Improving an appliance - Honda Content

In reply to wheelsmithy:

Thank you sir! Yep B20B is the 1st gen CRV motor.

In reply to EvanB:

Thanks, where are you located? I may take you up on that.

I'm in Ohio. If you message me your address I'll ship it out sometime. Can't be more than a few dollars for postage.

I picked up this 2000 Accord EX 5-spd today for $150. It runs and drives, but has a bad oil leak. It belonged to a coworker who said the oil light came on as he was pulling in to work. There was an oil stripe in the parking lot where he pulled in. Also, you can see the oil slick on the road and on the trailer where I pulled it on. I added oil and drove it around the block before loading it. The engine sounds good, and clutch and trans are operate smoothly. The oil leak appears to be coming from the timing belt area.

The truck did great. I don't know how much the trailer weighs, but the car is 3300 or something. I'm guessing it was about 4500lbs total. It pulled smooth, the 4.3 had some trouble on hills, but, hey that's what downshifting is for.

The local junkyard has about 15 of this body style Accord in the yard right now. I hope to get a rear passenger door, and side skirt in the same color. It also needs a drivers side headlight. I may try to bang out some of the dents. That stuff, and a timing belt, oil seals and waterpump, and it should be a good car. It has 270k on it. I'm going to try to sell it for $1500 or 2k. That should help finance the rest of my build, and maybe pay off some of the truck.

In reply to AntiArrhythmic:

I might be interested in the Accord when you're done with it...which version of the F23 is in there?

In reply to Acme Lab Rat:

Cool, I will post all of the work I do on it in the thread. I'll take a look at the engine code stamp

F23's are essentially unmodifiable (that's a word) lumps, correct? My bare understanding of Hondas tells me that generation of Accords were kind of hopeless unless you had the V6.

what makes them "unmodifiable" ?

as hard as it is to do, even a Chevy 305 can be modified ... hardly worth the effort, but still doable ...

The F23 is actually the good engine. There are plenty of mods for them. Prelude stuff swaps on etc.

$150 is a good deal even if it was an engine with not much aftermarket. What happened to the rear door there?

In reply to Acme Lab Rat:

F23's are great motors! They have been overshadowed by the popularity of other Honda platforms, but they respond well to the correct mods. K20 pistons drop right in for high compression, and the H22 head can bolt to the F23 block with a few mods. Even a stock F23 swapped into a light civic chassis is pretty potent. If you do end up buying the Accord (or any other for that matter) and want some direction as to how to modify it I can point you in the right direction. There are a couple of pretty interesting build threads with these motors.

In reply to ssswitch:

The car was on a trailer a few years ago and the trailer tire caught on fire burning the paint off of the door.

Now that I own a Honda, I'm constantly surprised at just how partsbin the engines are. I always figured the various families were pretty rigid in parts interchange, but that's clearly not the case.

You should call it the Unlucky Duck. What a life that car has had.

Haha, I like the name. Maybe I should start an Unlucky Duck build/flip thread.

Picked up 2 parts for the Unlucky Duck, and one for the Work Truck. Out of the 15 accords of this body style at the junkyard, only one was the correct color, (Signet Silver Metallic) and all of the parts I needed were smashed. I came back with a headlight and a stock intake setup. I still need a rear passenger door, drivers door handle and maybe a trunk, since mine is dented. The work truck has no rear sway bar, so I grabbed a Suburban sway bar for it. I still haven't heard back from the machine shop about my B20 head, we'll blame that on the holidays.

Hondas are certainly easy to modify.

I just sold my 99 Accord coupe with an F23/manual. Had a fresh exedy stage I clutch and lightweight steel flywheel, plus ITR front calipers on prelude rotors.

Hated to part with it, but it had become an extra car and we couldn't afford it. Sold it for $1900, then spent that in repairs on my truck and the wife's van the next week.

AntiArrhythmic, thou hast a PM.

AntiArrhythmic wrote: I picked up this 2000 Accord EX 5-spd today for $150. It runs and drives, but has a bad oil leak. It belonged to a coworker who said the oil light came on as he was pulling in to work. There was an oil stripe in the parking lot where he pulled in. Also, you can see the oil slick on the road and on the trailer where I pulled it on. I added oil and drove it around the block before loading it. The engine sounds good, and clutch and trans are operate smoothly. The oil leak appears to be coming from the timing belt area.

There's a seal that blows out, I think it's a balance shaft seal but it's been a long time since I've seen an F-engined Accord. There's also a retainer setup for keeping that from happening again.

