Quarter panel wheel well lip rust?

[coolhandluke]

Rust in the rear quarters is very common on these in wet climates/salted roads. Here in Ireland - which is basically a giant teddy bear shaped sponge - It was very rare to see an R without rust in the rear quarters and sills, or repairs to those areas. Same in the UK.

JDM's didn't come with rear inner wheelarch liners which trap moisture, though they also came with less rustproofing too. There's a joint at the bottom of the forward part of the inner wheelarch where it joins the sill that is often slightly open and water can get in there and start rot on the inside. I dunno what the rules are about linking to other forums but there's a long standing and extensive write up on it on a UK based R forum. Some of the pics are scary...

http://www.itr-dc2.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=46786

A few members got caught out with this and more and more R's have been extensively repaired as they age(and start to gain value). And because you can't source new rear arch panels it has to be fabricated. If I were buying one today I'd be looking to pop the rear speaker covers off and get one of those inspection cameras to have a look down there. I've personally seen real horror stories in that section, yet the outside paint looked fine. If there's any bubbling at all in the area below the Type R decals what's behind that won't be pretty. Same for any bubbling on the wheelarch itself. The inner arch is almost certainly starting to get crusty.

I got lucky mainly because I'm paranoid about rust and have relatives into vintage cars, so a week after I got it I filled every section I could with anti rust wax and inspect and top it up annually(what Honda took out in weight saving I put back in wax. ). 15 years on, daily driven and parked outside in all weathers it's still very solid. I got doubly lucky because we had a huge JDM import market here for a time and was able to find a JDM 1.6 being scrapped and I cut the rear quarters off of it for spares. Funny enough from those I saw the "lesser" JDM Integras seemed to suffer less from rust in this particular area for some reason. In the US because you officially had Integras over there I'm sure a trip to a junkyard in warmer states could find similar to store for the future?

Wow, I wasn't aware of this information. Thank you for sharing and educating the mostly US-based community here. That is neat info.