Honda Civic Unflappable Fuel Door Suggestion

I've exercised a little brevity in this post. I'd like to round off this triptych of Honda Civic fix-up posts with a write up of today's EPS steering rack regrease soon, and with 45 photographs taken I'd prefer to give that the lion's share of my mindthots (spot the belated eponym reference) .

Something I've noticed about Hondas, driving this one, is that they all seem to have metal fuel filler flap doors, rather than the plastic flaps most other manufacturers use.

Something else I've noticed after a quick look through Google is that this Civic is not alone in sporting a rather indifferent fuel flap - occasionally it sticks shut when the opening lever in the cabin is pulled, and when it does open, well, it's not open so much as slightly ajar. From what I've read, I'm one of the lucky ones. Enough fuel flap cables have snapped apart on these Civics that an American website exclusively sells repair kits for them.

Using the method described in this post, I managed to persuade the fuel flap to pop open with a bit more conviction. Here's a before and after comparison, in the usual tradition.

Before fettling...





...and after:





Anyway, I had noticed that the piece of sprung steel that pops the flap hinge open had become misaligned, it was no longer parallel with the door. Its retaining nut (8mm) had slackened off with time, as photographed below.



Some days I'm just not in the mood for tinkering with cars. Instead of taking out the leaf spring, I just used angled pliers to tension it a bit more (bend it). I lined the spring back up in parallel with the fuel filler door, and tightened the 8mm retaining nut.





All done, thanks for reading. A suivre: the EPS steering rack regrease. And after that, I'm not so much as washing this Honda, my enthusiasm for this sort of thing tends to fade with the waning autumn daylight.