It being a typical Saturday morning, I was kicking around the house in a bathrobe shortly after getting up, at about noon. Knock on my door, so I went to answer it.

It was my new across-the-street neighbor, a young guy still in school. "I know you are a Honda guy," he said, "and I am having some trouble replacing the air cleaner on my wife's Civic."

Hmm, how hard can that be? So I get dressed and go over. For some reason he has taken the whole airbox off the throttle, instead of just taking off the top of it and accessing the filter. He also has a new PCV valve but doesn't know where it goes. Well, I don't know either, so he was out of luck on that one. I'm not sure why he had the new valve, since he obviously hadn't tested the old one and decided it was bad.

But anyway, he wanted to put the airbox back on the throttle, and he had forgotten the first rule of taking your car apart:

Pay attention to how it was put together before you take it apart, just in case it isn't obvious once it is disassembled.

I finally figured out the assembly order of the loose pieces, and together we reassembled them. I advised him to ditch his Chilton manual and get a real Honda service manual for his car from Helm, since he said he was planning to keep fiddling with it.

I was rather amused by the whole thing, but mainly because it reminded me of when I first started working on my own car, when I was in college. It had always looked so much easier when Dad was doing it....

-Mike

 

Hey, I saw your same post on the BMWCCA PS board. You have both a S2K and a Bimmer? That must be nice!

 

Nope. I have an S2K and a '91 CRX (trailhead/snow car). I also hang out with the BMW crowd because I work with a guy (Walt Conley) who is in charge of their driver training instructor program.

They have instructors, and I can use some instruction.... Mostly driving enthusiasts are driving enthusiasts, anyway.

-Mike