Love Letter to my Civic

I was hoping to make a couple more blog posts this summer, but I really haven't been up to much. I've been teaching full time and doing a lot of email correspondence to set up in-studio sessions at the BU radio for the fall semester.

But this past week was filled with a couple long-overdue repairs on my Civic, as well as a lot of talk about the looming end of its life. That car means a lot to me, and I think it played a big role in my coming-of-age, so I'm pretty invested in keeping it running as long as I can. I'll try to keep the musing part of this post short - there are a lot of pictures of my janky DIY bodywork too, and they're probably more interesting.

In case you haven't seen it, my car is a 2006 Honda Civic and it looks like this:

The Civic has always been the same age as me, and I've been riding in it my whole life. Right before I got my license, it broke down and sort of ruined a family road trip, so my parents decided it was time for a newer, more reliable car. I was lucky enough to more-or-less inherit it, and I started paying for repairs and driving it around.

And driving that car led me to places I don't know if I'd be without it. One of the first things I did was replace the dead speakers and buy a couple CDs. I think the first two I had in there were The Score by the Fugees and Steely Dan's The Royal Scam. The month I got my license I took a trip to the White Mountains and did a bit of hiking by myself for the first time. I met backpackers up there and kind of discovered that it was something you could do. And I started driving to regional festivals to volunteer, first at Common Ground Country Fair in Maine. Being part of the festival tradition has made me a better musician and I hope a better person too. I associate most of my key moments of adolescent independence with the Civic - driving to various places and trying out various things by myself.

So anyway, my mechanic said that I couldn't pass safety inspection this year without fixing a couple jagged rust spots:

 

So, at the mechanic's suggestion, my dad and I put in a patch to cover the larger rust spot. First, I knocked out as much of the rust as I could and we used an angle grinder on the rest, down to bare metal:

Then we riveted in this piece of sheet metal behind the hole:

 

From here it starts to look even more amateur... Here it is with body filler over the patch, then finally sanded and painted:

 

It looks super easy from the pictures, but we managed to struggle with the planning and execution for several hours...

As for the other spot, I put some duct tape over it! There's no way that's allowed, but my guy said he'd pass it if I did the tape, so it is what it is.

 

 

I also put some new headlights in - the old ones were ridiculously dim. It turned out to be harder than I expected, and the whole front panel needed to come off:

 

We've been lucky with the engine and transmission and all the other scary driving-related parts so far.. Which is good - I think if someone fixed my engine with the level of craftsmanship applied to that body patch, my days would be numbered!

 

And with all the pressing work out of the way, I'm feeling more optimistic about the Civic than I did last week. My sister has started driving now and I hope the car will last long enough to do for her what it did for me.