Final assembly of the car seemed to take forever, but the paint looked so good that every accessory needed to be just right. The headlights were sanded, clear coated, and polished. The front bumper lights which are normally clear were painted with ten coats of tangerine candy. The CR-X SiR has amber front bumper lights and Marc matched the color perfectly. The corners of the taillights got the same treatment to make them more orange and less yellow. Of course all of the lights were buffed to make them look new. A new PPG windshield was installed to replace the old pitted one. Then new Honda emblems went on. Marc's final task was to paint the side moldings and rear bumper top with a satin black finish. Once those were installed we push started the car so I could drive it home to prep it for the car show.
The car had been gone for close to three months and I only had three nights to get it ready to compete against Chen's NSX at the Niesi Week Import Showoff. The headlights and side markers were wired with Password:JDM conversion harnesses. A new Odyssey battery was installed with Password's carbon fiber relocation kit. Then finally the big items went on.
Like I said in the beginning, I always wanted to build one of these cars. But everything listed above wasn't part of the original plan, the one that started about 15 years ago. All I really needed was a black EF hatch. The wheels were to be my Precedios. The car needed to be slammed. The seat needed to be on the floor, and the car had to have the HKS dual tip exhaust. To get the ride height down I've temporarily borrowed a set of Mugen N1 coilovers. They're thoroughly blown and I couldn't tell you how they perform since cornering too hard drags the mud flaps and I don't want to loose them yet. TRS racing fabricated a seat mount that drops my old Sparco EVO as low as it can go. It's in a fixed position but it's not like I'd let anyone else drive anyway. With the new cover nobody has noticed that the FIA certification expired a decade ago.
I'll get that up to spec before we take it to the track, but for now it's been a blast just to cruise around in. So far Project Civic Backmarker has only gone through one tank of gas since it was painted. That tank motored the editors of Lowrider, Import Tuner, and Turbo magazines on a nostalgic trip to lunch with the Bazooka Tube bumping. It also got the car to the Niesi Showoff where it earned higher marks than the NSX, as if there was any doubt. This showcar stuff has been fun, but it's just about time to get serious. In the next update we'll build a real suspension, then a real engine, and then get these prissy things out to the track to see what they can do.
The Shoes Make The Man
The wheels make the car. To a certain extent, Project Civic Backmarker was built just to show these puppies off. This set of Precedio Circuit Speck Tune wheels were purchased new in 1993 and were mounted on my CRX for several years. But soon after becoming a dedicated racecar that car needed bigger brakes and wheels that could accommodate them. The Precedios spent close to ten years serving as living room decorations and sometimes furniture. But I never had the heart to sell them.
When it finally came time to get them ready for the Backmarker, they were in pretty rough shape. I sent them out to a wheel restoration company who disassembled them, polished the barrels, powder coated the centers and put them back together. They looked beautiful, but when I got them home my fingers knocked several of the nuts off the back of the wheel rivets (they're really bolts and nuts but wheel people call them rivets.) Apparently several of the bolts had broken and someone had recently applied rubber cement to reattach them. It was pure luck that I noticed it before the adhesive had set.