What's up dudes, figured I'd go back to my roots and document my latest purchase, a 91 civic std, aka project spare parts. Shes in pretty rough shape but ill be giving new life to this old girl in the following weeks.

Small back story on the car: I bought it as a rolling shell from my room mate. He bought it several years ago to use a commuter in stock form. He mostly just drove it to and from work as it got great mpgs and he had other projects. Some time goes by and he traded it to his brother, who is car illiterate. Long story short, he put easily 30k miles on the car never changing the oil once, only adding a quart here and there when the oil light would come on despite being told religiously to check the oil. Ff to last year, the clutch goes out, we get it home, do a clutch job on it, reseal the whole motor, etc. Then find out cylinder 2 is low on compression. We tell the guy its time to start looking for a new car, this one is tired, then a few weeks later it burns three valves between cylinders 2 and 4, gets given back as payement to my roomate for all the work he just did. He tears into it, starts a mini me conversion, then looses interest and stashed the car in our back yard. Fast forward to gas being almost 5 dollars a galon, and me looking for a better fuel efficiant vehicle as my sorento gets a whopping 15mpg, but on the cheap, and i end up making a deal with my roomie and buy it as is for 200 dollars

So, on with the build!
As stated, its a 91 civic std.
Came factory with a d15b1, a 4 speed manual transmission
ANNNND ac! Which is still 100 percent there but needs a recharge.
at some point some one replaced the tail gate with a dx tail gate, but has butchered the wiring on it...
It's had a rough life, if you read my paragraph above, plus see the pics below. I plan to change all of that with a bunch of tlc, and spare parts i've collected or saved or that are left over from my other ef hatch (i have a lot of cars... it's a problem).

 

*I do apologize in advance, these first two posts do have a fair amount of talking going on in them*

So I'm sure ya'll are wondering, ok so what is this guys plan? That thing looks like a pick n pull special! Which trust me guys, it is, or at least was. I've already put a bit of work into it, and my plans are mainly to clean it up, but keep it as a clean oem refreshed daily, nothing crazy. I'm making this build thread to hopefully help new ef members see some budget oem mods to improve at least the interior of their hatch.

So that being said, the immediate things the car needs are a new drive train
interior is trashed
Body is super rough.

I have the first two covered easy. A few years ago i picked up an 88 crx dx as a roller to save it from being scrapped. It's rough, but it has good bones. Anyways at the time it came with two motors, a d15b non vtec that was trashed, and a lowish mileage d15b7. I ended up rebuilding the d15b7, bottom end, slapped a complete y8 head with intake manifold and arp head studs on the block, got it running and the crx has just sat since because it needing a lot of other work, funds at the time, and covid. So thought hey why not use this basically brand new engine I have just sitting in the crx? I have biger plans for it but thats another build post.

So for the heart of the beast, she will be getting a d15b7 mini me paired with a 91 si transmission that i will be modifying with an hf 5th gear for better highways rpms, since i commute daily from battleground to ghetto se portland.

After taking a day to pull the new heart from the crx, I got my hatch pulled up into the driveway and the fun began. I do apologize, I don't have a ton of pics from the cleaning process so far, the car was disgusting on the inside. Mold all over the seat belts and the carpet, a hole was punched into the dash because yeah why not right? The front pleather seats are destroyed. Cracked ripped torn etc. So those came out, got a bunch of random trash thrown away, then I went to town scrubbing the heck out of the carpet to get rid of all the mold.

Following that I ran down to first my dads, where I picked up the following:
Propper passenger mirror,
Black dc center console
a set of 90-91 amber corner markers
Si rear control arms
Some motor mounts that have polly bushings in them
Si transmission
non broken dash vents with clock
un cut 90-91 dash harness
and a 90-91 cluster with tach.

Then I hit my storage and picked up
Clean black dash
rs integra rear seat
da integra front seats
Rear si sway bar
Rear speaker pods
Some amps
and some other misc things im probably forgetting.

