Topic: 1991 Honda Prelude Si "R1CECAR" Build
New, excited team reporting in. Just wanted to share our progress with the world.
Here's our current budget breakdown. We have receipts for everything, but I don't forsee much issue given that our car is basically a stock 91 Prelude with a fart cannon on it. Our goal is an "honest" $500 car, but like most we're stretching the definition of honest a bit (not counting alignment, fluids, sure you can't sell safety items but what if you happen to have two gas tanks, etc). At this point, the only budget item left that we want to buy is an accusump and an oil sandwich plate.
We bought two third gen Preludes for $800. One car was an 88 with a salve title, a banged up body, and a messed up front end but was otherwise running/driving. The other car was a 91, which had a mint body but was missing an engine. Both cars looked like they had been a project car for someone a decade ago, but hadn't really ever been brought back up to par. After much debate, we decided to fix up the 91 because sexy race rice car.
On with the pics! (the first batch have been recycled from the previous thread)
Here we are picking up the two cars. The 88 is in the background (we drove it home) and the 91 is in the foreground.
Tires on the 91:
The 88 came with plenty of parts (and some spares) inside the car
Here they both are in my driveway
What a pretty little car
At this point we started tearing into the 88. These brake pads were only a small slice of what was to come
Pulling the engine/trans out of the 88. We didn't really trust the cherry picker, so the 2x4s were only in place for pictures and while we came up with a better place to put the motor.
Note the top half of the factory 4, 2, 1 header. Despite the fancy OE header, people still claim that an aftermarket header will net you 10 hp on a car that only originally had 135 horsepower.
We wanted to pull the plugs to get a feel for how the motor was running. However, when we pulled the wires the bases of each wire was soaking wet. When we pulled the valve cover this is what we saw (note the oil spa in the spar plug well).
The first plug we pulled. No, we didn't dip into into a chocolate milkshake.
Thankfully the rest were just coated in oil
We blamed it on someone replacing the valve cover gasket without replacing the plug gaskets. Overall the motor looks to be in pretty good shape. We set valve lash while the valve gasket was off and marveled at the new timing belt. Hopefully it got a new water pump too. We put the valve cover back on (with new gaskets) and forgot about it.
Honda split the four year long third generation Prelude into two sub-halves (because, Honda): 88/89 and 90/91. The 88/89 cars had a speedo cable, but 90/91 didn't. 88/89 also had different axle splines than 90/91. This meant two things: we needed to pull apart the speed senders on both transmissions to make a hybrid unit that would fit the 88 trans, but send a digital signal to the cluster/ECU. We also had to swap uprights between the 88 and the 91 so we could re-use the much better looking axles that were on the 88.
The speed sender went together ok (here they both are in pieces), but wound up being an epic failure in the end.
An empty garage!
"There should be a motor in here, or something"
Yes, yes there should be.
Tada.
Do we have any regrets? Just one really. We drained the oil out of the trans as we were pulling the motor/trans because it kept leaking out of the axle seals (that will happen when you pull the axles and tilt the transmission). We installed the motor/trans dry. Unfortuantly for us, the fill plug on the trans is in a horrible location where you can't get a socket on it and had been tightened by a gorilla. We wound up having to use a pipe wrench to get the fill plug out.
A good crush washer is on the left, the one that was on our transmission is on the right. The gas tank was the same way.
Once we put all the various fluids back where they belonged the car wouldn't start. Some quick poking around reviled this rats nest. After restoring the harnesses to stock condition the car fired right up. It was disappointingly quiet with an open header.
While tearing down the car we found some actual rats nests in the headliner and glove box.
While mounting the awesome exhaust (only somewhat joking here, I'm generally a magnaflow fan) from the 88 on the 91 I found another amusing surprise. This bracket had been mounted by drilling a hole through the trunk floor. Note the factory exhaust mount about 6" behind this mount.
The 91 was covered with dry-rotted dust boots on its suspension...
... along with dry-rotted rubber pretty much everywhere ...
... and blown rear shocks. On the plus side, we did get bonus adjustable height coil-overs.
Starting to look like a race rice car. We are going to run a full(ish) dash to keep heat. The fancy-pants steering wheel came with the 91.
This day was a happy day (getting new tires + the alignment). I saw the tech who was going to pull the car in walk out to it with a seat cover and a floor cover. He opened the door, stopped, looked very confused, stared for 15 or so seconds, and then carefully installed the seat cover and floor cover.
While driving the car around post alignment I discovered that it's hella loud with the windows up, especially around 75 mph (our highway speed limit is 70). Putting the windows down helps quite a bit. We might look into a helmholtz resonator to knock down that peak after we get it on the track to verify that it doesn't just move up/down frequency wise with speed.
The 91 outside. In this picture it has the 88 hood on it (the 91 hood had a broken bolt in one of its mounting holes that we hadn't extracted yet). We took this picture in November. It's now December and we're supposed to see 63 degrees today. Last night it only got down to 50.
We completely stripped the 88 and started the process of cutting it up into manageable pieces to scrap. We did remove the rear side windows so we could sell them, but we cut out the front/rear windshields since they were both in poor shape.
To-do items:
Sunroof delete (we need all the headroom we can get for the 2" clearance between the cage/helmet)
Mount Caribou seat
Roll cage (gotta get the seat mounted first)
Safety items (kill switch, fire extinguisher, better rear view mirror, etc)
Install theme items (I'm pretty sure you have all guessed what direction our theme is going)
Shakedown