11.02.20: What's A $500 Used Car Worth? Making Used Cars Good Cars, How About a $500 Honda Civic? Condition & What It Means, Minor VS Major Fixes & Things to Ignore, Rules That'll Get You to Driving

The Gearhead Consultancy would like to assist you in your efforts to find a good used car. More importantly, we're geeks and we're here to help, specifically help you make hay with a $500 pony. This isn't rocket-surgery, kids, it's a few rules like working from the cheapest to most expensive parts, knowing the platform's faults, and knowing when to fix and when to live with it. We'll walk you through a litany of easy fixes that looked like disasters (electrical gremlins - the dreaded power suck, bad brake lights, stupid switches and vaporized valve-cover gaskets). Things you can do yourself: ask a geek, lurk the forums (full of geeks), learn the "knowns" (become a geek).