strongsail

I am a new SC owner, just bought a '93 SC400. Just looking for anyone's thoughts on the concours potential for these cars now that the body style has changed to the SC430. No more production, smaller numbers of really good examples every year from here on out, and so on make me wonder if ther is, or will be (or should be) showings of "perfect" examples of the design -

And I'm certainly not disparaging all the smart, dedicated folks whose posts I read here who are involved in every type of appearance, audio and performance mod to these cars - just wondering if there are folks here as well who are interested in the pursuit of the perfect, original, stock SC.

Your comments would be welcome - -

strongsail

Well, I will reply to my own post to get it to the top again - is the SC destined to be "collectible" or not? Any interest at all here in older models with no mods?

Maybe not.

But hey, that's cool, I am still learning lots about the car here, which is really the point.

lex400sc

I was trying to figure out what you were saying in your first post, but now I think I get it. I'm pretty confident the SCx00 will be a classic in 20-25 years (from it's debut), so give it another 10 years. It's still too modern a design and a relatively common luxo coupe. I don't think Japanese classics will ever share the spotlight with American classics or even European classics as illustrated in the past. No one has posters of Datsuns on their wall. But the Japanese luxury market is very new, so who knows how people will view them when they become vintage.

strongsail

yeah, vintage, that's the word - Pebble Beach Concours and all that - this '93 I just found is a candidate, it's gotta be the cleanest used (excuse me, pre-owned) car I've ever seen and certainly the cleanest one I've ever bought - trying to keep a daily driver this perfect will be an effort -

I'm from Seattle, and this car was probably owned by a neighbor of Bill Gates, and driven to Nordstrom at Bellevue Square once a week, and to the spa in Tucson in the winter, and to the beach house on San Juan Island in the summer - -

I will be blowing through (or at least close to) Pleasanton next week to go to the sailboat show in Oakland - wave if you see me -

strongsail

and speaking of vintage Datsuns, the FairLady and the 240Z are candidates, eh?

strongsail

Or how about a '90 Supra with 550 miles on the clock, preserved and stored since new, for $50K on Ebay?

lex400sc

Strongsail, are you going to be driving to Oakland or sailing there? If you're sailing, be sure to dock at Jack London Square and get some grub there. Expensive, but good stuff. San Francisco across the bay has even classier cuisine. I haven't been able to afford restaurants off the marina for a while now, but I sure do miss it.

How many miles on your '93? I bought my '95 with 47,000 miles on it from a rich old couple in Beverly Hills who only drove it to the grocery store and back. They gave it to their son at UCSF and I got it through my friend's dad who owns a wholesale car shop.

strongsail

Lex400sc, I'm driving - reeeeally looking forward to the southern Oregon section of I-5 on the way down and 101 going home - it will be my first road trip in my new beauty.

The boat show is at Jack London Square! Yeah, it's a beautiful development, and I've had lunch at Scott's, the nice seafood place right at the turnaround. Elegant!

My car is a "sedate" color like yours - mine is "silver spruce metallic" - have a look at my profile for a small pic - it had 83K when I picked it up 2 weeks ago, but it looks more like 8300. Amazing. The original Goodyear spare still has the little nubs on the tread, it's never been on the ground. Ashtray and lighter are virgin. the "spruce" (light blue-gray) leather seats look like they've never been sat in. Virtually no wear on the pedals or steering wheel leather. First time I washed it, I found a total of 6 paint chips - all touched up.

Sounds like your SC was a real find, too. We be the luckiest of the lucky, considering every SC driver is lucky, or smart, or both! I spent a month of hard looking, drove about a dozen cars, and even when they are modified, or less than pristine, they are still just plain amazing, what a ride! Like you said, a classic in the making - - it would be pretty cool, wouldn't it, to love the car and have a blast driving it, and in ten years it's worth more than we paid for it, like with that other SC, the 911 - -

lex400sc

Whoa, that's a cool color SC. I don't think I've ever seen that color. Very marine looking, like a seamist green. I been to Scott's Seafood too. I always get the blackened Mahi Mahi and the raspberry triple fudge brownies when I'm there. Their desserts are divine! You profile says you like home hi-fi too. What kind of system do you have goin' on? Are you a tube/ss guy? Analog/digital? Electrostat? DIY? Tweaker? 2-ch/multi? I saw your post on ground potential difference in the Nakamichi thread

strongsail

Yeah, I had never seen that color either, and haven't seen another one like it since I bought it - I had looked at some nice cars, some dogs (I carfaxed a '95 that I drove in Portland - 7 years old, and it had had 9 owners!) and the minute I saw this one, I knew. Whoom. Just like that. I looked it over, negotiated the price, signed the deal, never started it, no test drive, just gimme the car! I inspect complex stuff for a living, and a half hour with a flashlight told me I had the right car. I carfaxed it, too, of course, and the folks who bought it new from the local dealer had no lien on the title, which means they paid $41K cash for the car in 1993. You know this car had a good home.

