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Hi, I'm Patrick and this is my '96 Fastback which bought in late 2019 as my first car. Or at least how it looked a few years ago. Lots of stuff has been done to it since then and I will try my best to dig up some pictures of the process as we catch up to the present. :) The previous owner, who bought it brand-new, was an old man and pretty much all the dents are his work, by the way. Just wanted to clarify. ;) It is (was) a bone stock, base-spec, MA8 with the optional 'Comfort' package installed from factory. Meaning it's got a 1.4l engine that makes 90hp, electrical windows in the front, power steering, A/C and no ABS, with drum brakes in the rear. Oh, and that atrocious fake wood that fools absolutely nobody and looks cheap as hell. What were they thinking? Oldest pictures I could find, was already on some lowering springs by then. Also removed some fugly flower-stickers from the doors and got rid of the 'Comfort' badges. Like every responsible young man before me, I of course immediately went ahead and installed some lowering springs and got myself a nice, quality exhaust. The springs are from Eibach and, if memory serves me right, the exhaust is made by a Polish company called 'Ulter'. We did some proper maintenance, though. You need a good foundation to build a house, right? That, and my old man never would have let me get away without doing some maintenance anyways. :P Beauty shot of the freshly unboxed exhaust. The exhaust arrived on a weekday at around 7PM and me and my old man got giddy like a bunch of kids on christmas eve as we put or grubby hands on it. We immediately went out into the freezing cold to get it installed ASAP. :D Roughly an hour later we were done and it felt like it was the coolest car on the planet for that moment. If I only knew what was to follow... ;) Might be able to find a video, but no promises. In the next episode...! Broke 18 year old me finally saves up enough money to get a set of wheels. And...! Something big on the horizon.

Finally got around to installing my Hondata and let's just say that I might have been a little nervous when I turned that ignition key for the first time, hah! But everything went well, and I now have a running, chipped D16Z9 engine, woohoo! It might be running richer than Jeff Bezos at a marathon for now, but a few good street-tuning sessions are going to take care of that. And I'm talking Lambda-0.8-at-idle-rich; Even a few seconds of cold-start are enough to make the whole courtyard reek of marzipan. Sadly I barely had any seat-time during the past few months, as the bane of every D-Series owner struck - ignition problems. It started as a random ignition stutter (rev-counter visibly took a dip) that quickly ended in a complete engine shut-off on my way home from work, and the car refused to turn back on again for at least five minutes after the initial shut-off. But it weirdly enough acted as if nothing happened when it did decide to work again. Spent a few weeks hunting down the issue, buying a new igniter, new coil, the whole nine yards, but the issue persisted. I suspected that the sensors inside of the dizzy might be the problem and looked up part numbers, but quickly found out that those are not sold separately. Dang it. That's when I went "F*k it, I'm gonna buy a whole damn new distributor." But, as it turns out, 99.9% of aftermarket dizzys for D-Series are hot garbage and people always have to buy new ones as they break down faster than you can say K-Swap. That's chinesium for ya... So I looked at those funny looking "Dragon Fire" -ones, which I admittedly didn't take seriously at first, and through their homepage I found out that they actually meet the IAT standard - Success! If something meets that standard, it's at least not as crappy as all of those cheapo replicas from China. The car has been running fine ever since and even gained a bit of torque down low! :D [A few weeks later...] Last weekend it was finally time for yet another small addition, as I finally grew tired of the original pedals and imported myself these beauties straight from the land of the rising sun. The instructions might be slightly difficult to read, but at least they included some pictures. And, well, installing pedals is kind of self-explanatory, y'know? Quick peek at them, straight out of the box. The installation process is actually super easy, as taking off the OEM accelerator-plastic is the most difficult step in my opinion. But with a small-ish flathead screwdriver and a little bit of convincing you can lift the plastic nose on the top and then just slide it off! After that, simply remove the plastic strips from the double-sided adhesive, set the covers in place and attach the small metal clamps that screw through the pedal covers to sandwich the pedal between the little clamps and the covers. This is what the finished product looks like. :) The clutch and brake pedal have that extremely grippy texture to them, which looks to be some kind of metal foam that has been injected into the frame. (Has even more grip than skateboard-tape!) Oh, and heel-and-toe has gotten a lot easier, as these pedals are a bit fatter than the OEM rubbers. All in all - way too expensive, but worth it. Mmm, take a look at that close-up.

Hmm my favourite mod is probably my intercooler setup. Not a fan of seeing the pipes sticking out of the fog lights.