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Senior Rebuilds Car for School Credit

Kiyosh Arun, a senior, is building a car for his senior project this year. His goal is to exchange the automatic transmission of a broken-down 2000 Honda Accord for a manual transmission, saving the car from a junkyard sentence.

Arun took this project as an opportunity to learn more about the intricacies of transmissions and to make a broken car work.

“Cars are definitely a big hobby,” said Arun. “I’m passionate about working on the project, and I’m passionate about cars.”

He added that he’s enjoyed cars since he was young and grew up playing with little Hot Wheels.

Arun is working on an unusual type of transmission exchange. Most cars nowadays have an automatic transmission, Arun explained, but he wants to exchange an automatic transmission with a manual one, which often requires less maintenance and is more fuel efficient.

“So for dummies,” said Arun, “I’m taking the prindle, which is the Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and turning it into 1 2 3 4 5 R, so a stick shift.”

A garage would charge about $3,000 for the job, Arun said, but he’s exchanged automatic transmissions himself for under $500 before.

“Typically people go to special stores to do stuff like this,” said Arun. “There’s a couple of websites that tell you how to do them, but they’re very hard.”

Arun’s experience working with cars before the project has helped with his confidence in undertaking this project, he said. His efforts with the manual exchange have been going smoothly so far.

“A year ago this car had a problem where the auto transmission stopped working,” he said. “So I went to the junkyard and pulled an auto transmission from another Accord and put it in myself.”

Arun has been documenting his progress with the project through a series of short video clips, which he intends to include in his Capstone presentation, along with a live display of his fully functioning 2000 Honda Accord with manual transmission.

Julie Ellington, who teaches Senior Thesis, said that this year she’s experimenting with a synthesis of what used to be a research thesis and a Capstone project taught in separate semesters.

“Due to the pandemic and the curricular changes I was having to make, over the summer I reflected about the relationship between those two components,” said Ellington. “I started to see them as intrinsically tied together, so I developed a process that centers the project component. Through a very specific inquiry process, we get to a research project that’s related to the central project.”

Ellington emphasized how driven Arun has been about building the car, saying that he would be doing it whether or not it was required for her class. Arun’s challenge with the project was to achieve his goals in a timely manner, and Ellington has worked with him to come up with a schedule plan for the project.

Arun feels confident about the timeline so far, and hopes to complete the project according to plan.

“I do not pretend to know as much about cars as he does,” said Ellington. “My job is trying to understand the steps in his process, the order of operations and to be the person that interrogates those pieces to make sure that he’s hitting the benchmarks he’s set for himself.”

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Shambhava Srikanth
Shambhava Srikanth
Shambhava Srikanth is a musician and aspiring writer who lives in Portland.

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