Thinking of buying a 2000 Esteem. Need input.

[silver]

I bought mine 98 for driving school purpose, It really is the most reliable car i have ever owned. Running 8 to 9 hours everyday , six days a week. never let me down.

Bought it with 155,000km. Now it has 230,000km.

Most important, you need to start with a well maintianed car to begin with and keep up with maintainece. Very well engineered car these suzuki esteem.

[sd_read]

Well, I guess I find that trying to merge on to the highway it doesn't seem to accelerate well enough.

This car replaced a 1994 Mazda 626 with just short of 400,000 Km and I clearly remember the reduced power when I got the Suzuki.

It is interesting to hear about maintenance as mine has been very good including an original exhaust system.

[sblrog]

Hi sd. Is yours automatic. If so, turn off the overdrive when trying to merge. It will help tremendously.

[sd_read]

No it is a standard.

Today I tried the down shift thingy and realize the problem is that shifting from fith to forth is useless. The car is just as gutless in fourth as fith. So I have to shift to third where I do get power but it is noisey, and dropping down two gears is jerky.

This car has been like this since I bought it new. Why do I keep driving it?

1) I haven't had any car payments for at least 6 or 7 years.
2) It gets good mileage.
3) It has required little maintenance and has never left me stranded.

The other point is that by gutless I am not complaining I am simply stating how I feel about it.

I will buy gutless again if it gives me good mileage.

[Jim2000]

SD, Its was good to get the truth out, I understand that you feel diffferent and now have said what you should have. Let you know a secret to get better output and performance out of the four bangers.

First add Slick 50 to your engine oil when changing your oil, use synthetic oil, increase air flow by changing the air filtre and cleaning them frequently, better that you change to K&N and yes use a premium quality spark plugs.

I have driven suzuki swift 1.3 and I took it neck and neck with the big V8s and that guy wash eating my dust ( I had four adults in the car).

Remember the machine can only do what the driver wants it to do, so take care of small things and this car can do things you will not believe, I have seen Suzuki pickups do things that the american trucks owners cannot even think of doing and they last for 20+ years.

If you in Toronto area may be we can meet and see why you having the pickup problem.

[sd_read]

Thanks for the offer Jim but I am not that concerned as it is an old car.

To me spending money on Slick 50 defeats my purpose. When I talk about good mileage what I am really saying is cheap to drive.

Even though I change the oil and filter every 5,000 Km. I use the cheapest oil and I put in the cheapest gas.

Also, I recently I bought good Spark plugs (I forget what they are) and air filter. In fact, this is the second air filter I have ever put on this car. When I realised that I figured a new filter would surely show an improvement in mileage but... no change.

After that I changed the plug wires as they were original and I think that did help my mileage somewhat. My last tank was 43 MPG. I used to get closer to 46 this time of year.

As I think about it there is probably nothing wrong with the car and the lower mileage is because I can't shift properly because the second gear syncromesh is buggered.

[jim_naisium]

I'm sure some people have had good results with Slick-50 and other such products but when I was taking automotive in college we built a Chevy 307 V8 (somewhere around a 5.1 liter) out of spare parts that were either in the junk pile behind the shop or people were willing to donate.

We had two goals, # 1 was to watch an engine blow up at over 4,000 rpms the other was to test how long Slick-50 would protect engine that had a catastrophic oil failure.

A quick release plug was put where the oil plug went, we fired up the engine and let it warm up then full throttled it after a few minutes someone pulled the plug and all the oil came out, a minute later smoke started billowing out of every hole it could find, a minute and 34 seconds after the plug was pulled instead of blowing up the engine chugged to a halt and seized, a day later it would turn over but refused to start.

After tearing the engine down it was found that Slick-50 did nothing, the two center crank shaft bearings had liquefied under the heat and had deep gouges in them and had turned rainbow colored, and the sides of the pistons were badly scraped and looked like someone had used 36 grit sand paper on them.

So from my experiences I don't believe in Slick-50 or some of the other additives that are out there I just change the oil and filter when they need it.

[Jim2000]

Jim Naisium

I am a bit confused now, once you put together an engine from the junk, was it calibrated to be within the prescribed limits, from what I read is that the engine was put together without calibrations to what the conditions of varrious parts, as such the bearing could be too tight or the other too loose.
hence the experiment you conducted cannot be considered as any good.

Furthermore, after adding the Slick 50 did you run the engine for atleast 100 hours so that the engine gets time to get the treatment, if not that you cannot blame the product. I have tested this product and have found it that it does provide the slipperyness to make the engine smoother, cold cranking easier in extreme cold and reduce heat in extremely hot temperatures. I am talking of over 52 degrees centigrade in desert area.

On the other hand I had a inspection value problem in my car, it used to get frozen and the only way to get it working was to get the car interior hot so that the frozen valve gets released, this made the airconditioning useless, changes four valve to no effect, I used Slick 50 (One cap full) and never that the problem again, this proved that even at freezing temperature the valve kept working.

These two things got my attention and trust in this product.

One more thing We put the product in a 3 cylinder engine which viberate like hell, the engine after getting treatment of Slick 50 became very smooth and the vibration nearly disappeared. Not only this one guy used the old motor oil (with Slick 50) which had run in my engine for 5000 km, and he told me that his car engine became smoother and less noiseier that before.

All these are personal experiences.