The Autopsy

This morning I woke up with one thought on my mind: Man, my transmission is FUCKED! It turns out the guy signing in Sunday morning "arrivals" of my nature, is collecting all 5 generations of the prelude (They actually started making the Prelude in 1979), and he needed a 4th Generation (mine). I told him to wait until I get a diagnosis to see if I was going to sell it.

At work today, I get a call on the celly from FairFUXMEINTHEASS Honda telling me that they started looking at it at 6 this morning and still haven't determined what was going on. He started listing off what they had found wrong:

• All of your spark plugs are fried and are coated with some kind of mixture of what we think is oil and anti-freeze but your head gasket isn't blown.
• Since it would be too expensive to actually look at, we are pretty sure your valves are coated in the same crap and a few of them might actually have been bent in the process.
• After a compression test, we found that number 3 cylinder was not maintaining pressure and could be indicative of a blown piston seal or ring - we don't know.
• Your check engine light came on at some point and turned off again before we started it to and it shows that one of your cylinders wasn't getting enough air or too much air (hooray for data analysis right? I could have programmed that in assembly in 5 minutes)
• Your transmission and clutch actually look fine. It's just we can't get the car above 3000rpm even up on the lift.
• Since green team can't figure out what's wrong with it, we had our best mechanic start looking at it.

4:50pm roles around: "Hey Mr. P, uh, well, our best mechanic still doesn't have an answer. There is about 5 of us helping him out, and we still can't find the problem. We'll keep you posted.

Awesome. 5:30pm: Ok, we got it. Your catalytic converter is broken. It appears that who ever did your timing belt job last (Billy Craft Honda, Lynchburg, VA) missed the timing by just a little bit which caused oil to seep into the cylinder when it was igniting causing carbon and not so burned oil to build up in your CAT. This build up eventually lead to pieces of the CAT to break and obstruct flow from the exhaust port of your engine. So let me read off what you're gonna need done:

1. Get a new catalytic converter
2. Get new heat shields for the CAT because the last ones are toast
3. Replace heat shields that are inbetween the exhaust manifold and the catalytic converter
4. 150,000 mile service. We'll replace the bad spark plugs, put in new drive belts, adjust your timing belt CORRECTLY, and clean out the valves and check them for proper shape
5. Your cam seal is leaking and will have to be replaced.

And the grand total is: $2131.00

Not too bad actually. I was expecting upper threes. Looks like I gotta get a tow truck and tow this guy back to my place.