Sorry no parts hoard pics, im battling the rain up here lol.

First thing I did was install the rear seat to get it out of the way. The top parts fit just fine, but the dc integra lower is smaller and doesn't really fit right, however you can adjust the buckles to hold it in place and for a back seat that will never be used i say its good enough. I'll probably end up either hitting the metal with some bed liner or cut some black trunk carpet to fit so the red paint doesn't show. Here's a teaser pick of what the front seats will look like with the rear




Then I got to work pulling the old dash out. fun fact, if you are doing a dash swap and you need some oem screws, there is easily about 25-30 screws holding the dash boards together. No pics of the new dash in yet, it's just loosly hung as I need to finish routing a new antenna and a bluetooth mic. That gets us caught up to about current as of 4/4/22. I've done some other things but i want to document those in a later post.

 

So a week has flown by since I last touched the car, however, I did pick up a few parts for the build throughout the week.

The first thing was I was able to score a complete black cargo cover from fb market place in decent shape. The second, I was able to get a buddy to go pull the driver side window regulator from a hatch at pick n pull since mine is messed up. I also received an amp kit I ordered off of amazon, so thats a bonus!

The next project I tackled yesterday afternoon was installing the rear speaker pods. It was raining all afternoon and I didn't feel like getting soaked. My hatch actually came with the rear shelves installed already, but no speaker brackets. I had a spare set of speaker pods but the shelves were damaged, so I made two into one. Heres a little diy on it:

You'll need a dremel, philips screw driver and a drill

Step one, grab your shelves like so


on the back side will be a rectangle traced but not cut out, you need to cut the rectangle out for optimal air flow and so the wiring can be ran to the speaker, like so:



Once that is done there will be four marks on the back that need to be drilled out so the speaker bracket can be attatched to the shelf, resulting in this


I bought a set of these flush mount kenwood speakers from my work, because they were inexpensive, but also because they have oem style mesh grills to keep the speaker protected.



NOTE: factory speakers mount to the pods in a triangle pattern. To mount aftermarket speakers you will need to drill new mounting holes. Take care, as these are 30 year old pieces of plastic!

Heres the finished product, it got late and cold so I called it a night



fun fact, all 88-91 civics are pre wired for rear speakers, it just taped up behind the plastic. Heres where the hatch wiring is

The passenger side is just the same

 

Well sadly no updates this week. Apparently april is the new january, and it snowed this weekend. Like a decent amount. And is back down in thirties, which is just too cold for me to be out in for long periods of time. So sorry! But here's a snowy pic of some of my, and my roommates, other projects to make up for it


The deer were out having a good time

 

Small(ish) update today, i hopped on row52 last night and saw the pick n pull near me dropped a new 91 hatch that happened to also be red, so i went on an easter egg hunt to the yard today and scored a MUCH better condition passenger door, passenger fender, and a set of front mudflaps. So i spent the evening removing the old fender and door, and swapped on the new stuff. Hopefully i can score a set of clean door moldings at some point... a previous owner of my car decided drywall screws were the best way to reattach the door moldings instead of replacing the clips

Old junk


New stuff

Not sure why the caster looks so bad in this photo. It is off a little bit but it's not THAT bad. I think it has something to do with the fender alignment. Although i can tell with the front end off that she's been in an accident before. Supposed to rain all day tomorrow, which sucks, but i have a ton of garage work to do including:
seat pan swap on seats
crack open my si transmission, swap the 5th gear to the hf 5th, and replace the third gear synchro,
and swap the cam in the motor with a jdm d15b vtec cam i forgot i had laying around

 

Man time sure seems to just FLY on by like some one broke its fast forward button, but I was able to get some stuff done over the past week. First, last week, I took apart my two clusters hoping the speedometer would be a direct swap, but sadly the two faces are shaped slightly different between tach and no tach clusters, which would mean if I wanted to keep my cars mileage I'd have to remove the needles, swap the faces then hope I get them re installed back on. So I decided since my tach cluster is only 25k miles lower than what my car has, I'm not going to worry about it. As a consolation prize, I treated the car to a set of indeglow gauges instead. They feature a white face overlay that glows a light blue or light green depending on which I choose when hooked up to the light system. I had these in my old cb7 and I really liked them so why not eh?


