Mechanical Restoration of the Civic

Following Pat's assessment of the car when I asked him to change my axle, I bought a bunch of parts (luckily nothing over 80$) and dropped the car at his shop earlier today.

It's disappointing to carry out so much work on the car without gaining any performance advantage. The work he is doing is basically a mechanical restoration of the car. In fact, if you look at all the work I have done to the car (OK, there hasn't been that much...), I have kept my promise to just drive it "as is" for this season and just fix things.

Still, I have managed to fix almost all the things that I hated about the car. Basically, everything I physically had to touch on the car was either was low-end or broken : cheap rubber base model shifter (replaced by 9$ Ebay shifter), cheap, oversized and old Acura 1.6 EL steering wheel (replaced last week by smaller Acura RSX leather steering wheel), cracked elbow rest in door panel (replaced by a non-cracked one), unsupportive OEM driver’s seat (replaced by a used OMP WRC race seat), broken parts in the instrument cluster (replaced by an Acura 1.6 el cluster). 

The car is now at Pat's shop

The other things that annoyed me most were the exhaust banging and rattling (to be replaced by Pat with the Ebay exhaust I bought last fall), the idle that was all over the place (fixed by Sajan at Calabogie) and the driver's side window, which does not roll up properly (may be fixed when Pat repairs the window frame).

Hopefully the car will be fixed in time to hit a couple more Monday nights before our summer trip in late June...

There are also several things I have to take care of on the BMW, the most urgent being a small oil leak that seems to be coming from the oil level sensor (which I changed last year, but only started leaking a few weeks ago) and the fact that the temperature creeps up on hot days when you sit in traffic (cooling fan clutch?)... 

Otherwise, there are many cool cars on the road these days:

Lovely spec early Miata

First-gen Viper still looks good

Focus RS looks like a rally car in white

A rare early 2000's AMG C32

One of my favourite cars you can see on the road, becoming more and more valuable

Also rare, not as valuable, Ferrari 328

It doesn't look modern, but it looks good

This M Coupe looked like somebody's track car.