Hi again everyone! It's been almost a month since I got this CRV and I'm beginning to love this car. Right now, it's in a good enough running condition to be used as a daily driver, but she still has a few quirks here and there.





Right now, the car doesn't shift at the desired RPMs. It's alright on straight roads. Transmission upshifts at around 2K-2.5K RPM on feather light throttle. However, we're having a hard time getting her to downshift when we want to have a bit of fun on the highway. You have to really thrash the throttle to get her to downshift, and when you have your foot down, RPMs climb almost to the redline before it upshifts. Having no baseline to compare it to (we never got to experience the car with the original transmission, because it was pretty much toast when we got it), we don't know if this is normal. It gets frustrating, especially on uphill climbs where you can't get it to downshift when you want to overtake slow moving trucks.

The throttle valve cable I'm talking about is this:







Do we go about tightening or loosening this cable? I know this isn't the transmission you find on 98 CRVs, but it's compatible, so we're not complaining (we got a good deal on it). Also, another thing we notice is that shifting from 2nd to 3rd is a bit jerky. The jerk is very subtle though. Other than that, the car is awesome.

Secondary to these concerns are aesthetics. Anyone know how to clean up the trim and bumper? It has white-grey spots everywhere, making it look filthy even after a thorough wash. Would we need to paint the trim and bumpers or is there something we could rub on it to make it look new-ish?