When I was 15 I bought my first car, a 3rd generation Honda Prelude for $500. I loved it! From the pictures, you can see it was a rust bucket, but it had some balls in it’s engine and I learned tons of stuff working on the car.
However, I was really pissed after about 6 months when I really wanted to start building up the engine. I searched everywhere and there wasn’t any parts. I was so confused because my 1990 Prelude Si came with, what I thought at the time, was a B-series engine. It came stock with the B20A5 engine, which I thought was a B-series engine. You could imagine what happened when I found out what happened when I looked up the engine on Wikipedia.
The engine was listed under the B-series engines, but it had a little “*” and below it said that it wasn’t actually a part of the B-series family because it was an engine built and mounted at around a 15 degree angle. The engine leaned towards the back firewall of the engine bay so it would sit just right for the hood to close, since they styling of the car called for such a low-profile engine.
The engine comes stock with 130 horsepower, and the only parts available for the motor was a PACESETTER® BIG-BORE “MONZA” SINGLE EXHAUST SYSTEM KITS and some generic bolt on 
short ram intake systems. Now, I love turbo’d cars, and I totally wanted to turbo that car!! I searched everywhere and the only parts I found were custom made and it was like $400 for the custom turbo header!!! Being a 15 year old, I had better things to do with that $400! 
So.. I just did the basic bolt-ons, got some Motegi rims, tried to work on the body work, did tons of stuff to the 
interior to get rid of the nasty brown, put new cloth onto the seats, and then did a custom subwoofer enclosure in the back seat. For only being 15, I was so inexperienced. Everything was trial and error, and let me be the first to tell you, errors occurred often!
Don’t get me wrong… I loved the car! I never had one mechanical problem with it, I could get it to chirp in 3rd gear, and it was my first love! But.. after one winter, my shitty body work started to rust out. By the second winter, it was bad!
I decided to take the B20A5 engine out. One thing led to another, and the transmission ended up cracking. Since there was nothing else I could do engine wise, without buying expensive custom parts from other 3rd generation Prelude tuners, I just decided to retire the vehicle.
I gave it one last ride! I decided to make it fly, literally!! Now, you might think, “Why would anyone do this??” My brothers are some of the craziest people and love to do things to piss off all the rich people who live around my neighborhood in the multi-million dollar homes in the fancy subdivisions. What better than make the car an ornament in my front yard!! So.. we winched it up into a tree.
The engine went to my stepfather’s friend and the car ended up getting me $200 back into my pocket from the scrapyard.
So that is a very summed up version of my 3rd generation Prelude. If only that B20A5 would have been compatible with other 
B-series parts, I am sure I would still have that car today. So, that’s where I feel Honda messed up. They should have made the engine more compatible with B-series parts. I would have loved to make it v-tech and definitely turbo it. Ah well, it was a fun learner project while it lasted.
My 1989 3rd Generation Prelude Profile.
Off to Bigger and Better Cars!