Check for rust - one primary place is behind the trunk carpet on the
sides of the trunk

Skykomish? Is that the place with the big falls? I was there once and
impressed with the old steam trains just sitting there rusting. I gather
they were lumber trains because some were hill-climbers (built at an
angle). Anyway, the tracks are along the road to the falls we were going
to see and they had a name something like that.

Pretty place, but like Philo says, check your trunk area for rust.
That's one damp place. :-)

Get the VIN and run a carfax. Look under the car at the
rocker panels, that's the area under the doors from
wheel to wheel, there's a metal tube about an inch and
a quarter in diameter along each side of the car, Follow
the tubes back and make sure they are not crushed or smashed,
especially back around the rear of the car. This is a common
result of improper jacking by inattentive mechanics.

As mentioned before, check for rust. Fieros have a normal metal
structure under the plastic skin and can rust out.

Get under the driver's side dash and pull the carpet back
from the firewall just behind the clutch pedal, check for
brake fluid, that indicates that the master cylinder needs
replacement.

Check the oil. Do not check coolant by opening the radiator
cap in the front, instead, look in the overflow reservoir.
If that's dry, then remove the thermostat housing cap in
the rear to see if it's got coolant.

Regarding heater cores, for some odd reason that always
comes up this time of the year, don't worry, it's
incredibly easy to change one out. I did mine on my
hour lunchbreak and still had to heat and eat lunch.  :)

Once you get the car, and even if you don't you should
tell the owner this, under the front hood in the middle
of the plastic air box there is a three or four wire
connector that plugs onto a part that's held into the
air box with a couple 7mm screws, that's the resistor
pack for the heater blower fan. Leaves and debris fall
down into the air box and this resistor pack will ignite
those leaves and burn down a car. Removing the two screws
and pulling the resistor pack out allows easy access to
clean out twenty years accumulation of leaves.

In the engine compartment clean out all leaves, especially
any that have accumulated on the forward exhaust manifold
just under the rear window, this has been a source of fires
as well.

Common problems with the motor are relatively few. The
distributor has an O-ring where it enters the block, this
gets old and cracks with age and produces a heck of an oil
leak. They're not hard to replace, use only the tan fluorelastomer
ring from GM or http://www.rodneydickman.com for best life.
The timing chain will last the life of the engine with just
routine oil changes. The rod bearings are perhaps the only
real weak point of the 2.8 V6 engines. If the engine is
well maintain and not abused they will last well over
100k miles, but skip changes and beat on the engine and the
#3 and/or #4 rod bearing will stack and spin, and that means
new engine time. The forward spark plugs are hard to get to
for someone without good spacial visualization skills, so
I've seen 120k mile engines with the original forward
plugs still in place. Yikes!

A good forum for Fieros is http://www.fiero.nl and click
through to the Forums section. You can read without
registering but will need to register to post replys
and new topics. Cliff, the moderator, is a stand-up guy
and does not allow access to his registration database
by anyone under any circumstances.

If you have a basic set of hand tools and some minimal
mechanical aptitude then most problems in a 20 year old
Fiero are easy to repair.

JazzMan

Look up front, right in front of the headlights.  There should be no signs
of warpage in the sheetmetal work.  Now look between the rad, and the
headlights.  You'll see two sheets of metal that go up, and are pinch
welded.  Make sure there's no seperation of the two.

Either of these are signs that the front end has taken a hit.

Not to say it's a "do not buy" sign, but it's a good indicator of the
honesty level of the seller!  Needless to say, don't tell him what you're
looking for first....   :)