1998 HONDA PRELUDE

2015 - 2016 Project

Part II

How I went from this...

and from this....

So I was driving to work, a little late as usual, but not speeding, too badly. It was January 7, 2016. The car project was winding down. Pretty much done actually. Time to move on finally. It was in the mid 30's and not icy when I left the house. Four miles away, on the last turn before getting to work, the road passes over a wetlands patch and becomes a bridge for a few feet. You would never notice, but it was technically a small bridge. The temperature was just a couple degrees colder than at my house, just enough to freeze the wet surface of the short bridge section which also happens to be a 90 degree turn in the road with a 35 mph posted speed limit. My car came loose and as my back end swung out into oncoming traffic, I thought, so this is how my project comes to an end, after all this work, destroyed in my first ever car accident. And I'm going to be really late for work! 

Suddenly I was on dry pavement again and the car swung back the other way, over correcting, my back wheel, and then my front wheel, slammed into the curb, and my car lifted off the ground for just a moment, and then hit the ground going exactly where I needed to be straight down the road like nothing had even happened. In fact the car was driving perfectly fine. I pulled into the first parking spot at work, shaking and braced myself emotionally as I got out to assess the damage. It was not as bad as I was expecting. only one body panel was effected, the front bumper cover, the most complex panel by far. Both aluminum wheels were scratched up a little, but they were somehow not bent. The back wheel was not right but I later found that this was because the lower control arm had been bent about half an inch. That is about an inch thick and solid steel. It took the impact straight on from one end like the impact to your fist if you punched something. The bend was right where your wrist would be so the front of your fist would be bent down about a half inch. How the aluminum wheel did not bent I will never know. I still drive on these same wheels today. Once I replace the control arm the alignment was still perfectly fine. I was amazed. I hit that curb so hard I thought the axle would be bent, but then again, there is no axle in the back, and just a trans-axle in the front. 

I had never done fiberglass, or any body work before. Suddenly my project was far from over. My first body work project would not be a simple one. As you can see the damage runs right through several contours and even over into the fog light housing. Fiberglass turned out to come easy for me, although it takes a lot of patients and time. You put a layer on quickly before it sets up, and then wait for half an hour, then you can sand it down and evaluate if you need another layer. It is very forgiving though. If you screw it up you can just cut or sand it out and redo it. It bonds to itself and molds into any shape you want. It bonds to clean metal in a freakishly strong way, but not to plastic at all. The term fiberglass is misleading. It is mostly plastic epoxy resin, reinforced with tiny strands of glass that have been woven into a textile kind of thing. Together they are very strong, kind of like steel rebar inside concrete. When it's dry you can cut and sand it into shape and then build sections or layers onto it. It can be sanded very smoothly and takes paint so well it looks like painted metal when you are done. It cracks instead of denting, but you can always repair fiberglass. No damage is unrepairable, but it might be too time consuming to be worth it.

This is my only car so I had to drive around for a while looking kind of funny. Fiberglass is totally water proof, so the Oregon rain was not an issue. I got the panel back to one piece, but it took a while to get it to the point that everything was perfectly smooth and ready for paint. Every night after work I took it back off and worked it for a couple of weeks. 

After spaying the primer I realized that the license plate indentation in the middle needed to go. I have no idea why Mugan designed it this way. It is a flaw. With my new found fiberglass skills I could now correct that which needed correction. I would not rest until it was as it should be! In fact, I realized that I could fit the other body kit pieces myself. These fiberglass kits never fit perfectly and you have to have your body shop work them over before your final paint job. This can cost almost as much as the paint job itself, so I never even dreamed I would ever have that done. Now I could do it myself! With enough time I could potentially end up with a near perfect show ready exterior! Hopefully I will be able to learn how to spray clear coat well.

