I purchased this 1991 Honda Civic Si Hatchback from a friend of mine who thought the motor was "blown up". We towed the car back to my house where it sat for a few weeks. The car was in decent shape and I primarily bought it because the interior was clean. The rear quarters were rusted out, front bumper smashed up and dented, rear bumper rusted away, and hood pins were holding the hood down.
I spent some dollars at Advance Auto and Pep Boy's to fix the problems after i diagnosed the issues for not running. Here's what I did:
$130 in parts and about 3-4hrs of working on it. Here's why it did not run:
Pictures:
Now I started to drive the car since I was preparing to sell my 1996 Tacoma. I needed to fix the hood latch issue. I purchased an upper radiator support and hood latch mechanism off of eBay for $25 and a hood for $8. I also bought some ricey clear corners and turn signals from eBay since mine were all broken - $20.
I ordered my new tires and suspension from Tire Rack: Koni Red Adjustable Shocks, H&R Sport Springs, Ingalls Camber Kit f/r, KYB shock boots and strut bushings. I also made a short shifter that swings away from the driver's knee and installed it - free. Bought a cheap Alpine CD player and some poly strut rod bushings to eliminate the slop in the front-end.
I got some vacation time so I decided to install the suspension on the car. I discovered the previous owner had cut the springs on the shocks and done a poor job of them; 2 of the springs were climbing off of the struts. I also broke 5 bolts disassembling the rear suspension and had to destroy 3 bushings on the LCAs. This entire project took about 5 weeks of cutting, grinding, and ordering/waiting for new bushings. After all was done I just eyeballed the alignment since I was not concerned with the tires on the vehicle at the time.
I have been working on cleaning up a set of 1990 CRX Si wheels that I got for free. They were in poor shape and needed work. I soaked them a couple times with Aircraft Stripper to remove the paint. Then I sand blasted the remaining paint off of the wheels. 80 and 120 grit sandpaper and Scotchbrite pads were used to prep the surface and I coated each wheel with roughly 20 coats of Duplicolor Graphite Wheel Paint and 10 coats of Clear Coat. I should've used the Duplicolor Clear since the Krylone I used had a chemical reaction with parts of the wheels; oh well, they look good from 10' away. I'll mount the tires soon and get the car aligned next.
I also had a CRX front bumper laying around and since i could not get it to mount to the Civic I cut off the bottom 5" of it and attached it to the stock chin spoiler with small bolts and washers. And since i removed the fart pipe from the car earlier, I replaced the entire exhaust, cat-back, with a 2.25" pipe into a Dynomax Turbo muffler from Jeg's ($35 for the muffler and $100 from Roadmaster Automotive for the install).
TOTAL INVESTED INTO THE CAR TO DATE: $1879.00
I mounted the finished wheels and tires today and took them to Matt's Alignment (317 634-3379). $59 later and the car handles nicely. Matt's also did the alignment to our '99 C5 and took it to '01 Z06 specs. Great people and excellent service. They work on lowered and modified vehicles and have an alignment pit; so if your car is too low for a rack they can use the pit.