Missed the first two chapters? Catch up here: Part 1 and Part 2.
When we left off, I’d made a promise to a stranger nine hours away in Saskatchewan: if his rusty ’88 Prelude with the 4WS system was still sitting there in the spring, it was mine.
Wait — hang on. It’s been years since Part 2. I owe you all a bit of a catch-up before we pick this back up. So consider this a time-leap explanation, not a clean continuation.
Spring 2016 came, the car was still there, and true to my word, I brought it home.
Here’s the part I didn’t tell you yet: I never once thought that blue shell was going to be the car. I bought it knowing full well it was a parts donor and nothing more. Or did I think that? Anything is possible, right? Rust was rotting the body like a cancer, and fixing it would’ve cost more than just buying a cleaner shell outright. Two years of sitting, a body I had zero intention of building around — I wanted what was on it, not what it was. The 4WS system I’d been chasing, some good trim, power everything, that iconic spoiler, and a few pieces I already knew Shell 1 didn’t have.
That was the whole plan or was it?
It got me thinking, though — maybe I should just invest in cleaning up the first one instead. Spend the money fixing the rust on the rockers, taking the 4WS system, and and using the best of both to make one solid, running 3rd Gen Prelude.
Simple. Right?
The Realizing of Nothing
Except plans have a way of mutating the second you’ve got two dead-ish cars parked side by side and a welder within arm’s reach that you don’t actually know how to use yet.
The further down the rabbit hole I went, the harder it got to compromise with myself on what to actually do — and the worse things got, every which way I turned.
I had Shell 1 — my original ’90, already torn into for the engine bay refresh, already rotting from the underside up, needing a full rebuild before it would run again. But it was safetied.
And now I had this Saskatchewan shell — rust-riddled in its own right, but sitting on a body that wasn’t quite as far gone in the places that mattered. And this one actually ran. It could drive. It just would never see a safety inspection without money I didn’t have at the time.
So 2016 wasn’t a highlight. It was more of a what do I even do here — a lot of thinking, not much doing. One step closer to saying fuck it.
2017: The Year of Nothing, and Fuck It
Then 2017 came in and before I knew I had done nothing with either car that made any sense — but I did gain a garage to actually move the cars into. But I didn’t want two cars anymore. I wanted one. The one that could limp. The one I didn’t want, except for its parts.
So I did what any reasonable person absolutely should not do: I said fuck it, and started pulling everything worth keeping off both cars — cutting solid portions off the red one to keep on standby — and rolled it all into one single, mismatched, red-and-blue disaster of a Prelude that could, and I mean this in the loosest possible sense, actually move. It limped a few blocks to its new home, and that was that.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t finished. It wasn’t even really a car so much as it was two half-cars wearing a trench coat. But it moved, and for a guy who’d already spent two years underneath these things with a wire wheel and a prayer, “it moves” felt like a finish line.
It was a false hope. But at least I had my own garage to work out of now — no more outside trailer-park-style shop.
Then the Frankenstein just… sat. I sat. Life did whatever life does to project cars when you stop looking at them. If you’ve ever had a build stall out not because you gave up, but because everything else in your life quietly took priority without asking permission first, you know exactly what this time looked like. Which is to say: it didn’t look like anything. It just passed.
That drive from the rental house to the garage I now owned — that was the last time I ever drove a 3rd gen Prelude.
May 2018: The Dusty Miracle a Few Blocks Away
Then, May 2018, the universe threw me a bone I wasn’t even looking for. By this point, with a single shell to my name, I was hunting for donor cars to strip good parts off of, and saving up to have a shop fab new rockers. Instead, a guy messaged me out of nowhere, asking if I’d seen the one sitting in an industrial park, collecting dust.
A much cleaner ’89 turned up, sitting dusty in a compound just a few blocks from where I lived. Nobody wanted it — and I mean nobody — because the timing belt had let go and never been fixed properly, and the shop holding it wouldn’t touch it again until they got paid. They just wanted it gone.
I tracked down the owner and told him straight: I’ll buy it, but not for what you’re asking, because you wouldn’t even cover the shop’s bill at that price. And a bad timing belt on an interference engine leads to other mechanical issues real fast — exactly the kind of thing that scares off buyers who don’t already know better.
I knew better. Or at least I thought I did. I already had a solid, running engine. I already had parts from two Preludes. The one thing this car had that I didn’t was a body that wasn’t held together by two donor cars, rust, and spite.
I basically stole it for the price I paid, and got it towed home.
Oh yeah — it was an automatic too. Ugly. Who wants one of those?
Unable to keep a prelude in the parking pad, I had no choice but to organize the garage to shove both in, the garage had turned into garage-stuff-plus-two-Preludes. And everyone had opinions. Give it up. Move on. Buy something that runs, you absolute lunatic. Every conversation somehow circled back to why I was still doing this to myself. But I had to start somewhere, so I did. I needed room for this dusty, timing-belt-dead automatic, but structurally mostly-honest ’89 to get some serious work done, which meant tearing apart the very Frankenstein I’d built two years earlier.
Stripping the Monster to Make Room for the Miracle
Here’s where it gets a little poetic, if you squint.
Everything I’d fought to combine into one rolling car got stripped back out, piece by piece, and rehomed into shells and storage — on the hope it would eventually make its way into what would become the real car.
Two months later, I was standing in the garage looking at exactly this: one single miracle shell, the remains of two other Preludes scattered everywhere in parts, the 4WS system I’d been chasing since that first Kijiji notification in the dead of night, and a stripped shell ready for the scrapper. All of it, finally under one roof, planned for one chassis, in August 2018 — in a garage that looked like a chop shop crossed with a storage facility for a renovation-scrap horror story.
Three cars. Three years. One survivor.
And Then, Winter
You’d think that’s where the momentum carries you through to the finish. It’s not. It’s never that simple with this car — you’ve read the first two parts, you already know that.
Some of 2019 went into trying the timing belt repair. The car laughed at me. I did get it running — sounded rough — but other life issues kept getting in the way of doing the job properly.
Winter hit. Money got tight. Life handed me the kind of responsibilities that don’t care how close you are to finishing a wire tuck you’d been dreaming about since 2015. And then, before any of that could really resolve itself, the world handed everyone else the same thing, all at once: COVID.
The car sat. I sat. The Frankenstein was gone, the miracle waited in the garage collecting dust, practically crying to be worked on, giving me the evil eye every time I walked past. Sometimes I’d just go sit in it, doing nothing but thinking — remembering how fun it was to drive the first one back in 2015, remembering the short, sad limp of 2017. Meanwhile I did what everyone else on the planet was doing that year: mostly nothing, and worrying about everything.
Then I found a cheap engine hoist — the one tool I didn’t have that could actually get me moving again. And it worked.
It wasn’t until September 2020 that I finally pulled the engine again, two years after I’d built the thing that engine was supposed to go into. I started stripping the bay, painted it, primed it, and got the engine back in. But pulling the automatic engine out created a whole new problem: the manual transmission mount issue. And the price I didn’t want to pay — couldn’t really afford — at the time was exactly what I needed to spend to get this miracle running.
What Comes Next
The following year, life changed again — bigger changes than a stalled timing belt or a broken water pump ever threw at me. So in 2022, I found myself in a full rat race just to get this thing as close to running as I possibly could.
That’s not a story for this post.
But that post is going to be a game changer. Buckle up, because Part 4 is where shit finally gets real.
That’s Part 4.
Stay tuned – I promise it wont take a year or three.
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