After doing some research online and finding surprisingly little information, I thought it might be useful to write up how I quite easily installed an Acura RSX steering wheel into my 2000 Civic coupe. I bought this car as a track car and it came with a ratty rubber Acura wheel (maybe from a 1.6 EL?)


This is a photo I found on Ebay.

Anyway, the wheel in the car was too big for my taste and not very nice-feeling. Even when I wore gloves, there was no grip and without gloves, the disintegrating rubber was unpleasant. Since the car is street driven, I was hesitant to install the OMP steering wheel from my old race car. I managed to find a used RSX wheel with airbag for 50$, which is nice since it's leather and about 30mm smaller than the one I had. I thought it would be plug and play, but I was wrong, as the airbag was a dual stage on the RSX wheel, while the 96-00 airbag is single stage. When I test drove my car, it had a JDM DC5R steering wheel, which I liked, but which I did not take with the car as I wanted keep the purchase price as low as possible. What I didn't know at the time was that the JDM DC5's used single stage airbags. A used JDM wheel is around 250$ around here.

Anyway, it turns out that you can remove the airbag inflator from your single stage airbag and drop it into the dual stage one. In the photo, it's the circle-in-a-square held in by 4 nuts. Once you have the two airbags side by side, all you need to do is remove the sort of rounded off triangular nuts holding the inflator in place. Some people online recommended a vise-grip for this, but I was unable to do it that way. My friend helped me out with some 12-point ratchet bits, and they did the job. That's it, super simple. I put the airbag back into the wheel and it plugs right in (as it should, it's the same device I had before). I reset the SRS light with a paperclip and I was good to go.

I'm not sure which Civic/Acura airbag I had in the car, but I believe that as long as it looks like the one in the photo, you are good to go.

 

Sounds like a cheaper alternative to S2K wheel and IMO the RSX-S wheel looks better.

Post some pictures of the wheel installed so we can see how it looks.

 

Do you know if the base JDM Integra has the same set up?

 

Cruise control work?

 

S2000, RSX & EP3 steering wheel and parts are interchangeable.

 

True, but ppl generally ask more for an S2k wheel compared to RSX/EP3 wheel which you can get as low as $60