1994 Honda Legend Coupe - Gone! 20/4

Haha yes I have been tempted to modify my daily too but resisted because of the wibblepoo roads and speed humps.
You know the cheap Chinese stuff will either not fit, knock or soon fail but at those prices I am sure we have all been lured in.

Well things have changed just a bit since my last update! Working from home has meant I've got plenty of Legend off the road time to get on with some of the above jobs, and the weather is even playing ball as well

The first job I started on was sorting out the ABS light which has plagued the car ever since I bought it. I did a "code read" way back when which indicated that the ABS pump itself was at fault, so I bought a second hand unit which has sat doing nothing for about a year now...

I got it out and got it a bit more ready to fit in the car



Now being an early-ish ABS system, the Legend has a separate pump and modulator, the modulator sits above the pump right up in the top corner of the engine bay near the scuttle panel. I had quite a bit of a fight getting the eletrical connectors all apart as I suspect 26 odd years of engine bay heat had got them pretty much welded together, but I got there eventually.

Next, the manual suggests to relieve any pressure from the modulator using a special Honda service tool and the bleeder screw on the modulator. The tool is long since NLA.. Looking at the spare modulator I have on the bench, you can see that Honda chose to use a bleed screw with a square rather than a hex shape?



I can get it undone using an open ended 8mm spanner, but with the modulator in place on the car, there is no way to do this as the spanner hits the suspension turret.. So not quite sure what to do there! If I can get a socket with an 8mm square end, then I could crack the bleed screw off, then put a tube on and use a spanner or mole grips to open it fully perhaps

While I consider my options there, I decided to get on with the rear suspension, more specifically the upper control arm



Old one was still very crusty. To remove, first I had to undo and remove the bottom bolt for the suspension strut so I could move it out of the way a bit. Then it was a case of removing the very rusted split pin at the ball joint end (I butchered it out with a selection of chisels and punches and loosening off that nut. I then was amazed that the bolt on the end of the radius arm came off with a mix of breaker bar and impact gun, I then used a ball joint splitter to get the ball joint out of the knuckle, and undid the two bolts that hold the arm to the subframe and the whole thing came off.





I haven't put the new one on just yet as I got distracted poking at the rust again..







I had wanted to get the rear bumper off to check there wasn't any rust hiding behind it but when it came to undoing the mounting nuts on the side, one bracket had rusted off and the whole nut and stud was rotating on the other... the rear inner arch behind the liner did look alright though..



The rust is really the limiting factor on what I end up doing with this car. Ultimately I'm also a bit limited by the Lockdown in what I can do about it also, so I've got a few options I think:

1. I could finish all the jobs I can do with the parts I have, and sell the car as is (after the lockdown) and get something else because the cost of the welding may well outweigh whatever I could get for the car once repaired.

2. I could finish all the jobs with the parts I have, then pay to get the rust sorted after the lockdown, which is going to cost £££ and will mean that I'll have to keep the car for a while longer for it to make any financial sense

3. I could use this time at home during the lockdown to get a mig welder and learn to repair it myself. Would still need to get the paint done professionally so it looks alright and there's absolutely no guarantee I could even fix it semi-decently, being an arch lip that also curves inwards and I don't think any panels are avaialble for these...


For now though, I may as well chuck on the suspension parts, fix as many of the issues with the car that I can and then see where I am on the rust

Ah thats a good shout, I've got one of those but on a T handle type thing



It wasn't quite big enough but looks like I've got the smaller of the two, I'll have to give the larger size a go

On the P38 with a similar set-up, although it's a Wabco ABS modulator, 30 pumps of the pedal with ignition off will depressurise the system.

And yes, they seem to go out of their way to make stuff hard to get to. For me it was two hard lines that took the best part of a day to line up and get screwed in!

This is one of those cars that likes to fight me.. Since the last update, I managed to get the split pin out of the drivers side upper control arm ball joint, but it came out in multiple pieces.. and the nut itself is pretty stuck.

Today however, the tap sockets I ordered arrived. quick test fit on the spare ABS bleed screw I have showed that it did fit over it, so I prepared the area on the car just in case brake fluid went everywhere



Only to find that that the socket didn't fit over the bleed screw thanks to the boss on the ABS modulator body.. So I'm basically just going to have to risk taking it off without bleeding the pressure, if the pump truly isn't working, I think it will be low risk.

