The New Wheels

In early May Jay and I made a trip out to Star City, a little town between Melfort and Tisdale, to purchase an '86 Honda Civic sedan. A few months previously we had purchased an '84 Civic hatchback to fix up. The two previous owners were all friends of ours, so we knew this car as Agatha. However, there would have been a lot of repairs to the interior required to make Agatha comfortable to drive, and Jay thought it would be cheaper just to buy this other car and put Agatha's engine in instead. So that's what we did. Here is the report on the progress of the new car over the last couple of months:


1. So I mentioned that we went to Star City to get the car, but I didn't mention that none of Jay's trucks are fully assembled or plated. This meant towing it with Jay's Civic as I sat in the new car and steered! It actually went pretty well - the tow rope busted once, but other than that it was quite uneventful. Since there wasn't a battery in the car the radio didn't work, so I had lots of time to think about things. While I was steering I thought of naming the new car Goldie. Only later did Jay point out that it was Goldie Honda!


2. Here is where the transplantation happened - putting the heart of Agatha (i.e. the engine) into the body of Goldie. Those are my feet you can see below Goldie's driver's door. There was so much dust in the car from all the gravel roads it had driven on! It has been vacuumed several times and still smells of it. I must get the interior shampooed soon!




3. Here's Goldie with her new guts, but missing a windshield. The old one was super cracked up, and Jay got a great deal on a new one. Then we installed it ourselves!






4. This is the driver's side back door well. Both rear door wells had large rusted out holes in them, so Jay had to weld in new metal then cover it over in fibreglass and bondo. He did a great job.






5. Here she is, body work finished, ready for painting.








6. Driver's side all painted!












7. My hero, hard at work. (I taped on all that paper...)











8. Ta daa! All done and ready to roll! We've done a little tinkering since then. We had to put in a new ignition switch - which was good because now the car doesn't backfire anymore. And Jay installed a double 12-volt power outlet, because the car didn't have one and I need it for my GPS receiver!