Nothing lasts forever, but she almost has. For twenty years, I’ve been thinking Mole’s 1982 Honda Civic would not last another year. And there were things we had to fix, but then she’d just keep on going. At the end of last year, the car had been getting progressively harder to start, and would sputter and hesitate for the first few blocks when first started, but still she kept going. As the year turned the corner, suddenly she started overheating, and would issue clouds of white smoke when started: Blown head gasket. Time for a new car…
But I couldn’t let this wonderful little car just be towed to a junk yard and get torn to pieces; or be crushed for scrap metal. So I bought a head gasket kit and had to clear out some space in the garage to work on it. The bike rack I’d made a few years ago jutted too far out into the garage to fit a car next to it.
I put some hooks in the wall, and hung the bikes up on hooks. Mole’s city bike is just too heavy to lift up, though, so it will need to be wheeled around…
Plenty of room! Now, to rent an engine lift, and get out the ’82 Civic shop manual.
The most difficult part is keeping track of all the vacuum hoses: A car of this age does not have a computer – or fuel injection. It has a carburetor, and the emissions are controlled mechanically through miles of vacuum hoses. I think there are about fifty hoses to label and keep track of before the head of the engine can be lifted out.
This is the “head”: I left the carburetor and intake manifold attached, so there’s less to reattach later.
No mystery here about what the problem is! One cylinder is completely filled with coolant that has leaked through the broken head gasket. In the few weeks the car’s been sitting in the garage, some rust has formed, too. The oil was an emulsified gloopy mess: Mayonnaise!
This absolutely felt like open heart surgery. Poor little car was hoping I knew what I was doing (first time).
The photo below shows the old head gasket. To contain the forces inside the cylinders, they embed a metal circle in the gasket around each cylinder. The second from the front one had rusted through – should have been more careful changing the coolant!
Mole caught a picture of me slowly lowering the head back in. Then the time consuming part: reconnecting all those hoses. If I were planning to keep the car, I would have replaced all those rubber hoses at this time. A tiny leak in any of them makes the engine run poorly.
When reconnecting the timing belt, I discovered that the mechanic who had replaced the timing belt (not me!) had set the valve timing off slightly. At first I didn’t believe it, but true enough, it had been wrong for years! This engine is so magnificent it can even compensate for the valve timing being one notch off! With the correct valve timing the engine now started even easier, and had more power, than before I replaced the head gasket.
So she’s back alive, and I was using her to get plywood, gyp board, and as a general SF runaround car. While going to American Ace to buy electrical parts for the garage, I ran into someone who wanted to buy her. He was so excited about the car, he was willing to buy it right outside the store (how would I get home??) He came over later that afternoon, and gave us cash: Years ago, he says, he had one. He loves the car.
So long! It’s been 32 years since mole learned to drive in this car. We’ve traveled to Canada multiple times, to Colorado, Tahoe, Arizona, and countless times up and down the coast of California in this car. Take care of her, Charles, and she’ll last forever!