Stock cluster above, replacement below

The hole where I ran the wires for the gauge overlays so they light up at night

Finished product. Much better in my opinion!

 

We finally had an actual nice day last week that also happened to be a day off of mine, so Sunday (I work tuesday-saturday) I spent the morning just enjoying the spring... but still managed to put in some work. No pics yet, but I finished cleaning then installing all of little dashboard related bits, including all three dash vents, the coin pocket, the cluster amd cluster cover, multifunction switch, steering colum cover and an si steering wheel. No pics yet as I still need to install the radio and lower center console, as well as. I also got creative with one of the dummy plates to mount the controller for my indeglow gauges. Monday the weather turned bipolar again so I spent the day going through my si transmission. If I remember right the Si I pulled this transmission out of only had around 160k on it, but sure enough had a third gear grind. I was expecting some major carnage but the internals all looked super clean. There was some wear on the dog teeth of the gear, as well as the shift collar but the synchro didn't look bad to my eyes. But just to be safe I replaced all three parts with known good replacements, as well as swapping out 5th for the crx hf gear set. Not going to lie, all the write ups make it seem so easy to put the case back together, but in my experience something is alllllwwwwaaaayyyyyss hanging up.


Then last night I got off work, happened to pull up fb market place and saw a post for a set of hx wheels with tires for a great deal so filled up the tank, mobbed down to Salem and scored some new wheels for the new daily. Hoping to get the motor in this weekend, fingers crossed though, the engine bay is dirrrtyyyy

 

Well another weekend come and gone, didn't get as much done as I had liked, but I had a bunch of other crap to get done too. Also, a lot of the jobs I'm doing right now are time consuming. Anyways after a long work week I slept in/lazed about in the morning on Sunday, then helped my roommate move the latest car he rescued into the junk yard, then spent some time helping him tinker on it. Don't ask me how but this guy actually saved and bought a car out of pick n pull once it was in the rows. Can't blame him though, the car he rescued is a 93 subaru legacy turbo wagon, which happened to be the exact same color as his crazy built 92 turbo legacy sedan.

Anyways once I was done helping him out, I DID manage to accomplish a few things. I started with polishing the cam journals on my d15b vtec cam, then installed it with a new cam seal, set the valve lash then installed a new crank seal since it was leaking, and then set the belt timing. Then I pulled the water pipe off and replaced the o rings on it since they were bad and discovered a leaky iacv coolant hose. Today I made it over to the yard and scored a set of keyless door handles, a better condition bumper light and the hardware I was missing for the front transmission mount. At this point the swap is ready to go into the car, I just need another non raining day to pull the old motor out. I started working on pulling it today as well but kept getting rained out. Oh well. Oh I also picked up some energy suspension transmission mount inserts as well as the radius arm bushings from my work

 

Hey! recently ive been looking into possibly getting a ef hatch aswell. partially for being a daily but also partially for the potential of a swap. the ef im looking at right now has a 5 spd that came stock with a questionable health motor and I was wondering, do you know of any possible vtech swaps that would allow me to retain the stock 5spd? simply so i can save some dough. I know that most likely i will need a new ecu and to convert from obd0 to obd1, but I would really enjoy a bump up from the stock dx motor. and if the vtech isnt a realistic outcome any motor that would pair with the 5 spd and have room to be worked on/built in the future is ideal. any info would help! *ima also new to the forums so appologies if i messed something up!