Ah, now, regarding hifi - don't get me started - I will show my age here by saying I sold the stuff for a living, for a couple years while going to college, and I was selling the original Bose 901's, the original Advent Dolby cassette deck, and the first Phase Linear 700w power amp. The place I worked before that had a JBL Paragon in the showroom. I finally parted with my Tandberg reel-to-reel tape deck a few years ago, and still have the Thorens turntable with the SME arm and Grace cartridge, but it hasn't been hooked up for a while.

My electronics are mostly NAD, and I am still at the Dolby ProLogic level - I'm not a big movie watcher but love to listen to jazz, and I don't think I need 6.1 digital surround to listen to a quartet recorded live in a small club. My system is biamped, with a 60wpc NAD integrated amp running the front mid/highs through Spendor's version of the BBC LS3/5A studio monitors, and a heavily modded Hafler 220 behind a NAD preamp running a pair of ancient JBL L100's with the high end transducers turned off. My rears are Bose 201's powered by the NEC (yeah, the computer company was in the hifi business for a few years) DSP, which is an AV switcher and is the control center of the system, but the motorized volume control crapped out, getting off my butt to change the volume is such a draaaag - -

I don't use a sub since I live in a wood frame condo and would have the neighbors calling the gendarmes if I had a woofer on the floor - so the Spendors and the JBL's are on sand-filled stands with spiked feet through the carpet - I can kill myself in here and the folks next door don't hear a thing -

You can see why I'm in the elecrical forums on the Nak, eh - I think I have lots of whoopee there in the Nak amp, I just need better speakers - I have a set of four great 4" Bostons that I ripped out of my Peugeot 505 Turbogas (great car, what a sleeper) when I sold it, and I will get a 4-ohm free-air sub and see how it goes - -

SCV8

Welcome to the forum!
I've been wondering the same thing ever since my car was repainted it looks like a candidate for a show,well maybe after replacing a trim part inside,but it's pretty close.
I make the run from South Seattle to Everett on a daily basis(80mi),so a smooth highway car was in order.Bought mine off of Ebay,had to go to Texas to retrieve the car,but was a good deal.
I'd avoid the dealer in Lynwood,unless you have have a lot of forgiveness regarding sloppy work performed at high shop rates.
There's an independant shop in Belltown that comes highly recomended.
Wow,my uncle has a Phase Linear amp that he purchased from the owner of that company many years ago here in the NW.Forget the guys name now,but he had a red 308 I remember.
Did you work for Magnolia HiFi?
I still have my trusty SAE 2300,with a couple home-made speakers.
Have been wondering what kind of upgrades I could do to the "premium sound" setup I have with maybe a Nak amp and an upgraded sub(maybe a Soundstream reference series 10).

strongsail

Hello SCV8! Nice to hear from another Seattle Lexus driver!

Maybe we'll end up competing in a Lexus concours at some point! Are there any meets, cruises, shows, race days, anything similar that you've heard of around here? I used to own an Alfa GTV, and the WA and OR Alfa clubs were great fun - about once a year there would be an Alfa day at SIR, and we could all go out and flog our cars around the track - an absolute blast! We'd often share the cost of the track with the BMW or Porsche club, and I met lots of nice folks.

You commute from south Seattle to Everett - work for Boeing? My sincere condolances on your commute. I work from home and live right downtown, and use my SC in my work (get to put the miles on my expense account, gotta love it) a couple days a week - so I will not be a high-miler, maybe 15K a year, and a lot of that will be trips to Anacortes where I keep my boat.

I've just had my '93 for 2 weeks - still deep in the throes of auto lust here! Bought it from Complete Automotive on Capitol Hill - they're a boutique used car store that specialize in European marques, and they had taken this car in trade on a Range Rover - they normally wholesale all their trades, but this car was so clean they decided to keep it, and I bought it the day after they got it, after watching Ebay for weeks. Seems like the Texas dealers are the big players in these cars on Ebay. You got a good car, eh? Does it have traction? I found that very few of the Texas cars do, and was lucky to find this local car, which has traction and heated seats.

