Places to do Car Work

This is just a funny post, but I thought it's funny the places I've done significant car work.

Parking lot of condo I was renting in Miami (underground).
Driveway of the house I was renting in Miami.
Parent's garage in IL.
Parent's driveway in IL.
Great aunt's garage in VA.
Bubbe's (grandmother's) driveway / in front of house on street in NJ.

I suppose the list will grow.

Ceras Victoria (Honda Prelude), Car Alarm Removal

Ceras Victoria had an aftermarket Clifford fancy alarm installed in her just after I bought her. I wanted a good car alarm.

The problem is as time has gone on I have not driven her much, especially being in law school and using public transportation every day.
I drive the car maybe once a week, more likely once a month. This means I use fuel stabilizer in the tank a lot and that the internal battery on the car alarm goes dead.
I disconnect the battery when I park it because there is an electrical drain (possibly was the alarm) so that I can start it when I need to.
The disconnecting of the battery meant that every time I reconnected the battery the car alarm treated it as a break in. This means that it goes in super shut down ignition kill mode which is just a pain in the ass. So, when it did this while I was visiting family in New Jersey with my girl friend (was supposed to be a short visit, turned out much longer) I decided the alarm had to go.

Luckily I had my camera with me.

Seat removed to make it easier to access the dash.

Ceras Victoria (Honda Prelude), Fender Remodeling

As mentioned before... the fenders on Ceras Victoria's ugly side sometime scrape the good rubber making for fun noises and interesting smells. This usually happens when the car is particularly loaded with stuff during left turns or big bumps.

Being really annoyed I took a hammer to it. Originally I was planning on reshaping the wheel well back to its original shape but that proved too difficult due to the folds in the metal.

I therefore hammered it up and out of the way, which helped a lot when the car is empty.
Also, to compensate for this, I'm known to left foot brake over bumps to shift weight forward and prevent wheel scrape. I think it sometimes drives cars behind me on the freeways crazy.

Pictures now...

Start...

Ceras Victoria (Honda Prelude), Road Trip to Washington DC, Summer 2012

I figured I'd post some images of the current state of the car...
I also drove it to and from Washington, DC this summer and up the East Coast some.

Nausicaa (Honda Prelude), Tear Down (Part 1)

I am in the process of tearing down Nausicaa before building her back up.

With law school and all, I haven't made that much progress. We'll see what I do with my free time and weekends this year.

Here are some photos of what has been done...

This is a picture of how I started...

Cloud (Subaru Forester), Back Together

While I was away in DC this summer my dad, brother, and sister finished putting Cloud back together.

I have no pictures of the process, but, on the bright side, it all works!

That means, fuel hoses and so on reconnected. I got a call from my dad asking why it would turn over but not catch and I had to remind him about the fuel relay under the dash. It is a royal pain to get to.

But yay! One project done, for now...

Ceras Victoria (Honda Prelude), Tail Light Swap

As seen earlier, post crash Ceras Victoria had some damage to the tail light.

Now, even with that damage I'd been driving around Miami for half a year and had no issues.
But upon moving back to IL for law school I got pulled over one summer night for having "white light show through."

Ceras Victoria (Honda Prelude), Headlight Swap

As seen in the other photos Ceras Victoria had suffered damaged.
To make her street legal I needed a working headlight.
This is the install.

Nausicaa (Honda Prelude), JDM Headlight Swap

As stated in the previous post I needed to put a pair of headlights on Ceras Victoria. The JDM ones would not fit, so, I put the JDM ones on Nausicaa and removed Nausicaa's for later use on Ceras Victoria. In the end I wound up with a spare headlight housing. Yay!

JDM Headlights

As the pictures show... Ceras Victoria had busted up headlights.
Nausicaa had a good pair.

A friend of mine had a pair of black housing JDM headlights for sale for a reasonable price, so I bought them from him, figuring those are what I wanted in the end on a finished car anyways (probably HID retrofitted, but I'll get to that one day, I hope).

So... here's the picture of the headlights I got before being installed, and the harness I bought so that the USDM harness in the car worked with JDM headlights, which us different bulbs.