Engine Block, & Timing belts

[hondasicarus]

Hello eveyone,

I have bought a new used car from a very supposedly nice young couple last week. A 98 Honda Civc DX coupe.... It has 89,000 miles on it, and to carfax has not a single problem with it...until honda looked under the hood for the 90,000 mile servicing + timing belt. Apparently it was in a front in collision... nice eh?... anyhow. The engine mount (that mounts through the plastic shell for the timing belt) is no longer there. Rather it has been remounted, and fitted with like a 2 inche wide by a 1/2 inch thickness U type bar... The engine block is not badly damaged....infact it is just surface problems... But where the mount would go is a hole. So the mount would go through the plastic cage for the timing belt and mount into the block, with the new addition the only thing that remains is the hole. My honda service said that potientially it could be a problem if something where to enter in the hole or salt would get in to there that it would deteriate the timing belt and ruin the engine. And the only response or help that i got was I would have to have the block replaced. My question is, since it is just a plastic hole...couldnt it be covered up by a super glued piece of plastic?
If the situation couldn't get worse... The family that I bought it from, said that her father backed into it with his Tahoe, craked the bumper and she had to have that front end replaced...but nothing more. Prior to that the honda was a certified used honda in 2002. I've been told that there is a serivce record that is kept of all incidents? and or body work that had been done. Honda says for the engine block to have had no mount that it had to have been hit, plus the front bumper is new, and one head light. So someone is covering this up...and lying about it. I need help! I used to have trust with people, and now I am becoming jaded as the minutes go by.

[i_a_n112784]

Ok, from what I read, someone beat the hell out of the front end, and then got it fixed, but did something ghetto for the engine mount. Maybe I'm wrong, but can't the part of the mount closest to the block be replaced? (I've never tried it) And if it can, why not just do that?

As for carfax, it is USELESS. I have had cars that my insurance agent told me had been in an accident that carfax had no clue about. Even the estimated owner thing is hardly accurate.


Honda keeps a record of all services, but it doesn't look like the job was done by honda, so there may be no record. And if the accident was never reported to insurance, which may have happened if it was indeed family that hit the car, I doubt that there is any kind of record.

[hondasicarus]

Thanks for the answer! Is there any like ghetto service book that exsists? If the front end was done up, wouldn't the person fixing it have to enter the VIN into a system?...so inturn that would be posted somewhere?!? eh?.. I have a though with covering up my triming belt case hole... Would taking some heat resistant, oil, gas, solvent glue/apoxy, with a tempered piece of plastic and stick it on?

[i_a_n112784]

To my knowledge, there is no massive database of accidents and repairs, other than the one the insurance people use, so the only record of the repair would be the reciept/estimate itself, or on the computer at the company that fixed it.

As for fixing the hole, the engine really needs that mount (after all, none of us know better than the engineer who put it there), but if it is a hole other than the one that the mount goes through, yes, I would patch it up using a good adhesive and some plastic. From experience, there is a glue/sealant called "seal all" or something real close to that, that is the ONLY glue I have ever found that gas doesn't eat through.