from what I've seen from looking on Ebay at photos of cars for sale, engines are one of the last things people swap, exaust are the first things because it gives teenage boys a warm fuzzy feeling, and because exaust systems rust out, and the aftermarket ones that reduce your horse power are often the same price or cheaper then stock.
If you replace your cold air intake with the stock air intake your car will not only run better, but quiter as well, or at least that was my expeaince when my air intake in front of the filter was broken/missing.
with 210,000 miles, I would replace the rings, with the short shifter, air intake, and exaust, someone bought this car with the intentions of abusing it, with that many miles on it the engine is likely to have been stressed, low compression, and burning oil is going to takes it's toll on your gas mileage, if you plan on keeping this car long enough that you might think about pulling the engine a 2nd time, then think about the time and money invalved in pulling it that 2nd time, I say do a compleat job the first time and then you have 100,000+ miles of worry free operation, and you will have a more solid vehicle to work off.

Do you think that an aftermarket exhaust could truely hurt FE? It is a 2 in exhaust except a slightly more restrictive muffler, not sure diameter.

From all info I've ever gathered, a cold air intake improves both performance and FE, but yes, at the trade off making things louder.

The guy I bought it from bought it form the original owner and he only put 4K on the engine. That's 208K by original owner. He put the exhaust and shifter for his son because it was to be his but the kid ended up wanting his deceased grandma's car instead. Some ugly 1984 GM 4 Door with 40K on the engine. Anyways, either it was the engine's time, the way it was driven, or spontanous head gasket failure (yeah, I made it up, wanna fight about it.)

BTW: That is a 1983 Datsun 280ZX Turbo 2+2, originally owned by a former Japanese ambassador. My dad's toy.

yea you gathered from the wrong info pool. thats all the cai manufacturors marketing cryap.

to 2nd matts notion about the exhaust: 1/4 of the civics i see have aftermarket exhausts 1/20th of the civics i see have swaps. what does that tell you about the amount of civics that have swaps and exhausts?

i disagree about the hf motor out-doing the vx motor. they may be the similar in their mpg but if they are both in proper vx will out perform the hf while providing the similar efficiency.

Bah, and here I was happy for a second.

Welcome to a fellow CRX'er, though I have an automatic CRX DX.

I hope to some day put in an HF tranny and get rid of my damn automatic.

the stock hf exaust is also pretty light, the first generation crx hf had a super light one piece exaust (9 feet long one piece, cat to muffler tip) and the only time a larger exaust is going to improve your mileage is when you are running wide open throttle, but the HF engine is not made to run wide open throttle, it's built for low speed and takes advantage of it's high torqe, the VX engine is built simaleraly to creat low end torqe, but as the engine speed increases, that 2nd intake valve opens to alow it to produce more high end power as well, but unless you have heavy trafic where it helps to be able to accelarate very quickly, and having a high reving engine helps, then most of the time you are not going to use that extra bit of enginering.

Hmm, are you able to use the 84 to 87 HF exhaust on 2nd gen, a 91 in particular, CRX HFs. Assuming of course you have the stock header too.

Also, is anyone's computer part of a college or university's network?