Lolli - Our 1997 Honda CR-V Daily Driver

As I was asking in this post, the wife and I needed a second car.  My truck has performed its duty for the past year and a half as our only transportation, but like most Chevy’s, has issues but keeps plugging along.  With the wife now working, we could afford a cheap second car to get us through the next year or so as we get our finances back on track.  Although I was watching multiple car sites over the three months prior to purchasing, we still ended up getting the first thing we looked at. 
Bought it from a little local dealer up the street who’s been in business over 35 years.  While it was not perfect and fairly old, it was low mileage (117k), had good A/C, power windows and locks (the truck did not and the windows were a bear to roll down) and seemed to be in fantastic shape.  Most important, SWMBO liked it and named her Lolli. Here she is:  

You can see what the south Texas sun can do to the clear coat (this was after I had cleared the headlights).  I have a plan to make it look a little better for little to no money.  Not, necessarily a good idea, but……

The interior was shockingly clean.  It still has the original CR-V floor mats (now purple), so the carpet underneath looks like new.  

The interior panels had also succumbed to the Texas sun.  While clean, they are heavily faded.  The dark part on the left hand side is not a shadow, but where the panel meets the dash when the door is closed.  That’s how much the interior has faded.  Not a complaint, just interesting to see the difference.

You can see the plastic trim is so faded it almost matches the car’s color and blends in.

This build thread will really just go through some of the things I’ll do to it over the next few months to make it a little nicer and some preventative maintenance.  Overall, except for the clear coat being dried out and collecting dust and some wear items that will need attention, it seems to be in fantastic shape and was well taken care of.  Wife was going through the original manual (which came with the car) and found out it had a 100k warranty, so there’s a good chance it was well maintained all it’s life.
Longer term will be all new fluids, all new belts (including timing), new shocks and new bushings.  It also needs tint, so I’m going to teach myself how to tint windows with it.  

The weekend we bought it, I didn’t get a chance to do much to it as I had to replace the oil pump on the truck.  Even then, there were some easy to do and not easy to do but kinda important items to address.  I’ve done a few of them that I’ll cover in the next couple of posts and then update as I do more.

-Rob

Quick, at least in theory, items were new air filter (no pictures, wife replaced it on her own in about 3 minutes) and a new cabin filter since the car smelled kinda funky.  I bought the cabin filter figuring it’d take 5 minutes to do.  Not quite that easy.  I guess this was early days for cabin filters.  As you can see below, you have to remove that lower bar to get the filter out.  Not a huge deal except for the buried bolts on the left hand side that I had a booger of a time getting to with my fat hands.  What I thought would be quick, took me about an hour.

Regardless, glad I got it done as the original was black and the car smelled much better afterwards.

Next on the list is something most old cars need, clearing the headlights.  Took me about an hour one morning and they look so much better.  New ones are still pretty cheap and I may look at replacing them and adding better bulbs down the road, but I was quite happy with the results.

Before

After

-Rob

The first big item to do was fix the driver’s door electrics.  Hondas of this generation have a common issue with the door harness.  The way it’s mounted, the opening and shutting the door puts a serious strain on the wiring (thanks Google!).  After a while, things like power windows, locks, side mirrors, etc just stop working.  So, I hit up the local pick and pull and grabbed two harnesses to use as donors.

Hours of pushing out old pins, cleaning the plug, soldering the wires to the old pins, putting them back in the harness and I was ready to wire it back in.

This is about halfway through wiring the fixed harness back up.

Taped the wiring diagram to the door to make sure I wasn’t messing anything up.  I did use the wrong color wire on one of the pins, but was able to get it figured out.  I did NOT expect it to work first time out, but it did. 

Hoping my fixes will last us a while.

Next post: "Honey?  Why are you smearing peanut butter on my car?"

-Rob

Good stuff. I just did the cabin filter on my '98 and was amazed at how much more difficult is than on the later ones. I don't think you mentioned it, but add valve adjustment to the list when you do the timing belt (then every 30k miles). Exhaust valves on the old B-series engines get burnt if you let them go too long. I refreshed the exterior trim on my wife's Element a couple years ago by power washer followed by 50-50 mix of Linseed oil and paint thinner wiped on with a rag. It looked new and has held up well.

AAZCD (Forum Supporter) said:

Good stuff. I just did the cabin filter on my '98 and was amazed at how much more difficult is than on the later ones. I don't think you mentioned it, but add valve adjustment to the list when you do the timing belt (then every 30k miles). Exhaust valves on the old B-series engines get burnt if you let them go too long. I refreshed the exterior trim on my wife's Element a couple years ago by power washer followed by 50-50 mix of Linseed oil and paint thinner wiped on with a rag. It looked new and has held up well.

Valve adjustment is now on the list. I figure in the next couple of weeks, I'll spend a weekend doing all the belts and probably the motors mounts too since I have to pull at least one to do the timing belt.  Problem is, the wife likes the car so much, she's driving the snot out of it on the weekends just to get out of the house from WFH during the week. 

Bit of a preview, I tried the old peanut butter trick on some of the trim and it was shockingly better.  Just have to get some time and nicer weather to do all the trim.

-Rob

Can you elaborate on the peanut butter trick?

HotNotch said:

Can you elaborate on the peanut butter trick?

It's amazingly simple.  After just a normal cleaning, spread peanut butter (I use the cheapest I can find) on the plastic trim pieces.  Let it sit for a while as you do other stuff.  It seems to work better the longer you let it sit, but I've never gone beyond an hour.  Then just wipe it off.  I haven't tried washing it off yet, as I've only done a few test areas.  I'll have some before an after pictures later, but what I've seen worked incredibly well and much better than the store bought stuff.  It sounds nutty (pun intended), but I think the natural oil in the peanut butter soaks into the trim and restores the shine.

-Rob

Do the first gen CRVs have the built in picnic table feature ? My daughter's 2005 has it. Funky.

HotNotch said:

Can you elaborate on the peanut butter trick?

This deserves to be in "say what"

Cousin_Eddie (Forum Supporter) said:

Do the first gen CRVs have the built in picnic table feature ? My daughter's 2005 has it. Funky.

Yes.

solfly said:

Cousin_Eddie (Forum Supporter) said:

Do the first gen CRVs have the built in picnic table feature ? My daughter's 2005 has it. Funky.

Yes.

Yep, neat little feature.  Our's was missing, but I was able to find a slightly tweaked one a the pick and pull.

-Rob