Once again, a new summer rally is upon us. Since this is technically my buddy's bachelor party, we wanted to travel in comfort. That means the furious grumbling and vibrations of my little '92 Civic didn't quite cut it, so it is relegated to the sidelines for yet another year of the rally.
So what did we get instead? This 2004 Acura TSX:
For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Acura TSX is a European Accord. Inexplicably, despite Europeans being poorer-by-capita than North Americans, they usually get the nice stuff so that they can admire the one person in their squalid village who can afford parking.
As such, this fine beast has a
6-speed manual transmission and
air conditioning. It also has some other stuff that we haven't had before on the rally, like a working sunroof, airbags and an alignment.
The body, she is not so good.
According to the PO, the PPO was backed into by a truck. Why is the damage so high up on the body? Because it used to be slammed, which explains all the wheel well rust.
Fixable. It drives nice and the interior is good, which is all that really matters.
It smells not so great, though. When we got it, it had like six "little tree" air fresheners, which is always a sign that something worse is wrong. It looks like someone spilled gear oil or shock oil in the trunk, which I have experience removing.
The PPO (or someone along those lines, this car has had at least five other owners) also installed a toggle switch in the centre console that appears to do nothing, hardwired an old-iPod interface, and left some sub wiring dangling around. These things could be related.
Let's move on from the inside and look at this ittshay Injen aftermarket intake that was installed by someone. It also has some weird wiring poorly tucked in the engine bay which I initially thought was HIDs, but the car should have factory HIDs since it has projectors. There's a loose relay holder that was crappily electrical-taped to one strut tower.
Things to do:
- New lug nuts because the tuner lugs that are on this thing are rusty
- Wire wheel off the rust, bondo it and spray bomb it. It's a 286,000 km car, it doesn't deserve patch panels.
- Figure out what's going on with all that wiring.
- Reportedly, it has fifth-gear pop out. Since the PO expressed very loudly to us that he did a "transmission flush," I think the best thing here is to immediately change out the fluid for the proper Honda fluid because I bet there's some crazy itshay in here. Hopefully it's not the shift fork; 6th gear doesn't pop out.
- Give the body a serious going-over to see if it's missing any bolts, clips, etc. There is some kind of rattle from the front end, and I noticed a missing fender bolt on the passenger side when we test drove it.
