Improve Your Civic in Only One Easy Step

"That Bastard Kurtis - An Attempt to Standardize My Username Across Platforms" (thatbastardkurtis5)
12/26/2014 at 16:34 • Filed to: None

The shift knob on my '03 Civic looks like this:

The car has a Honda Factory Performance package, and I'm not sure if that's the stock knob since I can't find another HFP Civic to compare to, but that's what is on it anyway.

I don't hate it, it's comfortable enough, but it's super cold and I live in Rhode Island. Also, it's a car that I own with a manual transmission, which means the knob is going away anyway.

Here's what my shift knob looks like now:

So much better. A plain white knob with the shift pattern is kinda my thing. I had one custom made for my '01 allroad because nobody makes a Euro 6-speed pattern, I just put one on my Corvair (factory is black), and I've probably had them on a dozen cars I've owned before this.

The knob is actually quite a bit larger than I thought it would be. I mean it's a handful. I think it's something like 2 1/4 inches across, and it's very satisfying in the hand.

New to me on this one is that it came with a threaded adapter to get to M10 (I had never had to use a thread adapter), and I ended up using a jam nut. Now in my opinion, jam nuts are the worst damn thing there is...there's nothing worse than gripping your shift knob and feeling a hex nut on the bottom of it.

Luckily, the factory knob included a kind of rounded, sculpted jam nut...it's nice looking, and it just feels like the bottom of the knob kinda fans out to meet the shifter. A definite improvement, and I didn't have to break out the Loctite.

So there you go. That's how you improve your Civic in one easy step. Though I expect I'll hear several other one-step solutions on how to improve a Civic...selling it, for one.