I'll look forward to the road tests, Mark, but in my experience to date Hondas are neither difficult to work on nor sensitive to detail. It irritates me that Suzuki, for example, doesn't follow the same design principles as Honda. It needn't be difficult to get good results.
Some years ago I had a long talk with the American engineer in charge of engine design at a very large American car manufacturer. His engines leaked oil, and always had. Top management started telling him this had to stop, and he challenged them to show him a better engine. They told him to look at a Honda car. He went to a dealer who sold Hondas as well as his company's products, and asked the boss of the place to show him a Honda that didn't leak oil, if they had one. The dealer pointed out across his yardful of traded-in Hondas, and said, "Any of those". The engineer didn't believe him of course, so he picked one at random, and the dealer had it brought into the workshop and put up on a hoist. The engineer inspected it thoroughly, in growing disbelief. He could not find any place where the built-up dust on the engine was not completely dry. It was a long time after that before he got his own engines to stop leaking oil, and he wanted to give up a couple of times along the way, but he got there in the end, by blindly copying the way Honda did it.
