Originally Posted By: Kool1
Originally Posted By: OneEyeJack
Owners in the dry sunbelt have an overwhelming advantage when it comes to the cost of owning, insuring and maintaining an automobile or pickup for personal use.
My Honda has never seen snow and very little rain. It's parked inside in a closed garage at home and many times inside at work. I've owned it since new and have no plans to ever sell it.
My first major expense was replacing all the bearings and seals in the transmission at 200K miles because of noise, along with the first clutch and pressure plate, speedo cable and speedometer assembly. I did the work myself at home and spent about $300 on parts and about $50 to rent a transmission jack for the week. The owner's manual automotive engine oil recommended for the tranny was Mobil 1 10w-30 but now I use Red Line MTL which is more suited to the task. At 430K+ with the MTL there's no noise at all. I replaced the clutch at 400K when I rebuilt the engine. It failed smog because of visible smoke. The oil control rings wore out so I rebuilt the whole engine. The rest of the engine inside was in great shape and would have gone a lot longer if it had not been for those oil control rings and having to pass smog.
I consider fluids, filters, hoses, belts, tires, brakes, shocks, struts, nuffler, smog hardware and tune ups to be just wear and tear items to be expected expenses on any vehicle, new or used unless you purchased an expensive car that includes some maintenance.
Did you use genuine Honda parts in your rebuild? I only have 181,000 miles on my Honda CRV and hope to get up to your mileage one day. Your story is inspiring to me.
I was lucky enough to find an NOS rebuild kit and all the other NOS parts at a dealer that was clearing out all their old obsolete parts. I recommend NOS parts for older Hondas. I was recently burned by a NAPA ignition coil (IC676) and went right back to an NOS coil.
This engine absolutely did not need a rebuild except for the failed oil control rings. The compression test before the tear-down was within new car specs. When I redid the head I was able to re-use all the springs, intake and exhaust valves and camshaft. The head was flat and only required a think clean up pass on the mill.
It appears that Honda engines like to be revved and not lugged. This 1.5L engine with a 3-barrel carb has a sweet spot between 3-3.5K rpm (65-75mph). After a very careful rebuild I ran it on a friends dyno and it produces 80 corrected hp at 6K rpm and 90 ft-lb of corrected torque at 3.4K rpm. The numbers are corrected for weather and calculated at the flywheel. I'm averaging 37-41 miles per gallon on Costco gas driving mixed city and highway miles.
The original factory number in 1984 are 76hp at 6K rpm and 84 ft-lb at 3.5K rpm. The increased performance is from matching manifolds, ports, careful work on the combustion chambers including un-shrouding the edges of the valve seats and a touch of work on the valve guides, a richer main jet, a smaller emulsion tube and several pizzas and some midnight oil burning.
My gas mileage is about exactly the same as before the rebuild except on long freeway trips. The last couple of trips have netted 43mpg and 45mpg, all on the freeway, LA to San Francisco and back. Before this I would have expected something like 40-42mpg, all carefully measured and calculated as usual, no dashboard readings on this car.
