malch

Thanks for the note, 94. But here's what happened yesterday. I took the car back in to Honda, so they could check out the squeaking. The service guy came up to me half an hour later to say that the clamp/thing/whatever, that he'd told me the day before was so hard to get at, was—in fact—not that hard to reach. So they fixed that. But the squeaking was still there. They admitted (after a bit of encouragement on my part) that the squeaking must have been caused by their efforts of the day before, when the mechanic reached in to bend some metal (to try to stop the rattle), and so they're ordered a part of some sort, and I'm going to take the car back in to them tomorrow or on Friday.
Whew!
Maybe I should have just started wearing earplugs when I drive my car!
Regards,
malch

Ray Pip

The heat shield rattle sounds like loose marbles shaken around in a metal bucket. Quite unmistakable and annoying.

I have no idea what the squeaking sound might be.

The hose clamps can be applied only if anything remains of the original heat shield halves. Eventually they rust away to a few pieces of metal. Trying to apply hose clamps at that point would be like applying a pants belt to a skeleton.

Ir the heat shield halves are completely rusted out, a local garage would make the repair for $150-$250. They would order the pieces from Honda. They WILL probably use hose clamps; it's a fix often mentioned in auto-mechanics magazines.

Or you could just have the loose shields removed for maybe $25 at a shop.
They are not absolutely necessary.

It all depends on how fat your wallet is at the present time.

It's not hard to reach. The Honda shop spied a fat wallet.

malch

for the sake of closure: I've had the car in to the Honda shop four times now, in the last 7 days. It's finally fixed! A quick recap of how the two problems (first the rattling, and then the squeaking) got resolved:
- it turned out that the other half of the clamp wasn't hard to reach after all (the service guy was thinking of an Odyssey from a few years ago he told me), so the rattling was solved easily.
- the squeaking was much harder for them to fix. They thought it was a gasket (or something like that) and attached a new gasket, using new bolts, on my second-to-the-last visit to the shop. But the squeaking and creaking were still there. So yesterday I took the car in, and took the mechanic for a drive (believe me, he was wincing at the awful sound)... 30 minutes after disappearing into his garage with the car, he re-emerged, saying he'd solved the problem by spraying oil on the 'lower engine mount' (which he said must have shifted slightly when my car was raised on a hoist for my first visit last week, when I brought the car in because of the rattling). That bit of shifting, he said, and the fact that the lower engine mount was "dry", had caused the creaking.
Anyway, the oil seems to have solved the problem.
So I'm back to being able to enjoy my CRV, without earplugs!
Regards,
malch