It isn't a Civic, its a CRX.

[Daeron]

Okay, it is high time I had some sort of Project thread for this car. I just can't bring myself to really get into any of the Honda forums; way too much volume, not enough informed people per capita. So here, to the "other vehicles" no-response subforum it goes

 

I bought this car a couple days before Christmas.

 

God I love that picture.. Yes, thats my 75 280Z in the background

 

It is a 1991 CRX HF. 5 speed, 390K miles on the odo, in REALLY nice shape, except the hood was smashed, and the windshield, and the hatch glass, and the radiator. Details follow on a machine that, believe it or not, drives more like a Mustang or a Camaro than a Civic. The reason is a dumb-luck previous owner engine longblock swap; this engine has "under 100K on it."

 

Car as I bought it:

 

 

 

Allright.. So originally, the CRX HF came with an 8 valve, roller-rocker head on a standard D15B bottom end. The D-series is the late 80s/90s civc motor, in the US none came with more than one cam but some other market motors were DOHC, some VTEC and non, but its basically your standard civic motor with a bajillion heads that make it different, and maybe two or three strokes, and lots of piston/rod combinations. ALL the other motors were at least 12 valve, i think the majority were 16 valve SOHC but the HF motor was 8.

 

It came with something like 65 horsepower, and 105lb-ft of torque, and the gearing was super steep; this car wasn't "the cheap one," it was the ultra economy car. quotes range from 45 to 53 mpg. The car weighs 1967 stock brand new (and the 90-91 was the "fat one;" in 88 the car was essentially identical but weighed 130 pounds less!)

 

So, like I said before just before Christmas this car came up on craigslist and my brother and I went to look at it; smashed windshield and hatch glass, smashed hood, bent front bumper, JY fender, no radiator, no headlights.. $500. My brother and I immediately noticed that the struts had little colored indicators on the tops, and adjusters... hellloooo.. Konis, Tim, did you see that, yah, shhh..

 

He laid down on the ground and peeked underneath, and sees lowering springs (H&R, a good brand) and camber adjustment kits all around, the same adjustable shocks in the back... OOooOOooOO

 

So I bought the car. Got home to look it all up and find that the pieces on the car would cost about 1200-1400 bucks new,

 

*subtle distinction: I bought this car from "the kid" and he bought it from the "PO"*

 

Now, the kid had never had the car on the road. PO said they backed into it with a truck (dunno if he bought that story or if he was trying to pawn it off on me, this car was in an accident. Minor, but no truck backed into it, it was an accident.) PO also said that the stock engine (that 8 valve roller-rocker 60 horse power plant) had blown and was replaced with a japanese junkyard motor. The engine code doesn't follow USDM nomenclature (where they are all D15Bx, where x is anything from 1 to 9; the HF was d15b6, the DX was d15b2, etc) It just says D15B, so its basically the standard DX type engine (D15B2) is what all my research comes up with. So, the standard power plant that makes about 85 horses with the DPFI on it, and about 105 with the Si MPFI.

 

The HF fuel system is a dinky, straw sized MPFI system; my throttle body is probably sub-45mm diameter (really I ought to measure that tomorrow; I have all the airbox apart, it would be easy and I want to know) So I have an intake manifold with narrow runners and a narrow opening feeding a motor that breathes much more than what "should" be there. On top of that, the double-D shaped ports of my intake manifold are much smaller both in height and in width than the ports on the head, so theres a very very VERY high velocity through the intake manifold and then an anti-reversionary step keeping all that inertia within the port forcing airflow.

 

**This post started as a PM that got WAY too long to actually send. This part was sort of directed at the person I was originally talking to, but I let it stand as is. If you can pretend I am talking to you, then great; if you don't naturally see the points I mention, ask**

 

Now, the tradeoff is naturally, inability to breathe at high RPMs. Well, Honda thought of that. The stock redline is 5500 RPM!! not because of rotational speed constraints (a honda motor that cant hit 6K? are you daft?) but because the motor wouldn't make power there.

