The 1989 Civic hatchback

Cool car! I love the look of those Civics. As a life-long Michigan resident I'm jealous of your shiny uncorroded fasteners.

In reply to BlueInGreen44:

Thanks! Being a transplant from the rustbelt it still amazes me.

Knocked out a little project this evening.

When I pulled the seats earlier I noticed some issues with the mounts. Whomever swapped these seats in fabricated some mounts, not too terrible. The welds are not the best but I feel they are serviceable. The metal is a little on the thin side for my liking but I believe they'll be fine. The biggest issue was they only use small 1/4" bolts and each seat only had two. I picked up some 3/8" grade 8 bolts, washers and lock washers. I underestimated the length a little so I had to leave the lock washers out but used some threadlocker.

Almost right.

That's better.

As a side benefit tightening the seats down knocked down a ton of the interior rattles I was having.

There's a 91 Hatch for sale across from town from me that is claimed to be a rust free North Carolina car. I'm half tempted to check it out this weekend, but then a lot of people around here have a strange idea of what "rust free" means, and there are no pictures on the post.

In reply to eastsidemav:

The last E21 I bought in East TN sat for years in a field about three feet from a creek. Underneath all the moss and crud that car was every bit as clean as this one is. Everything came apart just as easily. I'd say it's worth a look.

ssswitch wrote: I have started buying some of the parts to swap a faster-ratio DC Integra rack into my EG - on my car at least you basically need the little crossmember that retains the rack (or hog out the EG one), the rack and a u-joint. I would assume you can do the same on a DA Integra with your EF, but am no expert.

Somehow I missed this comment. Very interesting, I need to do some research. As it is I can see this thing spinning very easily because I'm not sure I could spin the wheel fast enough to catch it.

I hate days like today. Days when, at the end of it, I feel like a useless hack.

So I ordered some cheap motor mounts from RockAuto and they came in last week. I was planning on filling them with 3M Window Weld until I realized I couldn't get it locally for less than $30. So I found a one part Polyurethane sealant from Home Depot that would cure to a shore hardness of 50A for $7. I really thought I was on to something. So over the course of a week I filled my new mounts with this stuff. I did a layer, let it cure for 48 hrs then another and so on until they were filled. Today they were fully cured so I thought I would throw them in.

Pretty mounts ready to install (I thought)

Old mounts removed. They were definitely done, they just fell apart once I had them out.

Uh,oh. Signs of trouble. Old rear mount had the bracket on the right side, new mount had the bracket on the left. Being that I spent a week filling these things I decided to press on. I could have cut the bracket off the old mount and welded it on the new one but decided not to. I just ground off the part of the bracket that was interfering with the brake lines and mounted it with two bolts instead of three. Total hack move. Unfortunately, I believe I cross threaded both bolts so if this thing has to come out again I'm going to have to drop the sub frame so I can tap the captive nuts. Ugh, I'm pretty disappointed in myself right now.

After that it was on to the front. I didn't take a picture but you can kind of see it in the pictures above. The new mount is considerably longer and the mounting holes are about 3/8" farther apart. Where the steel curves is right where the hole needs to be so I couldn't re-drill it. The old mount was missing one bolt and the other two were loose. I decided to just mount the new one with one bolt for now and repair and fill the old mount. Next weekend I will reinstall it.

The car does feel a lot better when releasing the clutch even with all my hackery. I was hoping that it wouldn't be too harsh on the vibration side but at idle it really is. Most of the noise is from the stupid wink mirror which I'm pretty sure I'm getting rid of. I'll go to the junkyard and pick up the sun visors and mirror to replace it. That thing is aggravating to look out of and it rattles like crazy.

All in all a pretty disappointing day.

IIRC, those bushings are inside of metal sleeves that press into the mounts. With the right size press dies you can pop them out and swap them around.

In reply to simon_C:

Not having acces to a press that didn't even occur to me. Having access to a grinder and welder my first thought was to cut them off and swap them. However laziness won the day.

Finally got around to replacing the now repaired old front mount. Big increase in drivability.

Trying to figure out what I want to do with the temp gauge. The original is flaky alternating from pegged hot to normal range randomly.

The aftermarket gauge on the a pillar has the sensor in the freaking pipe returning from the heater core so it doesn't even register unless the heat is on. Real genius at work there.

At least you can test if the heater core is blocked without getting out of the car now.

If it's anything like my D15 the temperature gauge sender is a one-wire plug beneath the distributor that goes next to the ECU's temperature sensor. Mine was fine, but I can imagine you might get some corrosion or shorts because of the nature of the harness routing and the angle it comes out of the block. Either way, easy to check.

I have an extremely dodgy speedo (even after VSS replacement) so I think the clusters are probably also starting to wear out like my ECU did.

In reply to ssswitch:

The tach jumps around randomly too. One of these days I'm going to pull the cluster to check for corrosion and check the grounds.

Since money for real progress has dried up I'm going to switch gears a little and work on the cheap stuff.

I've sweet talked the bosses into letting me have half a sheet of coroplast so I can template the skid plate. There is an old electronics cabinet that they said I could scavenge the steel from. It's a little thin but with some strategic bends and reinforcements it should be fine for rally x.

