What would you do Veeky Forums?

Actually, haggling works most of the time if the seller is desperate. You just need to sound reasonable.

Service records on a 130k mile Ranger. Whoop de fuckin do.

Oil Change
Oil Change
Oil Change
Oil Change
Oil Change
Trans Fluid
Oil Change
Oil Change
Spark Plugs
Oil Change
Oil Change
Brake Pads

So you prefer a truck with no record of it getting done or done irregularly?

As long as everything looks OK and in decent shape, I'm not paying extra because PO got dealership raped every 3k.

The record is your own visual inspection of the vehicle. Does it look maintained? Is everything in good condition? What sound does the engine make? plug in your scantool and check for codes.

It should be pretty easy to tell if the vehicle was taken care of or not. Even with a dealer record, the driver could have been a blonde and beat the shit out of it.

That's because they routinely sold more of them, Toyota doesn't do fleet sales and the S10 was disconnected in 2004 and even in the personal vehicle market the Ranger outsold the Tacoma by a factor of 2/1 pretty much every year, that scarcity is also part of why Tacos are decently more expensive than Rangers.

Actually try to haggle, most people post a price 20% above what they'd be willing to sell for in anticipation of people haggling you'd be surprised what a wad of cold hard cash does to most people.

5k for a clean ranger with 130k is a good deal. fuck off poorfag.

It's not, I got my Taco with less mileage for 3k, you just need to become the Jew.

it's probably older or in worse shape or you just got lucky with a desperate seller.

My current Ranger has 234k miles on it and has only required basic maintenance. The transmission is still going strong as well. Current issue is staving off the damn rust lol

This. My dad's has 231k miles on it. It's needed suspension rebuilt and a couple pinion seals and steering rack. We've had it since 40k miles and the engine and transmission have never been opened. Original clutch too but it's starting to grab high.

True, it's a 97 that I bought from older guy who's arthritis and dementia had progressed to the point where he no longer felt comfortable driving, but age isn't much of an issue, anything in the early 90s to mid 2000s is perfect, any older and you run into reliability issues and any younger you have tons of unnecessarily electronics to break, engine reliability was pretty much solved in the 80s and modern FEA has allowed car manufactures to cut corners that they would have just had to overbuild for in the past, with cars of that age you pretty much only need to watch out with high mileage, rust, and neglect.

Mine's at 194k, and I had to change the clutch slave at 185k, clutch disc still looked good. That was by far the biggest thing I've had to do since purchased with 85k on it. The rust will get it before the drivetrain goes bad.

What engine do you have

Presumably not the 4.0L SOHC since they tend to develop significant timing chain issues past 150k MI that kills many of them, other than that I've heard most of the engine offerings are pretty solid, but then again what do I know I'm only a Taco guy.

2.3 Lima. Slow, but reliable.

Off topic: how do you fuckers know all this? How do you know that this specific engine has this specific problem? How do I reach your power level? Do you just read a lot and mess with cars? Teach me.

>Do you just read a lot and mess with cars?

idk about the rest of these guys but heres how i got to where i am

>buy first shitbox
>when something breaks or is abnormal i look that shit up on the internet
>which invariably takes you to some forums
>where you talk to other dudes who have your exact same car
>who will casually mention "oh yeah nigga, watch out for that"
>rinse repeat with another shitbox once the first one becomes too overwhelming to fix yourself.

Read Ford Ranger forums

That guy is telling truth

Eh, my frame of knowledge is really only general stuff for anything outside of small trucks, and even then I only know some specific things about the Ranger but I could sperg for several hours on the Taco since I own one and did more research than I needed to when I bought it.

It basically boils down to if you work on your own car and care about preventative maintenance you eventually pick up tons of information on the side I'm, assuming that this is your first car so just give it time you'll eventually know more than you really need to, just think of your first car as a learning experience and keep it cheap, you'll have a better understanding of things once your looking at your second.

here's a good rule of thumb. spend 3x as much time studying a repair procedure than the procedure actually takes. you'll understand when things take longer than you think.

so all of you are complaining about rust -- how do you stop that from eventually taking your car? Clear coat the under carriage and make sure the body paint stays clean? I just bought an older f150 and the under carriage is pretty damn rusty, so any advice would be superb because I'll likely suffer from the same problems.

Nigga, I see more Tacomas (15+ years old) here than I see Rangers. I live in South Oklahoma and they're everywhere.

And no shit there's going to be more Ferd Rangers on the road because they sold more of those than the other two you mentioned.

If you live somewhere that sees salt on the roads frequently your fighting a loosing battle, I've heard of some people ,(and my grandfather from Michigan swears by it), spraying used motor oil onto their underside at the start of winter with a paint gun, It's really messy and generally a pita to do but it apparently works well, it gets into places that regular undercoating wouldn't flow into.

If you live somewhere that only sees snow occasionally you can get the body sprayed with a rubberized undercoating that works pretty well or you can try using something like POR-15 to paint the frame, the big issue is that if you have rust that's already started there's pretty much nothing you can do except for cutting/grinding it out and then coating, if you coat overtop of it you run the risk of it just keeping on underneath the coating where you can't see it, and keep in mind with any coating if it gets scratched you'll see rust start to develop there.

With Tacos the rust problem is a design issue that's specific to the frame manufacturer and they all rust out in the same place first so it's easy to check, with other trucks you have to really go over the entire thing to see if you have any issues.

well fuck my ass. the entire undercarriage is basically covered in a coat of rust. grinding all that off is too much for me to undertake.

Post a pic. A light brown frame isnt the end, its expected on any older vehicle.

If it's just surface rust that's not too much of an issue, just tap over the frame with a ball peen hammer and you can hear if the rust has penetrated deeply, it will sound kind of dull compared to a metallic ping or in a worst case scenario it will break through.

If you do have serious frame rot it's possible to grind out the area and weld on a patch but that's pretty sketchy and probably not legal everywhere.

I'll get around to snagging a photo tomorrow, done enough of crawling around on the floor of my garage for one day.