The side skirts on the car proved to be a major challenge. In fact they were harder to deal with than the bumper cover. They attached to the car in a way that was nothing like the factory panel design, and they had this horrible sag to them. They looked like they were going slack as they hung from the side of the car. It was disgraceful. It's hard to explain why it took so much work to correct these problems, but it was over 80 hours. Getting them to fit snuggly with the top line perfectly lined up with the door, plus a very subtle curve out at the back end was a major test of my patients and perseverance. I developed a lot of resentment for whoever made them originally. Such sloppy craftsmanship. I assume they use a mold so are they making tons of these all with the same flaw? Are they pulling them out of the mold before they are done setting up? Who knows, but making a mold from a body panel is pretty easy to do so if they had an original Mugan kit to copy there is no excuse for this garbage. They brand is understandably nowhere to be found on the product, so I don't even know who to curse over this.

Fiberglass, in all its glory. Layer after layer after layer, until that gap was no more.

When its lowered and the body panels are straight, the 5th generation Prelude is a masterpiece of automotive aesthetics. Simple flowing lines and very clean. It's an elegant sports car from an era of gaudy tasteless Japanese designs, the era that coined the phrase "ricer". It looks like it could be a 2017 design, but it was made 20 years ago.

Of course the engine bay needed to be painted as well. I had painted it using spray paint, masking everything off rather than pulling the engine out. But now it was time to get serious, so I got an engine hoist from Harbor Freight and pulled the mofo.

Unfortunately I could not trust the spray paint as a long term substrate for the 2K epoxy primer I was going to use. The only solution was to sand the entire bay down to bare metal. This ended up being one of the most torturous and painful parts of the entire car project. Six to eight hours a day for two weeks I sanded it, mostly using a pneumatic die grinder with a paint stripper attachment. The engine bay does not have any large flat areas. It is very irregular and had all kinds areas that were tough to reach with the grinder.

I also fiberglassed over all the joints where the metal panels were spot welded together. I wanted to smooth the engine bay walls out to appear as if they were just one big sheet of metal. The empty holes were also filled with fiberglass. Then it was all covered with a very thin layer of body filler (bondo) and sanded until it was silky smooth. 

PART III

THE ENGINE

TOP - complete stage 2 valve train using Skunk2 Pro valves, SK2 Pro valve springs and titanium retainers, SK2 Pro I cam shafts, and adjustable cam gears.

BOTTOM - Mahle forged aluminum 11.5 compression pistons, 8.5 lb aluminum Fadenza fly wheel, Exedy Racing clutch, balance shafts removed, cams are degreed and the rotating assembly is balanced.

Also there's a PLM stainless steel Tri-Y header feeding through a test pipe into the 2.5 inch mandrel bent stainless steel exhaust with a Vibrant resonator and a twin loop muffler, Gates kevlar timing belt with a H23 tensioner conversion, OBD1 conversion using a Hondata S300 chipped P28 ECU and a 4th generation OBD1 distributor. 

As long as I had it out, I decided that I might as well go ahead and just rebuild the engine. Why not? So it was that I painted the car and rebuilt the engine at the same time. I had never done either, so I was in a little over my head. Fortunately I was able to borrow a friends car for a couple of months. The rebuild was not just a rebuild; I had to polish every part and make quite a few modifications of course. I took the head to Aluminum Head Rebuilders in Portland to be refurbished. They did the brass valve guides and installed the new valves and springs for no extra charge when they reassembled the head. That was the only mechanical work that I did not do during this entire project. Besides this head work, no wrench has turned a single nut or bolt anywhere on this car that was not in my hand.

Here is my engines wire harness. I was attempting to make my own mil-spec style harness. It is basically entirely encased in double walled heat shrink tubing. It all comes together in the thick section which is routed behind the engine down low through the fire wall to hide it from view as much as possible. The fuse box under the hood was moved to the glove box to help accomplish this. All the wiring sneaks up from the back of the engine to each connection in an attempt to stay out of sight. I used all the original connections and wires, but reconstructed the whole composition for aesthetic reasons. All the wires were shortened and I ended up removing about 50 or 60 feet of it.  

TO BE CONTINUED....