To mod or not to mod? Your opinion.

I have a 1990 CDM Celica All Trac with 122,000 km (76,000 miles). The body is in good condition with only a small amount of rust and a bit of paint fade on the top of the car, but not very noticeable. The interior is in excellent condition and besides the clutch and an oil leak which I am about to fix, it runs very well and is 100% stock. However, now that I'm tearing into the engine I've got the itch to mod, but I don't know how long I'll be keeping it around before I upgrade to a newer car.

I'm wondering, if I do some slight mods, straight air intake, mbc and exhaust, will this greatly affect the price, up or down?

I'm not sure, the way I see it is that if I go to sell it in 1 year, completely stock, people might like that a lot more so they can build it up the way they want. If they see mods, maybe it's been driven hard right. Any help?????? Should I mod or shouldn't I?

Yip if you are planning to sell it, you will get more for it being completely stock, compared to a mildly modded one.

Just leave it stock and do some maintenance on it

Or if you do end up modding it make sure you keep the factory bits, to put back on when you decide to sell it.

unless the car is truly mint, and this is rare in our world, mod it and have fun with it while you got it. +1 on keeping the OE pieces tho.

^Both of these guys have good points. My opinion is it's a matter of degree.

The traditional wisdom for most cars is that basic mods (intake, exhaust, boost controller) won't generally affect the price. Just keep the stock parts and only do mods that are easily reversible. Major mods can be a plus or minus depending on if you find a buyer who wants those mods. Usually you're going to make more money by putting a modded car back to stock and selling the parts separately.

The kinds of mods that really turn me off a car are the ones that are not easily reversible and/or a pain in the butt to put back to stock. Mostly this is things like moving the battery to the trunk, removing accessories like AC, cruise, power steering etc. Those are fine if you have a dedicated track car (see gtfour77's old posts for a real track car example) but make no sense on a street car.

One of the biggest things you can do to improve resale value is keep the exterior and interior as nice as possible. Repaints and rust work are expensive so a car that has well-maintained paint is worth an easy 1k or more over one that doesn't. Ditto for the interior.

I agree, have fun with it now but if I dump $1k into it and it actually brings the value down, that's a lot of money that I'm losing.

You're talking about modding a 19+ year old car, you would be hard pressed to do any mod that would increase it's value.

-Towels

WarTowels":3jjnkjzi said:

You're talking about modding a 19+ year old car, you would be hard pressed to do any mod that would increase it's value.

-Towels

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ding ding ding.... Guys they are great cool niche cars, however unless you have one of the few out there that is truly exceptional they are not worth that much. just mod it.

I had the same thoughts...should i or shouldnt i?........ and I did.....If you build it they will come.....

97JZA80":urfnrena said:

WarTowels":urfnrena said:

You're talking about modding a 19+ year old car, you would be hard pressed to do any mod that would increase it's value.

-Towels

Click to expand...

ding ding ding.... Guys they are great cool niche cars, however unless you have one of the few out there that is truly exceptional they are not worth that much. just mod it.

Click to expand...

Well, lets think about this for a minute.. no alltrac will likely ever sell for more than say 10k or so due to the niche nature you are talking about... but you can definitely do things to your car that will increase or decrease it's value several thousand dollars either way within that range. Anyone here have several thousand dollars to piss away? If so let me know and I'll send you my paypal info. :smokes:

The decision to mod or not to mod depends on what you bought the car for. If you just bought it to have a little fun then I would leave it alone because it is likely no mod will increase its value more then you paid to do the mod. However if stock is not good enough for you then mod away but realize this money will probably not be recouped. Think of it this way the money you spend modding it will not be recouped but then again you are modding it to make the car more fun not to increase its value.

lumbercis":15w187xc said:

Well, lets think about this for a minute.. no alltrac will likely ever sell for more than say 10k or so due to the niche nature you are talking about... but you can definitely do things to your car that will increase or decrease it's value several thousand dollars either way within that range. Anyone here have several thousand dollars to piss away? If so let me know and I'll send you my paypal info. :smokes:

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Yes, lets. =)

You can definitely do things to your car that will increase it's value. But can you do things to your car that increase it's value beyond the cost it took to make/install/buy the mod? In almost every scenario the answer is no. That's true for pretty much any car and it's especially true for a niche old car.


