1997 Honda Civic HX

1997 Honda Civic HX - I'm Mr. Coupe Biatch!

So you say you love your car, but how much do you really love it? Do you love your car enough to stay awake for three days straight building it? Do you love your car enough to have it repainted four times in a row until it's right? Do you love your car enough to drop out of college and go into debt to finish it? Mike Zusin does, and he quite possibly built the dopest Civic coupe of all time in the process.

When Mike first purchased this car he was a senior in High School. The HX already had a B18C ITR swap and life was great. Like many kids with swapped Hondas Zusin loved cruising around in his slammed Civic. Until one day he was feeling a bit frisky and decided to rip it past a semi truck on the freeway. Problem was that cars aren't designed to shift 3rd - 4th - 3rd and the engine's rod bearings paid the price. That's when his life would change forever.

"It was my first Honda, at the time I didn't know my way around a car besides the basics." Mike explains. "I dove head first into pulling the motor and tearing her down to find out what happened." After discovering the spun bearings Mike knew that the work required to fix the engine was beyond his capabilities and enlisted a shop that he presumed was qualified for the repairs. "After months of waiting I got the motor back, only to find out they had ripped me off and ruined the motor." But rather than getting bummed out, Mike did what any Honda fanatic would do - he set his sights K-Series bound.

"I dropped out of college, had a car with a crap motor and debt, so I decided to be dumb and start this huge rebuild." After selling off the B-Series parts he would no longer need he purchased a "really crappy daily driver." With that out of the way he was now ready to start the rebuild and look for a new power plant. "Once I tore down the car it looked worse than a theft recovery, I thought to myself 'what the hell did I just do?'"

At the time Mike's parents' house was on the market and they really didn't want to be any part of the car rebuild a garage full of Civic odds and ends certainly wasn't going to help them sell their house. Luckily for Mike one of his friends had an open garage, which sounded great at the time. "At first it worked out great and the car got more and more bare as we stripped it, but after a while my friend was hardly ever home. At one point I didn't see the car for five months!"

During this course of time Zusin's parents sold their house and moved into a new one. As soon as they were all settled in Mike made it a priority to relocate his car to his house so he could continue to work on it on his own schedule. After everything was torn down and reworked the car was ready for paint. Somehow Mike was able to find a J's Racing front lip, a piece I've been trying to find for my car for years. What Mike didn't know was that finding the lip would only be the begging of troubles he would face.

"When I was on my way to the paint shop my J's Racing lip fell out of the back of my truck, in rush hour! It was way too windy and I was just about to pull off at the next exit to get more straps when I saw the box fly out the back of my truck... and then I saw another truck run over the lip! Luckily we were able to fix it and get it smoothed back out, thank god for fiberglass!"

That would be only the first in a long line of paint and body related delays. "The first time we painted the car I had really bad planning. My painter was driving down eight hours just to paint the car and we only had one weekend to do it. I was up all night Thursday and he got in late on Friday, and so began a very bad/crazy/sleepless weekend. The painter called up two local friends to help tape off and paint the car. Everything seemed to be going well, we were working non-stop. We didn't sleep the whole weekend. On Sunday morning at 3 a.m., I came back from a burger run to find out they ran out of paint and still had the body and trunk left to spray."

Being a problem solver Mike decided to take the "rational" route and drove to Kentucky at 4 a.m. Delirious and sleep deprived, Zusin miraculously made the journey. "Let's just say we were able to mix the paint... somewhere. I was driving after already being up for sixty-plus hours and everyone else was asleep. It was not good. I made it up there, got the paint and drove back to Nashville. We sprayed it at 5 a.m. and cleared it by 6 a.m. and then went to sleep. When I woke up two hours later I realized that the paint color was different. Seventy-two hours with almost no sleep and the car had to be completely repainted!"

The second time the car was painted they decided to do it right and use a booth. Unfortunately, due to some time constraints the car ended up with a very thin layer of clear coat, too thin to color sand without cutting into the base. A third friend then came in to take a look at the color sanding situation and agreed it needed more clear. The fourth time seemed to be the charm as yet another of Mike's friends was able to paint the car in his garage. At last, success!