Motoring on a budget: Honda City Project Car

I have an interesting new project. But a little back story first. My younger sister is now at the age where she needs a car of her own, so my Dad decided to get her one and since we're not kicking back on any Pork Barrel funds, we didn't have that much of a budget to work with. So the idea was to find a cheap car, with an automatic transmission that we could fix up and turn into a reliable daily driver for a first time driver. I'm taking care of fixing up the car and I figured I'd document the process and treat it like a challenge to see how we can get everything done on a budget. Kinda like those cheap car challenges on TopGear!

So here's what we got! 

It's a 1996 Honda City EXi with a 1.5L D15B engine and an automatic transmission. We got it for only 75,000 pesos. Way below market price! These things usually go for around 160k to 180k, but the catch is that it was not running. My dad noticed the car parked in front of a neighbors house, he called and made and offer and we got it. This is where our adventure begins. 

So, we start with a non-running car. The owner said the car last ran in June of this year (3 months at the time of this writing). It was running before they stopped using it, and after not using it for a while it didn't want to start anymore. The culprit was likely just a dead battery. I had already enrolled the car into one of my AAP accounts so I could tow it to the shop and work on getting it to run there, but I needed to wait 7 days before the free roadside assistance would kick in. I decided we'd give it a shot and try to get the car running on the spot. We swapped in a fresh battery and the car started on the first try. It didn't sound the healthiest, for sure in desperate need of a tune up and change oil (the oil was filthy!) but good enough to drive home which was just a few blocks away.

The short drive home was enough to tell that we were going to have to work on a lot of things on the car. It ran ok and the automatic trans shifted fine. The interior was dirty and I kept my work gloves on because the steering wheel was sticky. The front power windows go down but need help going up and the brakes are noisy. At this price level though, we can't be too choosy. The car was running, the registration up to date and the aircon even works so that's a good start.

Once home, the first order of business was to pick out dirt and dried leaves from the crevices and hose out what we could. The car as seen in the first pic had been parked under a tree and had a lot of dirt and soil under it. 

The interior could use a good cleaning and smelled funky. I ripped off the yucky sticky steering wheel cover to find that the original steering wheel was pristine beneath it. It's got a rather ugly set of seat covers that actually cover the seats quite well. We suspect that the seats underneath are in pretty good shape. 

The roof on these early Honda cars seems to be a problem area. Seems like it's got something to do with the structural supports under the roof rusting through. We will get this properly repaired when all the mechanical work has been sorted out on the car but for now, I did a quick fix just to cover up the holes to at least try and prevent the rust from spreading. 

Using my industrial grade 'Nashua' aluminum tape. 

So that's where we are today. I didn't have much more time to work on the car today since I had work to do. Dad and I are hoping to get everything done and sorted with in a 100k budget. So far, we're at 75k for the car, 3.8k for the new Amaron battery, and 750 for the AAP membership (1500 divided by two since one membership takes two cars) running total for the project is 79,550. 

Tomorrow I'll drive the car to the shop so we can give the mechanicals a once over.

To be continued.