I love how the dash has to tell you which way is up or down...
I love how the dash has to tell you which way is up or down...
Mad_Ratel wrote: I love how the dash has to tell you which way is up or down...
ROFL, it's for the shift lights to get the best mpg.
Had one of these for close to a year. Great gutless commuter car. I had to replace the IMA battery in mine which wasn't cheap. The rear engine mount is probably shot on yours and I would look at cleaning the EGR plate also they can get pretty funky and cause poor idle. Theses cars also have head matched spark plugs, there's a stamping on the head that tells you which plug to get for each cylinder, and they are clocked to be at a precise angle when fully torqued.
Them most MPG I got from mine was in the high 60's for a tank, lots of driving at 55-60 to keep it in lean burn mode.
I would think a turbo added to it would liven it up a bit. Though not to sure if it would mess with the battery drive or not. Still a thought?
Think there was an insight build with turbo on here somewhere? Thought it sounded like a great idea and would be a great daily.
There is a very well done K swap here. Turbos have been done and are easy to find. This car isn't nice enough for me to want to make it interesting, it really is a car you wouldn't mind parking in a high school lot every day.
Holding off on the valve adjustment because Deucekid#1 wants to help. I also need to figure out wheel specs. I want to grab a set of 15x6's that will fit this and a Civic of the same era because the plan is to pick up a Civic in the fall for a proper RX beater and more wheels are better.
Now let's see what I can do with the paint....
Looks like the paint will clean up acceptably. The roof and hood are the worst but the whole car needs to be aggressively polished. 
Removing and scrubbing the door panels.
Spending a lot of time cleaning nooks and crannies like the fuel filler. Having all of the little bits clean and nice to touch makes me enjoy spending time around the car.
Just curious as to why you're putting in all the time cleaning instead of kid #1? Is Fergus daily driveable and I missed it?
No, I don't have children, why do you ask? 
I like cleaning cars and bringing them back from the brink of being scrapped. Having her do the work would be taking fun away from me. 
I am making her look at the process every day after school so she can see how things are progressing and how pretty simple labor can change a car. She'll be assisting with some of the mechanical stuff and all of the general maintenance that the car needs.
And no, Fergus is still sitting comfortably in the Grosh waiting for me to learn to make brake and fuel lines among other things.
I've got my daughter prepped for driver training. I'm going a similar route to yours only I'm using F1's 107% rule. I may go with 110%, but she isn't driving alone until she can qualify on the clock against me in the same car.
With my luck she'll get the "Borrowed Car" speed and I won't be allowed to drive anymore.
A manual trans is becoming an anti-theft device.
Funny it took me this long to post here.
First thing's first! I'm not getting away from Insights, i'm just going from two back to one! 
The driver's door handle linkage is screwed up inside the door somehow, which is why it locks itself occasionally when you begin to pull the door handle. I never looked into it.
AC always worked for me but I admit i havent turned it on in a while. I guess a critter munched a wire in that time!
Some of you may already know Insights are somewhat infamous for not being totally watertight. Add to that the fact that for most of the past two years i haven't even been opening the doors to exchange the air inside the car, thus the nastiness. 
As for the valvetrain noise and oil leak, i had some students at my school do a valve adjustment on it sometime over a year ago, so it's entirely possible that they left both the valve cover and some rocker adjusters a little loose! It did sound good immediately after doing it, and the job is super easy so it won't be hard for you to go through it again. We also checked compression which was 180psi @334k miles. 
At that time we noticed it doesn't have the correct Honda cylinder-specific indexed plugs in it, so when you get it driving don't be surprised if it won't lean-burn smoothly without putting Honda plugs in it.
Motor mounts are notoriously failure prone on these cars. Honda made them intentionally mushy (i.e. weak and overworked) to damp out the 3cyl nastiness. I filled mine on the blue one with window weld and i can tell you there is a lot of 3cyl nastiness to damp out.