As others have stated mod it if you want, within reason. Keep the stock parts if you feel that the mod detracts from the value or presentation of the car.

Intake, Boost Controller, and maybe a cat back will liven the car up quite a bit. The jump from 4/5 PSI in first and second to 10-12psi is a huge wake up call.

-Towels

Well basically you usually have to pull the motor to replace the clutch. As soon as you do this you run into a whole bunch of maintenance stuff that you might as well do while the engine is out. Ie.. timing belt, water pump, all the seals, etc... Spending money here should definitely help you sell it if you only keep it a year and document the work done. 77k is a low mileage trac so that and major maintenance done should make it a quick sale for a good price

BoostedBlueToyotas":20238nq8 said:

Well basically you usually have to pull the motor to replace the clutch. As soon as you do this you run into a whole bunch of maintenance stuff that you might as well do while the engine is out. Ie.. timing belt, water pump, all the seals, etc... Spending money here should definitely help you sell it if you only keep it a year and document the work done. 77k is a low mileage trac so that and major maintenance done should make it a quick sale for a good price

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I'll try to replace most of the regular maintenance items. But it is very tempting to mod. I see the toss up though and I think I'll leave it stock. I'm putting a Clutch Masters stage 3 in it so whoever comes after me can have their fun with it.

On the plus side, I'm just tearing into it now and I think i've found the leak. Seems to be coming from the head. Hopefully this is the only one because there's oil everywhere below it so I don't think I'd even be able to spot a leak lower down even if there was one.

If I did it all over again I would do:

MBC 12psi, 2.5" downpipe, proper brake pads, 1" lower springs, new adjustable inserts and a rear sway bar.

Thats it. The suspension is average to begin with but is shot to shit by this age on most cars, it needs replacing for safety as much as performance. I wouldn't even do the front mount again and definitely not the fuel, ecu, turbo kit. Too much money that you will never see again so unless you plan on keeping it forever which I will likely do, not a good move. The suspension mods if done well will possibly increase the value a touch if you are lucky but they shouldn't decrease value and you can always put the stock stuff back in when you sell. There will always be demand for those parts from other people like us.

Since my engine is out I should probably look at replacing the 20+ year old engine mounts. Does anyone have any good/bad advice for the Speed Source poly mounts? Will there be much more vibration over stock once they're installed?

Speed source mounts are good for the front and rear, extra vibration is hardly noticed. Replace the side mounts with oem toyota.

I recommend you try to do some work reconditioning it, if you do mods I recommend you don't do anything that's hard to reverse or permanent. I been looking for a while for the right ST185 within a certain budget because the car is just no clean, the whole Idea I look for in a car is a good representation of what a ST185 used to be, a nice clean car, not necessarily perfect.

I saw one with the battery relocated to the rear. I don't like that because I live in a winter state and sometimes batteries will breathe out fumes. The all trac is a hatch so your sharing your real state with your trunk space, would need special sealed battery so it doesn't leak fumes and they are sometimes expensive and harder to locate than an regular battery. Something happens to the battery I rather it be behind a firewall than behind me.

Other things include ugly body kits, Seen a lot of good looking cars and the whole undercarriage is rotted away. Things that might make it illegal in other states such as completely removed catalyst and some emission equipment.

You can do mods to make more power, just remember if your thinking of selling the car in the future some of the performance stuff will not really scale well to the money invested on it or there's enough of other problems going on to negate any profit to be made, you will prob make more investing in conditioning than performance.

If you remove the engine I'd recommend to maybe replace the clutch if it's old, change seal where trans and motor come together or even replace any seals that you can while your in there. Replace worn hoses, do the timing belt, water pump. Someone buying is gonna take this over a neglected car.

Well I'll probably sell this in the spring to buy an Evo5, just saying.