To that end, I carried on taking off bits around the ABS pump ready to remove it. Got two screws out of the heatshield that protects it from the nearside exhaust manifold but its still secured somehow. The Honda manual recommends removing this from the bulkhead





Its a control unit for a few of the emissions systems on board the car, EGR and the like. It reminds me of my RX7 in that theres a lot of vacuum hose and solenoids which just looks untidy and nasty to me, but theres no point in me trying to delete any of it. The guys in the US running Acura Legends do seem to note issues with the EGR system blocking up and leading to head gasket failures so that might be something for me to look at in the future but not a priority.

Anyway, with that removed, it still wasn't looking particularly easy to access the lower bolts for the ABS unit, so I gave up and targeted some other "easy wins" while under the bonnet.

I've had a fuel filter ready to be swapped on for a little while now, and thankfully it is actually easy to access on the Legend



The little bolt in the top of the banjo bolt is for relieving the fuel pressure, I needn't have worried as nothing came out when I undid them! The banjo bolt came out fine but the other connection on the filter is reallly tight (I did say the car was fighting me right?) tried a few things but no movement, I've just kept spraying penetrant at it in the hope it will come undone easier tomorrow.

Given that fail, I moved onto another couple of jobs which have been on my list for a while. A while back I took a load of the window trims off the car to clean out the gutters of tree detritus from the time the car had been sitting. When I put the windscreen trims back on, they didn't quite fit right as some of the clips had broken so they were due to come back off as I had replacement clips ready to go







Another point is that the wiper arms had the black paint coming off and the underlying metal showing through, so they came off also



(Using some tape to help me get the arms back on in the right orientation)

I'd also wanted to get the scuttle panels off as I knew there was more tree debris hiding under there. The first panel is like a finishing trim for the bottom of the screen which was clipped in





As you can see, lots of mud and pine needles hiding under that. The lower scuttle panels are in two parts, the drivers side is plastic and clipped in pretty simply



Noticed that there is a drain hole in it which was completely plugged with mud





Which was easy enough to sort. The Wiper motor and linkage was hiding under that



In and around the motor and linkage was other bits of tree. The other bit of the scuttle on the passenger side is steel and is also clipped in aside from where the bonnet gas strut mounting point goes through it





It's probably a good job I did tackle this now, as the mud and rubbish sitting on the scuttle panel had started to rust it out



So I've been wire brushing and sanding that back ready for some etch primer and satin black.





(Doing the wiper arms as well) It won't be the neatest job in the world but it should tidy things up quite nicely. I've also been getting as much of the tree curse word from out of the scuttle area as possible before I put it all back together.

So yeah, lots of words but not necessarily that much achieved, but working on a few different jobs at once seems to work for me I've got this whole week off basically so I'd like to get the jobs on the car all sorted but we'll see how much it wants to continue fighting me!

Thats a very good point, certainly my MGB came apart more easily than this! The rusted suspension arms I've been removing do have some remnants of OE Honda part numbers on them so as you say, the bolts will have been on there for the past 26 years or so without having been disturbed!

Feels like the tide is turning, got the metal scuttle tray and wiper blades tidied up and in Satin Black



Won't be winning any concours but they're a decent improvement. I had nearly given up with the fuel filter when a spanner slipped off it as I was trying to get that union undone, at which point it dawned on me that I should be using a flare nut spanner not a regular one, so a bigger one of those is on order which I hope will allow me to actually change the filter.

So I ended up back at the ABS pump/modulator. I'd left this with a heatshield that I had removed two fixings from but was still pretty well affixed to the engine bay. There was a further bolt which was hard to see but reachable, then there was one more bolt which was hidden further down, past two air con lines.



Absolute zero visibility, had to thread my arm between the cam cover and the shock tower, but was able to get a 10mm ratchet spanner on the bolt and remove it one handed without dropping it...

