Welcome to the forum. There's a wealth of Capri info here.
Your car is worth about $2000, give or take a $100 so you done well. I see them on Craigslist all the time from $500 to $4000 from that greedy sucker, lol.
It's a great first car. With 100hp and no turbo he isn't winning any races any time soon. Maybe MPG is all he'll win, lol. It's a great highway car and like where I live in the mountains it's fun.
We have threads on the headlight motors. Easy fix if you are any bit mechanically inclined. It requires removing the motors and cleaning up the copper contacts and regreasing the gears. The ones I've seen the brushes are hardly worn. Just some freshening up and they will work like new. There's a few other rarer repairs but we can get to that if necessary. It's nothing a home mechanic can't handle.
The oil you sound about right. Probably the oil pan gasket. This car it's possible to drop the oil pan with the engine still in place.
The car has a DOHC aluminum head. If the car overheats the head warps easily. That said I would make sure the cooling system is in check. Make sure all the cooling hoses are in good shape. Make sure the cooling fan comes on properly at operating temperature which OEM on this car is 192°. The fan should cycle on and off at that temp. If you notice you'll see a hard pipe running under the exhaust manifold and running behind the engine. This is a bypass coolant pipe which allows coolant to flow to other non- block parts when the thermostat is closed. On the back side of the engine you'll see a few little hoses coming off of it. Pay close attention to them hoses as they are the ones that lacked maintenance. They are easily overlooked as a couple are hidden. The one that got me is the little hose about under the distributor shaped in a 90. ID is like a 1/4". OD maybe 3/8". That particular hose is still available on RockAuto.com which is a great place for Capri parts. Advance is limited but there are great discount codes available for 30%+. We post some RockAuto codes for 5% which can cover shipping. There's a few other online sites and of course your down the street parts stores but parts are challenging to find on some. The hard to find hoses can be improvised from newer styles with a little trimming. The upper radiator hose, heater hose and that little bypass hose is readily available.
Around 100,000 if not done you are due for a timing belt which is another fun job. Since timing belt pulleys mount to the water pump it might be a good time for that.
Hmmm, lol, the engine bay electrical connections are a poor design and prone to moisture and corrosion. I would clean all your ground strap connections and use dielectric grease on all the plugins. People have experienced weird things when raining and that's usually the cause.
The oil gauge is known to be erratic which mine was. I read to clean the ground strap by the passenger strut tower. It helped but didn't fix it all the way. Only when I changed my head gasket I found a little hole feeding the oil pressure switch. I cleaned it out and cleaned the pressure switch. After that my gauge has worked great.
One last thing for now... The repair manual is expensive. This guy has an online pdf copy but he is getting ready to shut his site down so you better download while you can. The 1991 manual is the most thorough.
http://techcapri.home.comcast.net/~techcapri/
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Topic: capri done f'd up the driveway and whats up with the lights. (Read 3046 times)