smaggs

I just googled 'is300 common issues' and just gathered a few similarities between various threads to look at on the cars. I put a lot of trust in my mechanic though and let him give me the final go ahead as he owns a heavily modified is300 himself and is very familiar with them so i'm not sure exactly what he considered the main areas to look at.

I found this thread useful to get a list but as far as what to actually look at, it really depends what you want to consider the main issues: https://www.clublexus.com/forums/is-...-problems.html

Hope that helps!