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Watch This Honda CRX Get a Full Restoration in 45 Minutes
Restoration is a complicated term for us car nerds. On one hand, the act of making a car function properly is a restoration. On the other is the desire to keep as many original parts as possible, refinishing each part in addition to making it work properly rather than replacing it. Both are restorations, but depending on who you talk to only one is correct. Regardless of where you stand, you’ll likely enjoy the 45-minute video of the revival of this aging Honda CRX.
This video comes by way of the RRC Restoration YouTube channel and thankfully has no music overlay and shows much of the effort in real time. Speeding things up through time-lapse production can make for some seriously fascinating content to watch but also leaves gaps that our brains sometimes don’t know how to fill. This CRX effort might be lacking in self-peeling tape, but instead it gives a very honest look at the minutia of a restoration. Most tasks just are not sexy, especially at the start of a project when pulling up old carpet and breaking loose dozens of rusted bolts are what seem to take up so much time.
From disassembling crusty parts, the restoration moves on to putting the body on a rotisserie and cutting out rust. New metal is welded in and shaped to look OEM. It’s a process I’ve seen done on countless muscle car era cars, but to see a unibody car from the 1990s get the same treatment is interesting and this shines a light on the shifting challenges that will come as newer and newer cars reach the point where they transition from simple maintenance to actual resurrection.
When the body was complete it came time to deal with all the smaller parts. Many of those were sandblasted and then painted, while some were plated at home. This video does not show all the details of that process, but the channel has a handful of videos on subsections of the restoration that have significantly more information, step-by-step instruction, and insight from someone who has done the work previously.
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Videos that lay out every detail are nice to have, but seeing a project from start to finish in one go provides a bookend experience that is so rare these days, especially without unnecessary shop drama. If you can’t work on your project car but want to scratch that itch in your brain, this video is probably the ticket.
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I wonder how much they have in it vs what it is worth?
They easily put more in than it was worth. It’s certainly worth more now, but the total cost of the restoration would be the big question. The CRX was a great little car back in the day.