 

Honestly after wrenching on these things for a few years, the best bang for the buck swap would be a b18 or b20 swap if you want more na power, and if you want to boost them later the b series can handle a lot more power than a d series. Yes, you can do like what i have and convert your dx engine to a vtec head and go mpfi but the amount of money you spend doing just a head swap is almost as much as doing a b series swap. Plus most d series vtec engines you find these days will benefit from a rebuild unless you happen to get a low mileage swap from an importer, so keep that in mind as well. But if you are wanting to stay d series yes you can reuse your transmission and just convert to mpfi and ad wiring for vtec

 

thanks for the great reply! and yeah most likely im gonna go with a b18 or b16. is there any specific place i can pick up some full swaps for decent prices. the prices recently are outraguously high and would break the budget. and including all the supporting stuff needed.

 

Awesome to see another build from an old screen name!!! Seems like the only way to get a golden era honda these days is fixing one that is junked out.

 

thanks man! I actually have several builds I could post. I agree, you should see the condition of the crx I have tucked away for a "not so rainy day". Poor thing has been painted several times, had a body kit put on it at one point and never finished, and the quarter pannel is full of mud plus many dings and dents. I got lucky with my integra though. I bought a super clapped 01 gsr and came to the conclusion that shell swapping would be easier, after browsing Craigslist for a bit I stumbled across a super clean theft recovery 96 special edition and swapped everything over. I wish I would have taken more pics of that build, it was a longer process than I thought it would be

 

yeah no problem! Decent prices? Sheesh in this day not sure. My go to for swaps is hmo (hmotorsonline.com) but I'd say browse your local market place too see if you can get a deal. At this point in their lives the newest b series motor is 22 years old so at minimum it will need all new seals and gaskets. It doesn't take much more to have new rings installed, and have the head looked over by a machine shop

 

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Been working a ton of over time and have been spending the last three weekends clearing out my storage locker. I'll be back on the build soon, tons of stuff to work on still

 

Finally had a chance to get back at it!


"A couple of sr20's would pull a premium one week before race wars..."

Spent some of the day relaxing, then in the afternoon between rain storms was able to get the old engine out, dowsed the whole engine bay in super clean and then pressure washed it all clean. It's not 10000% perfect but it's WAY better than it's ever been. New engine going in tomorrow

 

It's not finished yet, but there's a heart back in her! Lots of behind the scenes work done yesterday to get here

 

Wow time sure flies by fast! Been putting in work where i can, life is a whirlwind and ill be honest ive noticed i spend WAY too much time on tik tok instagram etc... but i have the car almost done! Well stage one is almost done anyways, which is getting the car put together, running and driving. I'll let the pics speak for themselves...

Power to the car all wired up, stereo installed and testing it out, everything works great. My right turn signal indicator is burnt out though, so ill have to fix that

Still need to order new bumper lights, and eventually find a new to me front bumper, but i got the front end all back together, bought brand new iron man tires for the hx wheels, front mudflaps installed, and slapped on an aftermarket hood bra that used to be on my other hatch. The amber corners look better to me than the oem ones imo

 

Great work on this so far, too few replies here! Nice looking EF, I've always kind of wanted to build one of these. EF hatch or sedan, nice looking cars.

 

Whelp, im down to a seat pan swap and just tidying up loose ends... but i have to call it quits for today to go enjoy some bbq with my dad for his birthday. Engine bay is pretty much wrapped up other than needing a new painted valve cover. The engine bay shot reminds me of a 90's throw back before everyone had tucked shaved or boosted engine bays. Just bolt ons and go. Taking a gamble for now on a cold air intake, but i do have an aem bypass valve installed so i SHOULD be ok as long as i don't drive through deep water

Had to modify the cai i bought because i think it was meant for a dpfi intake manifold. Never the less i was able to get it to fit and work. Just need to charge up the ac. I also installed new bumper lights

Booty shot from the other day. Looking forward to installing a better exhaust, tint, and lips front and rear in the future. Wouldn't mind dropping it an inch or so all around either