At four in the morning yesterday, I was standing at my front door watching the show as heavy winds and driving rain battered BangShift Mid-West. In the morning, the ground was so saturated that my mailbox…recently repaired after a Pontiac G6 took it out with extreme prejudice…was wilting over in mud the consistency of pudding. The little john boat that my neighbor owns was filled to the brim with rainwater, and the three watermelons I haven’t harvested yet are probably little more than canteens with seeds at this point. Mud and slop is the name of the game right now, so why not go digging for an off-roader that I wouldn’t mind beating around the area? The problem: I wouldn’t want the typical lifted truck around here, because of those employed by Midnight Auto Wrecking, So what to get to splash through floodwaters deep enough to worry a Subaru Outback and mud that’d swallow up a standard truck?
Easy. 1982 Honda Civic Wagon.
I found this beast in Arlington, Washington, and I could swear that my late friend Bobbo could’ve had a hand in building this testament to the best worst decisions ever. Plopping the Civic body onto a lifted chassis with a V8 for power equates to a home-built answer to Subaru’s butch Legacy wagon. Do we know just how this was created? No. I’d guess an S-10 frame, since it’s sporting a 350 small-block where a tiny little four banger once sat. It’s not finished yet, either…some floor metalwork needs to be finished to seal the Honda up, the radiator needs to be repaired or replaced, and some fender flares might not be a bad idea given how far out the tires stick. It’s an absolute mutt of a thing, but I love it for that reason. You aren’t going to worry about it, but you will drive it like it was meant to be driven: through anything.
You’d be stuck in the mud in that pos seeing as how it’s only 2wd