Claff

New here, well, kinda. It says I joined in 2010 but probably didn't do anything till recently.

I grew up with Civics. My dad bought his first one new in 1974. Between street cars, race cars (ice racing in upstate NY), and kids cars we went through 16 of those early models (1973-1979, all 1200cc non-CVCC). My dad would buy a non-running car, rebuild the engine, fix whatever else was wrong and keep it for himself, make it a race car, or sell it off. When us kids reached driving age we'd learn on his El Camino, then as we moved on we'd be issued a $500 Civic. When one rusted out, we'd strip it, put the good parts in the basement and send the rest to the scrap heap. I went through four of them myself ('78, '77, '77, '79). By the time the last one died it was 1993 or 1994 and the supply of decent bodies and critical mechanical bits had pretty much dried up and it was time to move on.

First Civic, a 1978 model, which I got in 1985. It was originally brown but we painted it 1973 Corvette yellow


#2, the first 1977. This was after I was done with it, and it was issued to my brother. He was a big Dr. Who fan and had a TARDIS front plate made up. I borrowed the car back to run the Berkshire Motor Sports Club ice trials, which is kinda like autocross on a frozen lake:


#3, the second 1977. It started white but dad painted it 1971 MGB blue to match my 1971 MGB


#4, the end of the line, a 1979. It was pretty sharp, black with red pinstripes. It also had the "big" 13-inch wheels, which I painted black and put aluminum trim rings (from the junkyard) on. I preceded the played-out black-wheel-with-polished-lip look by ten years! The MG makes an appearance here. I still have that car today.


After the last Civic bit the dust, it was time for something better. It was 1994, I was out of school and got my first real job. I treated myself to a black 1987 CRX Si that was a rebuilt wreck so nothing on the left front corner lined up. Didn't matter to me, it had a sunroof. I bought it with 101K miles and drove it to 245K when it just completely rusted out (welcome to Massachusetts). It went to the crusher in 2002. For the longest time I considered this the best car I'd ever owned, and it's probably still in my top two or three after all these years.


After that I got away from Hondas. I followed the CRX with a Mazda MX3, then in 2004 I treated myself to a brand new sporty car. I tried a bunch: Civic Si, Focus SVT, Acura RSX, Mitsu Eclipse, Celica, etc. I brought home a screaming yellow Tiburon GTV6 Special Edition and treated it like my baby.

In 2007 I rediscovered top-down motoring. My MG was sitting in a barn in upstate NY where I parked it in 1999 and just left it there. At some point I thought it would be fun to find a cheap Miata to bomb around in. Bought a '96 Miata and loved it. I discovered I was no longer driving the Tiburon anymore and sold that. Then the wife wanted her own Miata, and then things got out of control. Up until recently we had four Miatas here in addition to other stuff. We got into autocross and quickly got semi-serious about that in 2009.

The wife had the longer commute and a couple of years ago was doing that in a 2010 Mazda3 hatchback we bought new. When her office moved, she lost her parking privileges and had to take the Metro into town, meaning the 3 was subject to the narrow parking spaces and door ding-a-rama that is the Metro parking lot. One of our autocross buddies had been putting together a ratty CRX for racing but decided to build a S2000 instead, and put the CRX up for sale. I hatched a plan to get the CRX, sell the 3, and do commuting in a throwaway cheap car so we could get rid of a car payment. The wife was on board so we got the CRX for $1600.

It's a ratty salvage-title '88 CRX Si. The autocross build meant it was on Koni SPSS struts and ~600 lb springs on coilover sleeves. It had an Ebay header and exhaust, and while it was loud, it wasn't ricey loud. It came pre-dinged, including a crashed-and-hammered-somewhat-straight right front fender, and had a bunch of stupid little issues. I spent some time tracking down things like non-working speakers, a dash cluster with a mind of its own, trim falling off, etc etc and it turned out to be a decent little car. It's not even that rusty.



It gets to come out and play once in a while. It's not as fast as our Miata but I don't think it would take too much work and $$$ to get it close.



Last summer, after about 9 months of commuting in the CRX, the wife started making noise that she wasn't too thrilled with it anymore. It rode hard, and on some of our suburban DC roads it can really beat you up. It doesn't have air conditioning. And every kid in a primered Integra wants to race you at every traffic light.

We had done so well without that car payment but the wife was really liking that Scion FRS, I had to try to figure out a decent car that we could write a check for. I started looking at real practical stuff like CRV or Element - we had just bought a Dodge Ram crew cab pickup for towing the autocross car around, but it's not the most ideal thing for bopping around town. Those were not cheap, so I thought Subaru Forester. Then people started saying OMG Head Gaskets so they were out. Attention turned to the EP3 Civic Si, which finished a close second to the Tiburon back in 2004.

After looking at a few EP3s we thought we had a great one at a dealer in Bethesda. It only had 75K miles but it was a little beat up in places, not a great car but would be a great commuter. The dealer wanted $7500 for it, I offered $6K and you can figure out where that got me. So we went back to private party sales, which I had soured on because so many people were hard to schedule viewings with, or they couldn't bother to use capital letters and punctuation in emails... stupid stuff like that. But we persevered and were rewarded with this 110K mile 2002.



(eventually I'll get around to taking a picture of it in the daylight)

So we're back in the Civic fold with a couple of decent cars. The 02 is already doing commuter duty even though I haven't gotten it through inspection yet - I have to replace a fog light for starters. The CRX is retired from Metro duty so I can play with it pretty much however I want. I'm thinking of spending a couple bucks to finish the STS autocross build since CRXs seem to have the upper hand on Miatas these days. Eventually I might try taking it to Summit Point for some HPDE fun. It's a very extra, disposable car I have very little money in - the perfect thing to stuff into a tire wall!

I thought the EP3 would remain mostly stock - the wife wants the windows tinted and the exhaust a little louder. But as I sit here I already have a set of springs that pretty much fell into my lap so it'll probably get lower pretty soon. I wish I hadn't sold my spare set of Kosei K1 wheels a year or so back because I think it would look epic on those. I might take the Kosei K1TS off the CRX and try them on the EP3. That's hardly today's problem.

So that's a pretty long-winded introduction, hopefully the few still reading haven't nodded off to sleep. Get back to work!

DerekEJ1

Interesting story! Awesome to see some pictures of the older Hondas. Really cool stuff. Can't wait to see what happens with the CRX, so keep us updated!

deschlong

iTrader: (8)

Nice work... I like hearing about those old Civics.