VROOOMM - 2000 Honda Prelude Project

[ryan freeland]

In the interest of killing time at work, I thought I'd start this thread haha. So I posted some pictures and stuff in my intro thread, but I thought I'd take it from the top here. When I got my license, my parents bought my brother and I a 1999 Ford Explorer.. we shared it and drove it to school and all. It had quite a few issues and we eventually had to replace the entire rear axle because the differential gears were grinding. When we opened the differential up, the oil was silver (no bueno). So while I was away at school last year, the parents sold the car to a dealer for $1k, which was a really stupid decision because they could have easily gotten 3k-4k if they sold it themselves, but I guess it was kind of a knee jerk decision, something my dad almost never does.

Anyway, that led me to start looking into buying a car because I would need to get around to work and stuff in the summer, and it would be great to bring it back to school and join MM! I would constantly scour autotrader.com, cars.com, craigslist for cars. Initially I was looking at Integras because a friend of mine had one and it was pretty ballin. The real criteria I had were: had to be stick shift, had to look cool, had to go relatively fast, and had to have good gas mileage, and I only wanted to pay $5k tops. After a lot of searching, I narrowed my search down to Integras and Preludes. I then found a 1996 Integra GSR on autotrader for $3900. It had 109k, but looked clean inside and out. As I was shutting down my computer to drive out with my dad to check out the car, the seller emails me saying some other guy put a $500 deposit to hold the car until the next day... so I was pretty bummed at that point. So I went back to craigslist and found the Prelude listed at $5500 up in Fair Lakes (which is about 15 minutes from me). I went to check it out the next day, talked her down to $5k and drove it home.

So... the issues I found when I bought the car: oil leak, check engine light, dying front brakes, yellow headlights.

I got my hands on an OBD2 reader and the ECU tripped 3 codes: running rich, dead O2 sensor, and EGR insufficient flow. I removed the EGR valve and it was caked with carbon, so I scraped and blew all the buildup out with an air compressor. I then ordered a new set of O2 sensors ($80, yikes!) and installed them.


Old vs. New

This got rid of the CEL. Next, I moved onto the oil leak... Here's the VTEC solenoid out of the car and the bad gasket (I split it in half when removing it).





Next I moved on to more cosmetic mods.. I buffed the yellow oxidation off the headlights, painted my gauge bezels, and replaced my gauge lights with blue LEDs.


Old.


New.







Next I moved onto the tunes. The stock front speakers both got blown out by the aftermarket head unit. Also, my friend gave me a pair of Alpine Type-S 6x9's for the back because he thought they were "blown", turns out he wired his speakers with duct tape and they came undone (dumbass). So I ordered a set of Polk DB6501 components for the front which are rated at 100RMS/300 Peak.. and I also ran new speaker wire through the doors which was a complete BITCH... here are pics...









I also had to fabricate the door panels a lot to get the new 4-bolt mounting to work... so the Dremel rocked for that. (no pics sorry)

Next project is to run this amp wiring kit:



To this amp in the trunk:



And that's where she stands now.

[.RJ]

I always liked those. Fun cars

[Mike]

I always liked those. Fun cars

+1 until they start blowing oil out the wazoo... they all do.

[.RJ]

I just looked on craigslist - wow there's a lot of junk out there. A reasonable mileage (100k?) stock, well cared for 97+ Prelude looks to be a bit of a unicorn...

[Apoc]

I always liked those. Fun cars

+1 until they start blowing oil out the wazoo... they all do.

They're not that bad. Eric still has my '98 SH and I think it had like 150k miles on it. I think last I heard, it burned a quart every 3k miles.

[ScottyB]

off to a good start. it's probably for the best you didn't get a GS-R anyway, it would probably have been stolen as soon as you walked away from it.

[ryan freeland]

Mine burns a shit ton of oil... something I found out quite awhile after I bought it. And everyone says GS-R's get stolen haha.

[Mike]

I always liked those. Fun cars

+1 until they start blowing oil out the wazoo... they all do.

They're not that bad. Eric still has my '98 SH and I think it had like 150k miles on it. I think last I heard, it burned a quart every 3k miles.

You can see his burning oil under normal acceleration. I don't believe a quart per 3k.

[HAULN-SS]

Are these cars actually two strokes?

[ryan freeland]

I ran 4 AWG power wire, speaker, and RCA cable today... pics:










Next thing is mounting the amp, running the amp's ground and crimping the 4AWG into battery terminal rings..