Hi,
Might aswell introduce myself first, I’m Vincent, 35yo and from Belgium.
I own(ed) a lot of honda’s over the years, but this is about my newest import, a 2001 orthia.
It’s a low mileage manual trans AWD version, so pretty rare, especially over here.
I’ve been refreshing and updating it, mostly to an oem+ spec, and I’ll post updates here along the way.
For now, here’s how it looked when I got it:
So I started with the chassis, although the bottom of the car already was stupid clean, and cleaned it up and applied a new coating
Then I pulled the front subframe, steering rack and suspension.
I had an EK9 subframe and swaybar to spare so I had these sandblasted and powdercoated to install on the orthia, together with new hardrace upper and lowers, tie rods and endlinks
A new set of driveshafts are waiting aswell, Hence I didn’t really care about pulling the old one out in one piece.
Spindles and brakes are up next…
Love this. So different 
Thanks. I accidentally stumbled upon it at the Japanese auctions, didn’t plan to buy anything.
But here we are 
you gotta love the Honda oddities from overseas.
It’s an oddity for sure. It’s like honda threw spare parts from 4 different cars together and made this Frankenstein looking thing.
But I like the potential it has, and want to find out what I can make of it.
That’s cool! Wish we could bring one of those to the States. Not quite old enough yet though.
So the orthia was put on a back seat for some time while I was waiting for parts.
But here they are. From US to Belgium in 2 weeks, during holiday season, that’s pretty impressive.
Almost as impressive as the parts themselves.
These S1 trailing arms are next level stuff!
In case you were wondering why I would buy awd arms for a car that is awd from factory, they come with drum brakes on the rear and I wanted discs, to complement the front brake upgrade. Also, even though the shell was really clean, the subframe, front & rear arms, steering rack etc were in bad shape so that’s all being replaced. So choice between oem with drums or reinforced oem look with discs was easy 
Meanwhile I’m keeping busy with some small cleanup and upgrade stuff, that I’ll post about tomorrow.
So will be ready for inspection soon then ? Get it on the road
It’ll be on the road sooner than the EK9 at least. Hopefully by summer. Depends on how fast I can get it to the paint shop
One of the small things I did was get a second valve cover and restore it.
The one on the car had some paint coming off.
So I got another one from the breakers,
Stripped it, cleaned it, put fresh wrinkle paint on it and sanded and machine polished the letters.
From this:
Little impulse buy:
Front and rear Spoon strut bars and a rare Spoon lower tie bar.
Going to get the mounts blasted and coated and polish the bars, then install them with new (titanium) hardware.
Just got to find out if I can actually fit that lower tie bar. 
If it doesn’t fit, it will fit on my EG 
I’m going to clean them all up anyway, so I it doesn’t fit and you want it, we can work something out 
Spoon bars arrived today.
They are in pretty good shape but I had some time to spare, so i gave them a quick sand and polish.
I didn’t want to make them too shiny, just remove the scratches and imperfections.
Before:
oooo a shiny silver spoon
Been a while since a posted, but nothing much did happen aswell.
COVID, work and winter threw off the plans.
How’s everyone been? Hope you’re all safe & healthy!
Got some parts delivered today though.
Rare A’PEXi backbox for orthia:
, a set of VTI fan blades, been redone in white and have some light damage, but they are straight and were really cheap and after a refurb they’ll look like new:
