1998 Civic Winter Assault Vehicle Build

A few months after rejoining the ranks of GRM, I now have a second project adorning my garage. I discovered that a co-worker had this 98 EX coupe/auto sitting dead at his son's house for about 18 months with no spark. They were planning to scrap it, so foolishly my son and I showed up with a tow dolly and dragged it home behind the Odyssey for $250.

I was envisioning three possible roles for this: winter beater for me, first car for my son, and possible 20xx build. My son just turned 15, and contributed half the buy-in, plus most of the power to move the hulk around.
CL worthy photo just after arrival:

It was 35 and raining/sleeting so we just dumped it in the garage rather than taking nice 'before' pics.

We strategically re-acquired the battery from the Saab resting next to it, and did a few basic tests. Fuel pump works, good compression, no spark in any cylinders. I foolishly figured 'I'll just go drop in a new battery and a CPS, since they're cheap. We'll have it running by this evening.' Wrong-o. Seems that Mr Honda's minions carefully placed the CPS right behind the crank pulley, requiring 90% of the work of a timing belt change to get to it. We of course didn't realize this until after downloading a shop manual PDF. Oh well...
I set Master Mechanic to work pulling stuff off, while I drank beer and ordered stuff online:

We revised our plan of attack to be: change CPS, timing belt, water pump and drive belts cheaply so we don't have to go back in there. After that we'd dive into troubleshooting other no-spark causes.

And then.....

I'd have done the same thing at that price! Didn't Civics have ignitor issues around that time period?

Woody wrote: I'd have done the same thing at that price! Didn't Civics have ignitor issues around that time period?

Yes. Remove the distributor cap and check for the brown dust of death. If you find it replace the distributor. If not replace the ignitor.

LOL I was trying to get a few more things done outside before game time.
No brown dust of death, the coil checks out OK. The ICM test sheet I found lists some wierd colors for ICM wiring, so I need to get into the shop manual pdf for that. Unfortunately, this morning I discovered that the subframe is pretty rusty on the passenger side:

Didn't really want to drop the subframe, but it looks like that may be in the near future. Bummer. Any Hondaphiles seen this before? I didn't spend too much time looking at it, but I'm guessing it shouldn't be driven much.
Short term plan will still be to get it running first then evaluate from there.

Trackmouse wrote: And then.....

NO AND THEN!!!

In reply to XLR99:

Woah, that's crusty!

Is that structural or just surface?

x2 on picking up a junkyard distributor

Lots of surface rust from sitting out; there's rusticles on all the bracketry and suspension arms, but the shell itself looks OK apart from surface rust. In the middle of those two pictures is a hole on the flat bottom plate of the subframe, which you can't see all that well in my cellphone pic. Right around the bend in the sway bar.
It looks like this is all that holds the back half of the lower control arm. Good news is that it's unboltable. This is why the old Saab will remain in the garage until spring, not much worse for a car than Ohio .

bgkast wrote:

Gallon size would be helpful here.

While watching the Browns get spanked by the Buffalonians, I discovered a local junkyard with a 'Southern, No Rust, Bare' subframe. Scope creep begins!

While you're at it, should be cheap to do a suspension refresh. It'll all be laying on the floor anyway, and a better handling car is a safer car for a teenager.

Yes, im encouraging scope creep. Others did it to me. It's a vicious cycle.

That looks alarmingly similar to my Chevette's floors

Dusterbd13 wrote: While you're at it, should be cheap to do a suspension refresh. It'll all be laying on the floor anyway, and a better handling car is a safer car for a teenager. Yes, im encouraging scope creep. Others did it to me. It's a vicious cycle.

Exactly. My OCD will not allow for taking things off without making them right(ish).
I was hoping to get this up and running quickly and cheaply; my goal was sub $1k including a set of snow tires (300 delivered from TireRack).

I've been putting off dropping the subframe on my 9-5 wagon so I could take my time, get it blasted and repaint everything while it's apart. Now I've added a second one to do. At least Civic parts are lighter than Saab ones.

Junkyard_Dog, surprisingly in this case, the floors themselves are good to go; the black hole there is the non-rusted shell above the subframe.

I figure I'll give a brief update on my non-exciting bottom feeder project: Taking a break from the garage to warm up a bit (34 deg inside this morning). The good: new timing belt, water pump and CPS are installed. Everything that has a hex head on it has been soaked down with PB blaster a few times already. Radiator hoses are ready to go in when my son gets home from his friends' house. Haven't test fired it yet due to my incidental finding this morning which got me distracted.

