Before the pearl S13 there was a pearl S14.  At the time, I tried to convince myself to do a Navan build because no clean hatchbacks within my price range existed. The car was originally my father’s and when he lost interest,  I gladly took it off his hands.

The funny thing is that this S14 helped me obtain the hatchback I have now.

The story starts one Saturday morning after receiving a call from my dad asking to take him to pick up a car he considered buying. We pull up to the house and an older woman comes out, opens the garage and there sits a pearl white 1995 240SX, clean as hell. She said the car kept running hot and the gas tank had a leak near the top so it could only hold a little fuel and she wanted it gone. We removed the thermostat in her driveway, my dad drives the car to get gas and then home.

Later that day, I find a gas tank on Craigslist and headed out to pick it up. The seller recently hit a deer, destroying his S15 front-end conversion, so he decided to part the car out. After arriving, we chat it up a bit, and it turns out that he was a potential buyer of the 240 that my dad just bought. I say to him “small world” not realizing that he and I would meet a few more times down the road.

About 2 years go by and both our 240’s are just sitting. I had no plans to move forward with the 89 because I wanted a cleaner car to start with. I think my dad just bought the S14 because I bought one lol. Why we both are into 240’s goes back to 2003, another story another time.  Regardless, he said it was mine if I wanted it, so I took it in to get the gas tank replaced and a tune up. I drove it the entire summer and later bumped into the guy that sold me the gas tank. He was driving a white hatchback and said that he would trade it for the S14 on the spot. I would’ve said yes, but that hatch wasn’t as clean as I wanted it to be. Another year goes by and the timing chain caused the S14 to get parked again.

One night I was browsing craigslist just to see what was out there and I come across a clean stock white hatchback. It was late at night so I emailed the seller asap and began adding the phone number to my contacts and as i added the 5 digit a contact name comes up, It was the same guy that sold me the gas tank, but this hatchback was different than the one I saw a few years ago. This was the third encounter we had about these cars and in this case, the third time was definitely a charm because one pearl S14 was traded for one pearl S13 and all was good in the world.