During my search, I stopped by the Fife dealership just once - they had a car listed on Autotrader.com, and when I got there of course they didn't have the car - "give me your card, I will call you if we find what you're looking for." Yeah, right. A month later the listing is still there. Morons. Thanks for the headsup on their service dept. - I can't stand what most dealers want to charge me for routine work! I had my power steering pump resealed at Pacific Rim Automotive up on Stone Way - they seem okay, very clean well-equipped shop and they seem to know the cars pretty well, have a Lexus-trained tech on staff. The one dealer service dept. I have been impressed with is Lexus of Portland, on SW Canyon Dr. in Beaverton. They did an inspection on a car I was looking at in Portland, and I rejected the car based on what they found. I will probably take the car to them for the timing belt. No sales tax either! I'm curious, what's the name of the shop in Belltown? That's close to where I live.

I think the founder of Phase Linear went on to start Carver, but I'm not sure - I know they were both local companies. No, I didn't work at Magnolia, I was in Oregon then and worked at Fred's Sound of Music on Hawthorne in Portland and then at Mac's HiFi in Eugene - this was before Magnolia had started to grow, in the late 60s and early 70s. There I go again, showing my age - -

I have been watching the threads on the stereo system, and I guess you can run the Nak amp with the mid-level "premium" dash unit - but I also read that you must upgrade the power supply wiring to a Nak amp if you upgrade to that (and probably any other high-output amp) - when the amp produces a bass note at a high output level, it will draw gobs of current from the battery/alternator, and wires that are too small will cause enough voltage drop to force the amp to "drop out" for a split second - it's not "clipping" as such, which is usually a result of over-driving the amp into a speaker load - in the enclosed space of a car's cabin, you will normally drive the speakers into severe distortion before you drive the amp into clipping - or bust your eardrums first!

Tell me more about the Soundstream sub - is it a free-air design? From what I have read, the fuel tank prevents an enclosure from being stuffed in under the rear shelf, and the sub that goes in there must be fairly shallow to clear the tank.

I talked to the guys at Magnolia's car audio department on Roosevelt, and they have stopped handling free-air subs because it's too easy to drive them into over-excursion with a high-powered amp, and they got tired of replacing blown-up subs under warranty. They only sell subs designed to go in ported (bandpass) or acoustic suspension (sealed) enclosures.

I found some good info, including model numbers, somewhere on this site regarding free-air 10" subs - you may have already found the same thread. I want to stick with a 4-ohm sub since the amp's power output is rated at 4 ohms - running higher impedance speakers with an amp that doesn't use output transformers won't necessarily hurt the amp unless you push it hard all the time - it will produce less output into, say, an 8 ohm speaker, so will be working harder and will be subject to overheating.

I like my Nak system, it sounds really clean and accurate, but the bass is just thin - so I want to find an efficient sub that will give me better bass at lower volume settings. This car is so quiet, I don't have to crank it up very loud, and good full bass at low levels is a real test of a good quality amplifier. I'm pretty busy and may not get around to it for a while (summer coming, boat projects, etc.) but will post my progress here as I go. I have gotten pretty good with a digital camera since I use one constantly in my work, so will be taking pix of the process as well, and will post them as site bandwidth permits.

Stay safe out there in those 80-mile commutes!

lex400sc

StrongSail, you have a solid audio setup! I have a Denon 3802 receiver running as a preamp to Parasound HCA1000A amplifiers, Energy Veritas 2.2 front speakers, Enerrgy Veritas 2.0c center, Energy RVSS surrounds, Energy Take2.2 surround backs, Boston CR4 front effects, an Energy EXLS12 subwoofer, and a Boston VR2000 subwoofer. I have a Parasound tuner and my CDP is a cheesy Sony SACD player. I think I have too many speakers, I only use them all when watching DVDs or TV, which isn't very often at all.

There is a Hot Import Nights in Seattle coming up and I think Emerald will have her SC400 there. There are plans for a national/regional Club Lexus meet within the year. Most likely it will take place in San Francisco or Los Angeles. It will be huge, you should both show up.

strongsail

You know, during my car search I ran across Emerald - whoa! - now I can't find the site again, can you pass me a link?

And tell me more about this Hot Import Nights clambake - -

I jus' luhv to pahty - -

SCV8

Well the imort show was last night,down by Safeco field,alot of nice cars down there.Saw a grey metalic SC400 there with some real nice seats,rims,subs.
The only dealer I've dealt with is up in Lynwood,won't be back.
Carver's the one alright,nice stuff.
That shop is called" Import Doctors"@2nd& Bell St.,got recommended to him by Denny Aker who had worked on our aircooled cars for years and is big in the vintage race scene also.
My dad has owned a few Alfas(Black early GTV;'71 spiderw/race motor;'65 Guilia racecar) over the years,never took any of them to the track though.I had a '71 sedan myself for a little while.
My friend races with the BMW club with his Ford Contour,wants me to get out there in my prepped Fiero,but he tells me that they can get snobby when you have a fast car that doesn't say BMW on the hood.Still sounds like fun though.