After watching cars.com for several months, I found a '88 CRX HF with a blown engine about 200 miles away. It took a few phone calls to locate the seller but I was able to make arrangements to look at the car the next weekend.

The body looked really straight. It looked like the hood and headlights had a minor encouter with something but nothing like what I was currently dealing with. Since I had become very familiar with that area of the car, I could tell the front bulkhead was straight as was the rest of the chassis. There was some surface rust around the fenders but this is not uncommon for these cars at that age so I didn't think much more about it. I bought it and haluled it home.

So the disassembly began. The sheet metal was all I had hoped for, relatively straight and everything lined up. I wished it wasn't the ugly silver-blue, but the only other colors the early HF's came in was red or white. Once it was up on jackstands, I finally got a really good look at the underside. It wasn't pretty.

The rust was much worse than I first realized. The pictures don't show how bad it was at the forward subframe connection where it turns up to the firewall. I was genuinely concened about the structural integrity of the chassis in that area (and I'm a structures engineer!) especially considering the types of loads it would see with sticky tires and stiff srings. I suppose it could have been repaired, but again that was beyond my skills and I still think it would have been more trouble than it was worth.

Ultimatly, I decided to salvage as many good parts from the car as possible and write the rest of it off. Feeling really stupid for not looking under the car closer when I bought it, I am just glad it didn't cost very much to begin with. The other problem was I was right back to square one.

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