Jess and I are now the proud (hopefully) owners of a 1991 Toyota 4Runner SR5 V6 4WD.
I drove the 40 miles home with Jess following me in the Saturn. It drives well. Feels a lot like my old truck. The shocks are an upgrade from the factory shocks, and I like the stiffness of them. It handles corners well and doesn’t feel too top heavy. Bill, the previous owner, noted numerous times in his records that there is a slight…. difficulty… in shifting from 2nd to 3rd. I felt it too. At a stop, it shifts fine. But under load, it seems like the natural progression of the stick is to go back into 1st… but not quite. So it sort of hits a… notch… without a little to-the-right pressure to get it into third. It feels more like the shift from 4th to 5th than it does a shift from 2nd to 3rd. The air conditioner is a little weak. It feels like it’s cold enough, and makes all the noise like it would be blowing hard… but, not too much air actually comes out. It has bigger tires (31″) than the factory, and the perceived power takes a hit because of it. The same thing happened on my truck when I upgraded the tires to 31″. He gave me a goodie bag full of replacement parts that he had: belts, rings, wiper blades, oil filters, etc.
I was going to ask him if he wouldn’t mind only charging me $250 for the vehicle in exchange for $5000 as an expression of my gratitude. However, he filled out that paper when I was wasn’t looking and so I didn’t get a chance to say anything. However, he left the “amount” field blank. I’m not sure if he did it intentionally or not. He wore glasses for near-sightedness that made it difficult for him to read, so he had to peer over the top of his glasses to see the pages. Additionally, it’s easy to miss the fact that the owner is supposed to fill in that box. He left all of my parts blanks and signed it anyway saying I could fill them out later. Because I wasn’t sure if he did it intentionally as a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell kind of thing, or if he actually forgot, I didn’t mention it to him. So I’m not sure what to do. Should I write $250 in the box as I fill out my parts, or should I call him and ask him what he intended? When he filled out the Bill of Sale that I had brought, he wrote $5,250 in the allocated box. What do you think?