At Home Mechanic

Car companies come and car companies go, but the products they leave behind often find a loving home that wishes to preserve and conserve them for years to come. Name plates like La Salle, De Soto and Studebaker are only distant memories and a few remaining survivors. Over the course of the last couple of years, once strong sellers like Plymouth and Oldsmobile have been dropped by their corporate parents for lack of consumer interest. In the former examples, loyalists blame Chrysler and General Motors for failing to sufficiently creating enough product distinction for sow sales. But the sad truth is that the abundance of manufacturing over capacity for North American car manufacturers made reducing nameplates a must.

Orphan cars are not totally alone in the world; stockpiles of spare parts are generally good for even the most obscure obsolete marques. Entire industries are dedicated to keep old cars in spare parts; a simple search on the Internet can help you find a Rambler radiator or a Hudson header.

But there is another type of orphan car, and for some reason these cars end in my collection. This other type of orphan car is the sports coupe that is no longer is or never was supported by the Aftermarket. The Aftermarket is the hundreds of companies that make the "go fast" parts for cars. Better flowing intake systems, higher compression pistons, stiffer suspension stuff, and much more does not come from the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) but from small to medium sized businesses who cater to the auto enthusiast market.

The Aftermarket is interested in making money so they tailor their products to what sells. Lots of people want to improve the performance of their Mustangs, so the Mustang Aftermarket is large and robust. Very few people want to improve the performance of their Mercury Marquis, so the Aftermarket for that car is nearly non-existent. That all makes perfect sense.

What does not make sense is the lack of Aftermarket support for some popular sport coupes. And I am not talking about product offerings from some obscure Serbo-Croatian cobbler; I am talking about reasonably good selling Honda products. Honda products have led the renaissance of interest in the automobile hobby that has blossomed in the last 15 years amongst young consumers. The Aftermarket for most of the Honda product line is deep and wide, meaning it is nearly possible to build a Honda Civic strictly from the parts available at your local import speed shop.

But I have had the misfortune to fall in love with maybe the only two Honda products that is not supported by the Aftermarket with any kind of enthusiasm. My 1987 Honda CRX was once at the cutting edge of the current Sport Compact Car phenomenon. At its introduction in the 1984 model year, the CRX became the prototypical Honda performance platform in America. The Aftermarket quickly embraced this car and a good supply of performance enhancing parts came to market. But when Honda fundamentally changed the design of the CRX and its sibling the Civic in the 1988 model year, the Aftermarket dropped the older CRX like a hot potato. Today, is I need or want a performance part my choices are slim. I have found that my best source for performance parts are garage sales, eBay auctions and my local junkyard. But at least the parts for my car were once available and can be found with a little scrounging.

The other enthusiast car in my stable is a 1990 Honda Prelude 2.0 Si. This car might just as well never have been born as long as the Aftermarket is concerned. Other than some sketchy Cold Air Intake kits from eBay and some dodgy looking body kits the Aftermarket ignores this car. This handsome sports coupe featuring a torquey 2 liter B-series Honda engine and a fully independent double wish bone suspension and four wheel disk brakes is an orphan at the performance parts counter.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the lack of things to buy for the Prelude is going to save me a lot of money in the long run. Rather than plotting how I will spend my next paycheck making the Prelude faster, I will be saving my money for the next "fun" car I will buy. Do you suppose the Ford Thunderbird has much Aftermarket support? If I buy one, you can count on any that exist to immediately dry up.