A bit of a faff later, and the heatshield was liberated



With that out of the way, I could investigate what was actually holding the pump assembly into the car. Partially aided by looking at the replacement assembly I had to see where the bolts were likely to be. One was quite easy to get to at the front of the mounting bracket, one was hidden deep down behind the modulator but was reachable with a few socket extensions linked together, the last one however felt inaccessible.

It was back down between the engine and wing, and the aforementioned A/C lines were getting in the way again. I decided it was worthwhile getting the front of the car in the air and seeing if it was visible from underneath.





In the red circle is the last bolt holding the ABS assembly on, it's rather obscured by the pipe bracket so I undid the bolt in the blue circle to move it out the way a bit and give me better access.

A couple of pipes going into the ABS modulator were a pain to get out thanks to poor access again, but finally, I got it out





Externally the original and replacement modulators and pumps look very similar, (original on the left in both photos)





I was always going to be re-using the modulator as the replacement one from the breaker had the wires cut, I'm also re-using the original bracket as it is in much better condition than the other one. It was a pretty simple job to swap the pumps over, theres only a couple of bolts holding it to the bracket, and just the high and low pressure hoses going to the modulator.

I did carefully crack off the bleed screw but there was nothing in the way of pressure held in the unit so had no need to worry there, and confirms the error code about the pump not working!

I didn't take any more photos but I did drop the assembly back into the car after cleaning the mounting area a little. Took quite a bit of moving it around to get it back on the mounting bolts (having the lower mountings on the bracket slotted, was a good move from Honda) and then a bit of messing about getting the brake lines to attach again.

Which is about as far as I got today, tomorrow I'll be bolting the ABS assembly down properly, reinstalling the heatshield and reconnecting all the wires. I'm also going to have to work out how to bleed the system and will be able to make a bit of a start on reassembling the scuttle panel bits

And its still got the master cylinder with a massive servo on the other side of the bay! ABS and braking technology has certainly come on a long way since this system.

Life has largely got in the way of major progress, but there are some updates.

Initially there aren't many/any photos as it was mostly just general hacking and swearing at the rear suspension arms trying to persuade them off the car.

On the drivers rear side, I did eventually get the upper arm off and new one loosely in place, and the lower arm eventually came off as well.

Being able to get the new lower arm on has so far evaded me, its a balance of slotting it onto the radius arm which locates to the middle of the lower control arm, while locating the ball joint end into the knuckle and the inner bush needs to avoid the exhaust and locate into the subframe. All of which, the car is resisting intensely!

There is another suspension change which I hadn't planned on but I blame lockdown induced boredom...





I bought myself some cheapy Acura TSX/Honda Accord (CL7/9) coilovers As you can see above, the top mounts are quite different on the Accord and the Legend, so I ordered some new Front and Rear Legend top mounts. This just allows me to keep the original struts as complete units ready to swap back on if/when the coilover experiment fails

First thing I had to do was drill out the top mounts as the coilovers use a bigger diameter damper rod





I used a step drill bit to give me the 12mm pilot hole, then a 12mm drill bit to drill it out. ( I did also have to buy a pillar drill to be able to do this but I needed one anyway right?...)

I then took the coilover top mounts off and did a bit of measuring and calculating to account for the different thicknesses in the new and old top mounts. Basically, I had to make a 14mm spacer to go over the damper rod; luckily for me, there was a crush tube in the old rear lower control arm that I just removed which had the correct diameter, so I cut it down to length





And it did the job. I don't seem to have any pics of the completed strut but its all gone together OK. Not fitted to the car yet due to the aforementioned messing about with the lower control arm.

NOW, while I was getting a bit fed up with trying to fit said lower control arm, my attention was drawn to a suspect area at the rear of the drivers side rear wheel arch, so I did a little digging.













I hope those are somewhat in the right order.. but yeah, a hidden rust hole with what looks like the remnants of a poor welded in patch then the rear of the arch lovingly sculpted in filler.. Currently enquring about the arches on the one breaking Legend Coupe that I can see at the moment to see if I can get some second hand panels for this as this looks like it will be a hard shape to make by hand (unless you shape it in filler I suppose...)

I'll still try and get the suspension on while I weigh up my options, on the one hand I did want to learn welding, but also I can see this car snowballing and keeping me from getting other stuff done, we shall see