I'll template with the plastic and then cut the steel out on the water jet with mounting holes and reliefs for the bends cut into it. Once bent I'll weld the relief slots back.

Not much has happened since the last update. We had a rainstorm the other morning and I decided to drive the car instead of putting all my raingear on and take the bike. I had a constant water drip hitting me in my left arm all the way to work. Looks like the seal split where the roof rack mounts. I decided to pull the rack off and attempt to patch up the seal while I try to find out if that is another NLA part. While I was messing around I decided to go ahead and give it a bath.

Can't decide if I want to put the rack back on or not. What do you all think?

With rack

Without

I'm still waffling back and forth about trying to get rid of it. On one hand I really don't enjoy driving it. On the other hand it's been very reliable and there is always a chance that the next junker I pick up will not be. It's to the point now that I really trust the car.

Looks better without the roof rack.

It's the devil you know vs. the devil you don't know. I will take the devil I know in about 99% of those cases.

In reply to NGTD:

Yeah, I'm leaning towards not putting back on.

I think I'm going to see if the paint will buff out a little this weekend. It's really trashed and super soft. It's got tons of rock chips, cracks and an absolute ton of swirls. Don't have any money to spend on it so I might as well make it shiney.

I waited for the temps to come down to wash and clay the car tonight in preparation for compound and polishing tomorrow.

Here are some pics of the general condition of the paint. It's hard to capture in a photograph how bad the paint is. It looks way worse in person and is pretty much beyond repair at this point. We'll see if I can make any difference in it.

It's got tons of rock chips and scratches in it.

Patiently waiting for tomorrow.

Like some of the girls my buddy used to date, that car looks pretty good under dim lights at night.

Whew, that was a long hot day. Cooler than it's been all week but 98 is still hot.

I didn't get off to the best start today. I found that I packed away my buffer and pads with product still on them. The handle and body of the buffer had a layer of stickiest nasty gunk all over it. Had to clean that before I could even pick it up. The two wool pads were fine but my two foam pads had been broken down by the product. One was completely shot and the other had a layer of dead foam on it but I thought if I could get that dead layer off there was enough good left on it to do the job. I set the speed on the lowest setting and touched the blade of a screwdriver to it. In my garage. Right next to the bike and the laundry machines. With a basket of clean clothes right under me. You would not believe the amount of blue foam pieces that covered everything in my garage. Thankfully it was really dry and the leaf blower was able to blow it all out.

In the years since I last used this stuff my good compound and polish had dried out. All I had that was still good was a bottle of unopened Turtle Wax polishing compound. Not very aggressive but I figured I would just do what I could with it. I did a small test section on the hood and the results looked promising so I continued.

The game plan was use my least aggressive wool pad with a lot of speed while misting with water to keep the polish from flashing off in the heat so I could work it. Then switch to the blue foam pad and walk it back. That worked well except for the roof where I had to use the most aggressive pad due to some major scratches.

I'm just taking pictures with my phone so I know it won't do it justice but hopefully you will be able to see the difference.

Here is the obligatory 50/50 shot.

Here are a couple comparison shots. Look at the details in the refection of the trees to see the difference.

Hood.

Roof.

Here are some general shots of the finished product. I could have spent a couple more hours on it but I had been outside sweating my ass off for about nine hours and I was just cooked. The only thing I have left to do is reinstall the wiper arms when the paint dries. They were in really bad shape.

Bling bling, motherberkeleyer! Looks good!

Looks good from here, nice job. It reminds me of the shade of red my old e30 was painted - it could get real dull if neglected, but it buffed out real nice.

Very nice! Bright shiny red looks good on boxy 80s cars.

Well, the car has been running really good, It looks as good as it can, I've fixed the majority of the rattle issues and after spending some quality time with it it's starting to grow in me.

I was leaning towards throwing it up for trade on CL but I've decided to stick it out at least for a little while. We are coming to an understanding it seems.

I have a new valve cover gasket for it but was waiting until I get a new timing belt to install it. However I feel it really needs a valve adjustment and given the condition of the rest of the underhood components I'm pretty sure the timing belt is not that old. I'm leaning towards doing the valve adjustment and putting the new valve cover gasket on this weekend and skipping the timing belt for the moment. I realize I'm tempting fate but I just don't have the money for a timing belt at this time.

I'm glad I went ahead and adjusted the valves. They were all really loose. The intake more so than the exhaust. The engine is so much quieter now and the idle is a lot more smooth and even. The only thing is the idle speed is about 500rpm higher now with and without the A/C running. I'll drive it around for a while to see if it works itself out, if not I'll adjust it again. But it really made a huge difference

Everything looks pretty good in here.

Timing belt looks to be fairly new and in good shape. I check the tension and all is good.

I figured I should clean up the cover while I had it off. I found a half used can of silver and a half used can of clear, both which are at least ten years old. The silver wouldn't spray correctly and the clear came out kind of yellow but I still think it looks better.

With the shiny paint and the nice OEM+ wheel upgrade that thing is looking super nice!