My Love hate relationship with a 3rd gen prelude

I purchased a 3rd gen prelude in 2015 and loved the car. But after the struggle of getting it, and realizing the troubles of owning one. I began to hate the car, now I am blogging about my experiences. This is going to be a series of ongoing posts about my extremely unhealthy obsession of 3rd generation preludes. By the way, I still love the car!

Start of a love-hate relationship with a 3rd gen prelude

A few years ago, I had a crisis and wanted to purchase a project car. I knew I wanted an older Honda. So I searched Kijiji and came across this 90′ prelude si. The price was pretty sweet at only $900, and the car looked like it was in good condition. The other thing was, it had under 200,000 Km and it was safetied. This meant I would be able to drive it right away!

So I decided I would go and take a look, I found out someone else was interested in it, but still went anyway. The second I sat in the car, pushed in the clutch and turned the engine over, I realized I needed to own this car.

I told the guy, that he needed to call me right away if the other guy bailed… Two days later, waiting impatiently like any person with ADHD would do. Finally, I got all that sounded like bad news. But it turned out the other guy bailed and the car was mine. So I ran straight to the bank, grabbed the money and went straight for the car. I offered the guy $600, we settled on $750.

The first big disappointment

As soon as I got the car, I ran to the insurance company to get insurance. And what I heard shocked my world, it turned out the car was two days out of safety. I just realized I purchased a car, without a safety inspection and knew I was in trouble. I honestly felt like I was going to explode. If I would have bought the car two days prior, I wouldn’t have had this problem. I started to freak out, because if anything was wrong with the car when I brought. it would not pass a safety inspection. And who knew was was wrong with the car at this point.

So, I purchased a 5-day travel permit on the car and drove it home cursing the whole way.

And search begins

So as soon as I got home, I started using Facebook to try and find anyone who knew someone, who would be able to get this car to pass safety. A couple days a later, I found a guy who was going to take a look at the car and see what it needed. The only thing I knew about this was the guy, was that he was a mechanic of a friend of mine and worked out of this guys shop. So figured what the hell, I took the car to him, and he told me I should have it back in a couple weeks. He told me to give him a call every couple days for progress on the car.

After about two months of trying to get updates and missed calls from him, a bunch of text messages. I began to wonder if I would ever get my car back, or ever get the car on the road. Finally, I got a text message 2 am one night saying the car was ready. He told me it was about $700 worth of work. That morning I ran to the bank, got the cash, and got the car. The papers checked out, and I was able to insure the car.

I gotta tell you, the feeling of being able to drive this car is unexplainable.

Doing research on 3rd gen preludes

I pretty much drove it everywhere I got a chance too. I will admit I spent a lot of ours just driving the car for no reason what so ever. Also, a couple people offered to buy it off me on the spot. Thinking they were crazy for offering me cash and did not know why. I decided at this point, I would start doing some research on the car. I found out 3rd gen preludes are actually pretty rare. So I thought that was a bonus.

I also found out that the engine within the car, the b20a5 was called the “bastard B” for being almost impossible to modify. It was the precursor for the 90’s b series engine that was majorly popular in the Honda Civic, Integra, Del Sol, and CR-X lineups. And impossible to modify meant that, no other b-series parts worked on the damn thing. So that limited the number of options to work with or rebuild the engine.

And the problems start

Anyways, after I learned more about the car, I didn’t really care, because it was my new baby and I was going to do whatever it took to fix it up and make it look amazing. But, after a month or so cruising around Winnipeg, MB in the spring time weather. I noticed that the car was starting to overheat. And figured it had to do something with the water pump the guy I bought it off of mentioned.

So I decided I would investigate which made me start to notice a lot of other issues under the hood. Given that the water pump on this car was in such a tight spot, I wasn’t looking forward to replacing it. But then again, I had swapped a civic engine a few years prior, which I talked about in the post “I pushed a car for 3.5 km with passion!.” So, I had a pretty good idea of what I was doing. In the end, I did a lot more work to the car then I anticipated.

But, I’ll save that experience for another post, and continuation of my love-hate relationship with 3rd gen preludes…

Question!

Do you have a project car or a love-hate relationship with your car? If so, comment below, I would love to read your comments, and or posts on it!