While finishing up high school, I put tein lowering springs and a skunk2 exhaust on the car. Painted the stock ls wheels and thought I was coolest guy in town.
At that point I joined a local Honda forum and met a few guys who were much more serious (track days, drag racing, etc.) then I was. Started hanging out with them a lot more and that got me into getting deeper into modifications. I had also just started school at Cincinnati for engineering so money was hard to come by.
My sophomore year I decided I wanted to try my hand at something a little more in depth on the car. So during my spring break, I decided to pull the engine, clean up and paint the engine bay, delete some of the creature comforts and tuck some wires. Still kept the ls due to money, and did some really tacky teal green powdercoating.
At that time I also threw on some function&form type 2 coilovers and some Rotas with cpr stickers.
Around that time I met some other guys in Cincinnati who were big into Honda’s and had a couple Honda tuning features between them that I started hanging out with. These guys were more into drag racing, but still into quality builds with non-counterfeit parts. So I started collecting parts after starting my co-op job and making a little money. First item I bought was a Jdm itr 36mm 5 lug and shortly after that was a jdm front end. I knew by that point when it came time for a swap I wanted to go k series, so I scooped up a set of first gen hasports from a member on here. They came off a yellow itr that was at one point a project feature in Honda tuning or one of the magazines, I think it was quickly turned into a race car by that member (and possibly wrecked?)
All those items were stored back at my parents house while I continued going to school, and my 4th year I ended up picking up an 04 tsx to finally have a nice daily. The integra got parked and pretty much ignored for a year until I graduated. I did end up finding a genuine Mugen gen 1 for a stupid deal my last year of school, so I bought that and put it in the parts pile.
Upon my graduation, I moved back to Columbus after taking a full time position. And when I got my first check, I treated myself to a set of itr spec volk re30’s that belonged to a friend of mine. Around the same time, my best friend through high school’s dad bought a 3000 sq ft shop for us to all work on our projects. They had a few mg projects, some old Alfa’s, an old mini and a first year new mini. Having a place to work comfortable was the domino that led to totally stripping the car to a bare shell to try my hand at a ground up build.
I don’t have any of these pictures on my phone, I’ll try and dig through my old laptop and find pictures to update some of these.
To be continued...