The seal pops out and then pressurized oil goes straight from the journal to the inside of the timing cover. Very easy fix, only slightly more work than doing a timing belt.

In reply to Knurled:

Thanks Knurled, I ordered a timing belt kit. Hopefully it will include the retainer.

ssswitch wrote: Now that I own a Honda, I'm constantly surprised at just how partsbin the engines are. I always figured the various families were pretty rigid in parts interchange, but that's clearly not the case. You should call it the Unlucky Duck. What a life that car has had.

I've been shopping for a manual hatchback and I stumbled onto a CRX the other day that had a "mini me" swap. I had to look that one up.

It involves slapping a SOHC V-TEC head onto a non-V-TEC engine and winding up with a high-compression, rev-happy engine and, in most cases, slightly improved fuel economy. Seems like something I'd do.

Yesterday I got all my parts laid out to do the timing belt and oil seals, then I realized my friend had my jackstands.

So I decided to clean the engine bay up some and polish the headlights.

I got some work done on the timing belt job today. Got it torn down, and the seals all replaced. The source of the oil leak became obvious pretty quickly. I only snapped a few pics since it was cold and I was trying to GSD.

Knurled wrote: There's a seal that blows out, I think it's a balance shaft seal but it's been a long time since I've seen an F-engined Accord. There's also a retainer setup for keeping that from happening again.

You called it!

The valvetrain looked very clean! The car came with a folder of maintenance receipts, I think it will be a good running motor very soon. The timing belt and tensioner bearings looked to have relatively low mileage, but the belts were soaked with oil, so I threw them out.

Not much of an update, hopefully in the next one it will be up and running. Thanks for your interest in the build, creating content for the build thread provides a little extra motivation.

Well I lost my job, so the civic B20 build is on hold for a bit. The money from selling the Accord may have to go to paying some bills instead of funding the build.

Such is life. As a nurse I have a lot of options for finding a new job.

As for the Accord, I broke a crank position sensor while reassembling it. When I went to the junkyard to get another one I broke my 19mm trying to get get a crank pulley off. So, I just ordered another off of Amazon for $15. Hopefully I will have a real update fairly soon.

Good news. I got a new job with better pay, better benefits, and better hours. So as soon as my bank account recovers from 3 weeks of unemployment I will get the B20 together.

In other news, I've made some progress on the Accord. After getting it running I noticed I had a flashing CEL which indicates misfire. Also, you can hear the misfire at idle, but it smooths out above 2,000 rpm, and the flashing CEL goes solid. So I pulled the codes on it and the computer told me I had a misfire in cylinder one, and another non-specific misfire code. So, I pulled the cap and noticed it had oil it in, also the spark plug for cylinder #1 was black.

Honda says the internal distributor seal isn't serviceable, so I bought a complete distributor from eBay for $60 (10yr warranty) and some 10.2mm plug wires for $25. Before changing the plugs I seafoamed the engine. Here's a current shot of the bay.

My non-specific misfire code is gone, but the cylinder 1 misfire persists. I know it's not dumping fuel since I'm not getting any black smoke, so I'm leaning towards a burnt exhaust valve. I have a HF leakdown tester, So I'll test it soon to confirm. In the meantime I have put tag and insurance on it and have been driving it. About 100 miles so far and it drives great as long as it's over 2,000 rpm.

Yesterday I got lucky and the junkyard and found a rear passenger door in the "correct" color.

The paint on the donor car was exceptionally clean, when I got it mounted I noticed it had been resprayed, so of course the color is a bit off. At least it looks better than it did. I also grabbed the side skirt since mine was melted.

This Thursday I will pick up another F23 from a friend (FREE!) It has high mileage and a stripped spark plug hole. I'm going to pull the intake manifold off of it and clean the EGR ports, IACV etc, the put it on my motor. (Mine has roaming idle). I'll probably pull the exhaust valve out of the donor motor and install/lap it into mine. I also put a radio and speakers in it yesterday. It's getting close to being ready to sell!

Congrats on the new job!

if you pull the plug from cylinder #1 is there any oil showing ?

if so then it could be the same thing that I had with my CRX ...

a leaky valve cover gasket ... allowing some oil to get over into the spark plug and causing an intermittent misfire ... the rubber o ring around the long tube from the valve cover to the plug would need to be replaced also ... if it is in fact the gasket, then all the o rings and the gasket would need replacing ...

very easy job, must be if I can do this

might not be the problem .... put pulling the plug to look doesn't take much time