Car tuning: is it worth it?

[HondaLuver83]

If you want something done right, then do it yourself. That's what I did, grab a haynes manual and search online.

 

[BlkCurrantKord]

Guys cost or research is not the culprit. I did everything myself that I could, basically all but take the engine out kinda deal, I don't have a hoist nor a dyno to tune it etc. The only real correlation here is aftermarket has a higher rate of failure by far. I found this out the hard way trying to boost and ended up getting an H22 swap instead, more OEMish. All I was hoping for was to get a bit of durability and the cheap performance car tunning generally proclaims. Some of you say you get what you pay for. Well I paid about 10k for the H22 swap so far and the value is way to low. I didn't get what I paid for, I got less than I paid for.

I don't have a hoist either, I borrowed one from a friend. The only aftermarket part I've had "fail" was my Magnaflow exhaust, the muffler cracked around the welds. I don't know how you paid 10k for an H22 swap, you literally got raped on that one, you could've swapped, slightly built, and turbo'd the engine for that much.

Research is money too btw. Think the time lost researching you could work and get paid an hourly wage. Either that or pay someone to do it who invested his time in research. When you do work by yourself it's not free, and most of the time to do it right you need tools and it's maybe even more expensive. I have to teach as part of my graduate program contract, I think I get higher payoffs by researching in economics. I don't mind paying someone to do their work if it's just, but it really isn't, I find myself always working on my car tightening screws that others forgot to put in, it's too sloppy and parts are ****ty, like Drift said you need to spend some quality time and money to figure out the 1 in 20 that works well.

How do you figure that someone loses money or wages by researching what they want to do to their car? Unless you live in a world where you work 12hr days. I work 8-9hrs a day, 5 days a week. So what do I do in my spare time? Research, research, research. I do everything that I can myself, it costs me nothing but my own time, which I don't mind giving up. The tools pay for themselves.

In the last two years I've gone though half a dozen shops that I've dealt with on more than one occasion until I got fed up and moved on to the next. These shops were chosen not based on cost but based on reputation, research or what have you. I've had my car worked on in shops that have been on TV, shops that are true legends on the forums, several Honda Services while I was stock, shops that cost way too much, Honda specialty shops, shops that specialize in only the thing I needed them to do etc. I don't want to drag names in dirt, I think this is an industry wide phenomena.

I think we put up with most of it and some of you may not even realize the degree of failure because we have a higher tolerance for mishaps. An Accord however is hardly a toy car and usually a daily driver. Reliability and drive-ability should be at the top of the list. I'm all for having fun, but we do share the road and some of us do need it to start-up in the morning.

Well I'm not here to say I'm quitting at least not yet. I've been on the forums before I bought my car, researched it for a year before buying, I've been here since before this site. I will most likely keep this car until something irreversible happens to it. I built one piece fiberglass doors to house 10 inch midbases, that took 2 months out of my life and some lung capacity, I built a carputer that integrates the Hondata display as a real time monitoring device, a track ready suspension etc. I know how much time I put in this car and it's not a good deal to let it go, because time is money.

Whatever the issues were with shops, etc. I think what it comes down to is you need to either...

1) Suck up the past bad experiences, start fresh, and get your hands dirty working on your car, yourself.

2) Don't bother modding the car anymore if you're going to rely on shops to do all the work for you and then complain b/c it wasn't done right.

If it were me and a shop didn't do the work the way I wanted it done or to my standards, well then I'll make them redo it till it's right. All in all, it's not the aftermarket's fault you spend 10k on a 3k swap, had bad experiences with parts, or bad experiences with half a dozen shops.

You picked the motor, you picked the parts, you picked the shops. If you didnt like what was done or how it was done, you should've either spoken up or taken on the tasks yourself.


/rant

 

[RickyG]

One phrase sums this all up. "You gotta pay to play."

My suspension set up cost over a grand. What does it do? tears the hell out of the car and rids like crap. Do I like it? on most days yes. Do I regret it? sometimes yes. Wheels and tires. If you're going to buy wheels don't buy cheep fake stuff. The $400 you pay for wheels and tires on tirerack or wheels direct, or pretty much any site like that will never compare to a set of gram lights, or volks, or higher end enkeis. Just don't skimp on parts. Do you think J's Racing sells their parts for as much as they do because they're crap? NO, they back up the cost with tons of research and development.

Basically spend your money wisely on the things you want most and you're good.

 

[Bond4387]

I agree with you on some points, but I agree with everyone else on other ones.

I know that my car will never be a race car. I know that it will won't blow away other 'sporty' cars, unless I drown money into it. We all mod for fun, and that's why we suggest to new members to "blackhouse their headlights", or "add a lip kit".

Its all about being unique for me, and seeing as how mostly all of the 6th gens around my area are terribly modded (rice ftl), or untouched because of older people driving them, and I consider mine to be the most clean out of all of them I see. Sure I only have blackhoused lights, tint, fogs, and stock se's, but its all based on what you like about your car.

On the other hand, stop going to garbage shops. Research, and don't buy garbage parts.
Good luck with your new revelation, I hope it brings you to a different awareness of modding your car.

 

[Atreidies]

$10k for a H22?!?! That pretty much makes my point on research. If you had taken 30 mins out of your life to look at the costs on the net, you would've saved $7k or more. Is your time really that valuable?

 

[RedRyder]

Like Juicebox said, doing it yourself is the only REAL way to guarantee satisfaction. If you want to do something and don't know how, learn. If you don't have the tools, keep saving money and accumulate them over time. If you don't have the workspace, wait until you find one. Sure you can pay someone else to do something, but you have to accept there may be some level of failure. That's just reality. You SHOULD be able to trust someone to do the job right, but the fact is that you can't.

I never do anything to my car without first doing the research yielding that it can be done exactly the way it needs to be so it is correct. Sure I get impatient but the wait, if it occurs, always pays off in the end.

This is precisely why I am waiting to swap to 6spd and supercharge. When I buy a house and have a garage to work in, and when I get more tools, and when the Accord becomes my 2nd car...then I can learn and work on it freely with no consequences. So anything bad that happens is my own fault and I can fix it since I know the history, and anything good that happens I can be proud of. Right now I don't have a second car, I don't have enough tools, and I don't have a sufficient workspace in which to do the job. So I do other stuff.

 

[TheHunter]

^ Hopefully your autotragic lasts till then haha...

Guys I think CVJoint did research, he says so in his last post. Sometimes you just get unlucky IMO. Perhaps he got lied to with the H22 he bought, and everything on it was on the verge of failing, or the shops he went to just kept overcharging because they thought they could. There's no way of telling exactly how much everything will cost.

 

[RedRyder]

^So far it's been autoMAGIC lol.

 

[TheHunter]

^So far it's been autoMAGIC lol.

Hahahahaha that's what you think! Wait till you feel the power difference with the swap. There's no comparison.

 

[Drift]

Im still not seeing how this added up to $10k. I think my entire swap was under $3k, with a motor. And that was almost 4 years ago when there was far less resources available.

Im not trying to be a dick by any means, its just such a big number that its hard to figure out where the money went, especially have done much harder swaps into other cars for way cheaper.