The bad: the alternator is siezed; couldn't turn it with water pump pliers. So it's currently loose inside the engine compartment while I decide how to actually remove it from the car. Looks like I need to pull the driveshaft or at least pop it out of the hub and swing it down?

Cool project.

I worked on a few cars where the driveshaft needed to be removed in order to remove the alternator, 1st gen Probe was one, who the hell thought of that?

Btw, 34 degrees in the garage????!!!! Holy crap! I just jumped in my pool, it's 82 and sunny here in Florida

Nice, rub it in ... I'm glad I have a garage to work in. One of my co-workers was changing tie rods and wheel bearings in his driveway in the rain a few weeks ago, using a tarp over the nose of the car.

I hate having to drop an extra $100, but I'd much rather work on things at a relaxed pace than "It's 10pm and I need to reassemble this to get to work at 6am" mode. One less hard to access item to worry about later.

Nice! Looks just like my old one. I can tell you from experience: Firestone Winterfire snow tires in OEM size (185/65-14?) will be awesome in snow.

Sounds like you're gonna damn near end up with the trans on the floor, might as well swap it for a 5 speed while you're in there.

Subframe rust is pretty common. Trash that thing. I bet your rear one looks pretty nasty, along with the gas tank. Junkyard dive to get all the hard parts you need, then replace every bushing with poly stuff. Makes a big difference and is pretty cheap. Hole saws make the bushing removal work go VERY quickly.

Rear sway bar addition will require you to buy a brace for the rear subframe. With that kind of rust, it WILL tear.

Also, do NOT buy aftermarket rear LCA's. They're garbage.

TLDR: just get it running, throw snow tires on it, and let it return to the earth. That's on it's last leg.

Had one in the shop a couple years ago like that. You could eat off the floorpan, but the subframes were swiss cheese and the brakelines were leaking everywhere. Replacement subframe from Honda wasn't too bad price wise, but southern junkyard will be much cheaper.

Gearhead, this one isn't that dramatic, but yes, something like that. The rear quarters have far less rust than most others I see driving around, but everything steel under the hood looks like it was swapped off the Titanic. Until the spark comes back, it's academic anyway. There's a local subframe supposedly from a southern car nearby, but I cringe at thinking about how much of a battle all those rusty bolts will be. For that reason, Beans' solution has some merit to it. My initial project of changing the timing set and CPS is done, now I'll move on to the distributor side.
I discovered that the alternator will come out the bottom if you pull the alt bracket. Found a supposedly good used one for $25 via ebay.

Time for a quick update - It's alive!! No pictures because it was cold and we were in a hurry. After buttoning up the left side of the engine from the belt change, I did some quick troubleshooting, the ICM checked out OK by the procedure in the shop manual. I then noticed some of the aforementioned Brown Dust of Death Junkyard_Dog mentioned sitting in the bottom of the distibutor after I pulled the inner dust cover off. Found an uber cheap diz on Ebay for like $70, and viola, it started up!

The $25 alternator charges, no CELs yet. It was initally idling at 15-1600, then went into a big lumpy idle, maybe a vacuum leak? Also an exhaust leak in what looks like an aftermarket welded-in flex pipe. Trans works in drive and reverse, and the brakes work. Also, since a major goal of this is to help my son learn a few things, he got a lesson in the finer points of rusty nut removal. The nut on the left lower motor mount wouldn't come off with impact after two weeks of PB blasting. Ended up cutting it on four sides and chiseling it off. It's a 12 x 1.25, so we'll be waiting on a die and flange nuts to arrive at the local Fastenal early next week to finish that job. My parents will be here Sunday, so hopefully my dad can help him get some more work done next week while I'm at work.

beans wrote: Hole saws make the bushing removal work go VERY quickly.

Good info. That belongs in Tech Tips.

OK I figure another long-winded update is overdue! New ebay distributor:

We let it warm up until the thermostat opened, then discovered that the rad is leaking along the joint between the tank and core! Bummer, since it looks very clean inside. However, I went back to the 'bay and found a rad for $27! Should be here next week.

Also did a bit of troubleshooting on the surging idle. It's throwing a P0505 code, which points to the IAC. Since this IAC seems to have a coolant loop, I'll pull it off and clean it next week when the new rad gets here. Til then at least we can move it in the driveway using the engine rather than teen power.

While mom & dad were here for Festivus, my dad used the 50+ weather to show Nick the finer points of polishing headlights.

Also washed and waxed it; it actually looks pretty good from 20 feet: