Hey everyone, another thread on a car I am working on.
My 1999 Camry was on its last 2 legs, had to part ways with it and bought this 2004 Civic the very next day for a great price. I got lucky I found it so quickly with 148k miles.

I checked it out yesterday mid-day but looked worse in person and interior was a mess, smelled like cigarettes. I left with intent of thinking about it, on the way home i realized it was too good of a deal to pass up so went back and bought it!

Its pretty hideous, if you squint your eyes or see if from far away it looks good.
Interior is dirty, missing parts and the list is pretty long.

Heres some pictures of it. Don't be fooled, it runs great and sounds great, just needs a lot of cosmetic work.

Both latches for the hood and trunk were broken, rear bumper has a huge crack in it.
The front end is all wacked out! The bumper is screwed on with wood screws all around.

I bought a newer rear bumper today from the junkyard, same color too, what a score. 40% off this weekend was only $27.
The front bumper was not found so I'm going to try and salvage it, fill the holes for the screws and see if I can get it straight. Going to bang the fenders here and there to see if I can straighten them out. You can see if some pictures the right fender bows out towards the bottom.

Heres the interior.

Carpet is missing on the driver side only for some reason, need to find a new carpet and replace it.

Already bought the missing handles

Got a newer bezel trim, the current one looks real bad, I think it was about $6?
Got a 1 new tail light, some $9 i think, better than $45 on ebay. Might have to cave in and order the right one from ebay, cannot source it down.
Got random clips and covers as well, still need a new hood, carpet and few other parts I can't think of right now.

Plans for it, get the body straight this weekend, fix the latches to get rid of the bundgy cords and scrub the interior.

Im thinking of painting the door panels, either same color or another color. Anyone have tips on this? I was thinking rub with maroon scothbright pad and spray some new paint on them...?

Once the body is all straight, I'm going to be painting it a dark metallic color.

The 2 front doors close and open fine, but the rear of the doors do not sit flush with the front of the rear doors, no signs its been crashed or door replaced, anyone have any thoughts on how to fix this?

I hope you didn't pay $1300 for it.

Toss that RHF guard in the bin and go get a straight one from your wrecker. The time you spend trying to get that straight, without knowledge of panel beating, will not be worth the trouble and you could well make it worse.

Otherwise you're pretty much on the right track but don't change the colour. On a car like that you want to minimise investment so you have some chance of recovery if you sell it. With 236,000km it's not going to be worth that much anyway, even if in pristine condition.

Example. Here's one I bought last week. Auto, air and steer, only 136,000km, one owner and full service history. Interior a bit grubby but undamaged and complete. Had a shunt up the rear so I reckon 10-12 hours to fix. Buff, polish and detail and it should be worth around $4,000 retail private sale. Cost me $500 plus say, another $1200 in materials and labour, so $1700 plus 6 months registration will bring it up to $2000 total cost. I'm at no risk of overcapitalising.

Thanks for the reply NFT5.
I actually only paid $650 USD for it.
I was looking into Civic of this year and they were all in the $1800-$2500 with high mileage, some 200k+ miles.
Once registered and smogged will be about $900.

So you think it'd be best to replace the fender eh?

Yea I'm wanting to spend as little as possible to get it looking great. For the price i bought it and money invested and going to be invested in it, I'm sure there will be some meat left on the bone. But good point on not changing the color. It will take a lot more extra time to do it, door jambs, trunk, engine bay etc.

Wow you scored on that Hyundai, it looks great also.
Do you come by deals like that often? Did yo get it at a tow yard or auction?
Do you ever get cars with odd smells? Would you know whats the best way to get a smell out of a car?

I put some coffee grounds in it and baking soda, going to vacuum it tomorrow.

What do you mean by "shunt the rear"?

shunt up the rear = rear ended

I get deals like that from time to time. Customer will come in with a car that the repairs are worth more than the car, at retail or insurance value anyway. I can repair and cost out at shop rate, covering my time and overheads but without a profit margin. The value of repair on that car was about $2.5K but I can do it, for myself at half that. My profit margin will come when I sell it.

