Honda Accord 2.0i ES Coupe
Small correction from the last article; I rarely sell a car before buying it's replacement. The only difference here was a friend had agreed to buy the saloon and I started looking something different...
I spent a whole weekend driving around viewing various cheapies, none of which were as described. Feeling a bit disheartened on the way work on Monday without a new toy, I saw a car with a 'for sale' sign in the window 30 seconds from work. During lunch, I took a walk and had a look; by this point I was pretty familiar with Hondas and always liked this big old coupes. The V6 would have been nice but they only came with an auto. At first glance, it was very clean! So I got in touch with the seller (the owners brother), arranged to view and test drive it, and there I was, the owner of my third Honda Accord.
Things started to fall apart pretty quickly. The first time I filled the tank, I got a strong smell of petrol and saw it dripping out from underneath! On inspection, it was leaking from the seams. Pretty pi$$ed off, I approached the seller, who only worked down the road from me, and confronted him. He was pretty apologetic but insisted he'd never filled the tank as he was only selling it. To be honest, I'd done the same when selling something so believed him. Either way, I now had to do a fair chunk of work on what I thought would be a reliable runaround.
I had to drop the rear subframe to get the tank out and couldn't find a replacement anywhere as the coupe uses a different tank from the saloons. I'd also heard mixed reviews about the tank liners with modern fuel, so I very gingerly cleaned it up and exposed several pinholes. On jobs like this, I like to experiment with techniques that some might turn their nose up at. On this occasion, I cleaned everything, used chemical metal on the pin-holes and then painted it all with POR 15 (I kept some spare 'blobs' of both to soak in a jar of petrol to monitor for the next few weeks too).
While the rear end was apart, I exposed some rust which needed repairing, re-made the rusted numberplate light mounts and also cleaned and painted the subframe.
The car was trouble free for a good few months until one morning I turned the wheel, heard a pop and then lost power steering; one of the PAS pipes had rusted and burst...another subframe out job.
As the pipe was between the body and subframe, a lot of parts needed to be removed to access it, which then highlighted a very crusty of subframe, the rest was perfectly fine though. I replaced the rusted section of pipe with a hose, repaired the subframe, cleaned and painted everything and reassembled.
Oh, one other thing I noticed while underneath was the fuel and brake pipes that ran the length of the car was dangerously rusted! So these were also replaced.
One last job that didn't warrant any pictures was a full exhaust after the cat parted company from the downpipe due to rusted bolts. The whole system was past it at that point so I replaced it all.
After a surprising amount of work, the car was in fantastic condition and gained lots of positive comments during the MOT. Although I liked it and had obviously put a lot of work in, I was browsing autotrader one day and a bargain came up that I couldn't refuse, so that was bought and the Honda had to go.