I didn't spend a lot of time trying to clean the car but I did spend about 20 minutes polishing the headlights for you.
Have you considered different battery or software options? There are sooo many cool salvage batteries out there right now.
Mazdeuce, how many cars you up to in your household now?
My wife is giving me crap cause between two drivers we have five cars and a boat. All of them run even!
How do you manage to do it man? :)
Seth has about 1/4 the cars i do. He just has mostly quite nice ones! I think my wife would vastly prefer that....
Special delivery..
I'm actually down to seven cars now. It helps that two of them are Mrs. Deuce's and are out of play. She also doesn't want me to sell the truck, so that's three, and the Insight is a kid car, so doesn't really count. The R63 is the family car, it just happens to be awesome, and Mrs. Deuce has claimed the V Wagon as her summer car, so I'm good with that. That means that Fergus the old Ford wagon is my only real extra car, and a guy is allowed to have one extra car, isn't he?
Basically it helps a LOT if your spouse really likes cars and regularly drives and enjoys them.
MrJoshua wrote: Have you considered different battery or software options? There are sooo many cool salvage batteries out there right now.
I'm working very hard to NOT get into the battery stuff until after summer. The car has to sit for three months and most all of the batteries have some sort of self discharge issues when sitting. I didn't really need to shop for a kid car until after the first of next year but the last time Vigo was over we got to talking and the next thing you know he shows up with a highly inappropriate tow vehichicle with the Insight.
Be careful with the friends you make......
mazdeuce wrote: Looks like the paint will clean up acceptably...
Great job!
mazdeuce wrote: Teen Angst Racing. Whatever.......
The first line of Nirvana "Serve The Servants" is "Teenage angst has paid of well, now I'm bored and old" What a brilliant opening line! I hope she's hip/well-versed enough to be making that reference!
I LOVE the before/after detail pics. That stuff always gets me going.
I will just leave this here for you...
next thing you know he shows up with a highly inappropriate tow vehicle
As far as non-trucks go it's the most appropriate yet! And most efficient, averaging slightly over 20mpg over 500 miles of towing.
I usually use Torque to read OBDII stuff, but it wasn't working on the Insight. Poop. My wife's Scanguage worked, so I downloaded some other apps and found one that worked. Awesome! It would be cool if I could confirm that the car will pass emissions with the dead battery. Except.......the program says the MIL light is on. But it's not on. Or is it?
Flipping the key on but not starting the car reveals some lights, but not nearly as many as the owners manual would suggest.
Popped the dash apart. Popped the cluster apart. No less than 8 missing bulbs. Awesome.
Did I mention I live in an area with emissions testing? Heading further down the rabbit hole with this one.
Damn, if i'd ever noticed that i could have given you a bunch of those little bulb holders and bulbs. Also, do you already know about the trip button repair for those clusters? I did it on my blue Insight as soon as i got it, but I don't even remember if this car needed it or not.
Oh also, is the hatch pop working? If not there's a little plastic piece that breaks inside them, Honda doesn't sell just that piece, but the Insight forum guys made a CAD file of it and you can get one made.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:15386
It's pretty simple to replace and beats having to keep the key turned all the way with one hand while trying to open the hatch with the other hand and still hold 4 grocery bags with that hand.
The hatch still works, but thanks for adding that to this thread for when it breaks and I need to fix it.
Vigo - Not a problem. I'm going to buy a pile of LEDs to replace them with. Some of the bulbs were on long enough that the board shows signs of scorching. 
It doesn't matter what the dash says as far as emissions testing, just the computer when they plug it in. I mostly want them to work for when my kids drive it. There are lights you should pay attention to, and those lights should have bulbs in them.
I know access to 3d printed stuff is improving, but especially for something that tiny and already-modeled, it takes like 10 minutes, a few cents of material and very little effort. So if you need it let me know, or if anyone else reading needs anything similarly small and easy. And color choices are bright blue or bright green
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