I've also picked up some from the mechanic next door. Car comes in with blown engine and customer just says get rid of it. Got one a few weeks ago, nice Honda Accord with high kilometres but all highway driving. Belt slipped and goodnight engine. $400 plus replacement donk and labour came to just on $2K - for a car worth $5K minimum. Needed nothing but a buff, a little touch up and a detail inside.

Smells? Yeah. Everything from poo to bad socks to smokers. A wet vacuum usually fixes it. Dry vacuum won't work. Need to shampoo all the upholstery and carpets at least.

Ahh got it.
So you get the mechanical work done at an auto shop?

I used to get into cars with mechanical work and fixed them myself but started not to like it after a while. Rather fix body than mechanical now.
But good deal on the accord. Might still be good to get cars worked on at a shop with room for profit.

Im going to shampoo the car today, get the latches on and try to track down a hood.
Still have a gmc truck I have to work on too. Going into the spray booth this week.

Got a little bit of work done today on this car.
Spent most of the day doing body work and sanding on the truck.

I started to remove the wood screws on the rear bumper to swap it out when i got carried away by the trunk latch. I put the newer one in and the trunk didn't want to close!

Turns out the spring that pulls the latch back into place once the cable releases it was just not working, so i pulled the spring out further and wrapped it around both hooks, grabs a lot better and the trunk closes but I need to find a better spring, this doesn't look to nice.

Does it look like the cable is the culprit here? you can see the plastic shield is broken from cable.

Oh by the way, there is a broken bolt stuck inside the threads for one of the bolts that hold the latch on. Great. For now one bolt is on there nice and tight till I get around to drilling the other out.(you can actually see the cut off head of the bolt in the picture.)

I noticed the trunk does not sit flush with the 1/4 panels. No signs of an accident but I am thinking the trunk hinges are bent upwards and thats why it does not sit flush.
heres how it looks.

Heres the how the hinge looks, Yes I hopped into the trunk and had someone close it so I could see what was going on. I can't see anything wrong, can one of you guys see it?
The hinge looks normal to me, but thats all I can think that is effecting the way the trunk sits closed.

Finally heres some quick pictures I took of the door fitment. The 2 front doors no sit flush against the front of the rear doors. Again, no sign of a crash or door replacement. Any help on this is appreciated. Thanks.

Looks like alignment issues that's all try loosening the strikers on the posts in a bit. You always want to have the doors to over hang the adajacent panel by a tiny bit to prevent wind noise. The trunk looks like they jammed it full of crap and tried to shut the trunk and tweaked the hinges. Again just try realigning Italy the hinge.

Thanks for the reply mike!

i never thoight of having the doors out just a bit for wind noise. Makes a lot of sense. But these doors pop out too much. ill loosen the strickers and move them back a little to see if it fixes the gap. Thank you.

And good theory on thr trunk, i didnt even consider someone jambing stuff in the trunk and bending it.

I figured if the hinges were bent up, i could bend them down. I took the trunk off and tried to bend them back into place and the left side looked better but the right side didnt so i tried to bend that side some more and guess i jacked up the hinges. I did buy replacement ones though so ill just swap them and see if that fixes the alignment issue.

Back to square one with the hitch for the trunk. Im thinking the cable is bad, i bought a replacement one too but it is going to take some time to swap out.


Bought a new hood for 40 bucks this weekend, went to install it and the new hood hitch only to realize the hood cable is broken.

Well just went out there and messed with the strikers on both front doors and the doors lined up great! I pushed the strikers in a bit and tightened them up and it worked. Thanks a lot for that help mike!

No problem... If you open the trunk all the place your left hand at the bottom and your right hand at the front by the back glass and tug the deck lid towards you with your right hand. That should fix your trunk alignment problem.