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Old Jun 13, 2003 | 11:17 PM
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DelSolSIinMD's Avatar
DelSolSIinMD
Le Grand Illusion
 
Joined: Oct 2002
Posts: 1,180
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From: Damascus, MD
Default Have you ever driven an Eclipse GS-T?

I did the other day, and it was a spyder, too. Belonged to an old friend who got his license suspended a while ago for not paying to renew his tags; been down on his luck fiscally.

Anyway, a cop caught him on the old tags and told him he needed to have a friend drive him home, and that he better not drive it anymore before fixing the registration issue. So I was picked as the lucky friend...

Quick note: this car is a spaceship. Altezzas, I'm not even sure what to call the middle section between the altezzas, that was clear also and had little "+" LEDs, short shifter, indiglo shifter, indiglo gauges, full brushed aluminum interior, etc. etc. etc. You get the idea. Absolutely nothing done performance-wise, not even intake. 137k miles. Red, stock rims (!).

So the car had some SERIOUS problems. He said that he had "a bad hub" on his driver's left side and that Eclipse's were notorious for it. So any time I got the car about 3-4K RPMs in 1st or 2nd gear I was rewarded with a very very loud "KHKHKHKHKHKHKHKH" sound... like the sound you make when hocking a loogie or driving without much brake pads left. Metal on metal. LOUD. It wasn't pretty. In fact, at one point, when I hit 5k or 6k in first gear pulling into his neighborhood, we heard this "KHTHUNK" sound, he said "damn, did something just break??" ... who knows what it was, but it wasn't good. He also said it had tons of "lugnut problems"...anyone heard of that?

His shifter was nearly impossible to shift, also. His short shifter was one of those cheap eBay ones that had broken on him, so he had some friend weld it for free for him in their spare time... only it resulted in -tremendous- effort moving the shifter left to right. same with pushing it up or down to engage a gear. It was a real work out.

On the plus side, the car really moved, especially for just being stock. Whenever the little turbo gauge would start pushing up into the "+" territory, the car would really take off, and even though I didn't have too much area to experiment in, it was a whole hell of a lot faster than my D16Z6 Del Sol

Overall, it wasn't bad. I never caught "Eclipse Fever" which made its way through my town about two years ago, when after one of my friends got a '95 GS-T, like 4 or 5 other people (at least) went out and bought one. The spyder I drove was perhaps the last car bought during that craze. His previous car was a nice, clean Acura TL. Before that he had two non-turbo Eclipses, one 2nd Gen auto and one 1st gen stick. I'll try to get some pictures to post this weekend!
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