 

So at 5500 my fuel cuts anyhow. The car actually has an upshift light tthat comes on whenever I have stopped accelerating and failed to shift, or when I am not accelerating hard enough to justify the RPMs, etc.. I haven't fully analyzed what makes it come on but so far it just seems to come on when its time to shift

 

APPARENTLY I can put a chip in my ECU and run Hondata, a tuning program that makes the computer as good as a megasquirt according to my brother... Some larger injectors, and maybe some head work to open the ports up a *tad* right at the manifold flange, but leave the port volume the same right at the valve (in other words, set up another velocity "ramp" between manifold flange and valve face) and then maybe some hybridized inlet manidfold where I take like, an Si plenum and runners and graft them onto the last 1/4 of the HF runners (okay the intake manifold is crazy but its all vague notions of a "goal" that I may or may not work towards anyhow) would probably spell the "ideal" iteration of this motor...

 

I am sure you see the ideas I am getting at, because they are all analogs of the L20/LD/TonyD/Twin Plate TB threads that have been going on here in the past year or so... This car kinda showed up at a time when it made all of those loose strings into a rope that I just tugged on and found was strong in my mind.

 

**End of that sort of personalized part** Lazy copy edit FTW

The gear ratio for the trans and the diff:

HF 3.25 1.65 1.03 .82 .69 3.15®

HF (49 states) 2.95(!)

 

Yes, a honda with a sub 3:1 diff ratio and TWO overdrive gears in the tranny!

 

photobucket:

http://s130.photobucket.com/albums/p249/tardaeron/CRX/

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The trailer hitch was just absolutely priceless!! The car is fairly rust free with a couple VERY small cancer spots, and some rusty bolts and threads.

 

The "Good" side:

 

afar:

 

Underhood rattlecan:

 

Power by:

 

Old Front Glass:

 

New Front Glass:

 

Front Section:

 

 

Now, today I painted a battery tray, cleaned the rust under the battery tray in the engine bay (minimal and superficial) and primered and rattlecanned that section of the engine bay; cleaned and detailed the airbox and its bolts (the bolt heads on this car are somehow rusty like they've lived in a swamp buggy their whole lives; the rest of the car is fine, rust free, and the threads aren't that bad, just the heads?!?) and dropped the front frame crossmember, wirebrushed and primered and painted IT. The rest of the front clip (radiator cross bar etc) was painted red a couple days ago, and by Thursday most of it should be going back together. I still need to get a pogo stick and finish pulling some bends out of the driver side radiator upright to get it all into the right position though.

 

 

This car was COVERED with a thin coating of a moldy, algae-like residue that settles into cars that sit around in the swampy areas down here for too long.. I cleaned the engine bay three times and now I have it all torn apart again for paint and plastic detail work

 

Thus far:

 

Car......500

Hood/Hatch.....150 (generous amount added for JY prices plus paint and supplies that overlap onto alot of other stuff)

Windshield.......230

Bumper bar, misc bolts and screw retainers from Honda......120

Headlights.......50

Radiator........60

misc. Junkyard items (lic plate holders, light sockets, relay, brackets, etc)....50? Lets say 100 for good measure.

 

So just over $1200, and I have a buddy who will help me spray the exterior panels on the hood, hatch, and fender, so maybe another $100 in paint and clear to be done with it all. This car is going to be one SWEET little gas sipper...

 

More updates to come!

[Daeron]

Okay! So, as I reported in my feedback thread in the Miscellaneous Tech sub forum, I got my bumper bar in from http://www.TheHondaPartsStore.com on Monday and got set to work. Monday was a wild goose chase for some stainless hardware, and then setting to familiarize myself with the complete task at hand; namely, straightening out the bent and kinked sheetmetal on the front driver corner. The car drives nice and straight, but the hood got seriously borked and the headlight and bumper rather smashed up, and I labored for several hours trying to get my head wrapped around the task of taking sheetmetal thats bent up one way, and making it bent up in the slightly less complex way it USED to be.

 

I test mounted the bumper last night and was working on various pedantic fitment issues. I jammed the bumper cover on in a remotely even way, lowered the hood, and suddenly my car looked almost finished!! I thought about grabbing a snapshot, but then realized it would not do without at least setting the missing headlight into place.. Only to look and realize instantly that the bumper bar is obstructing the approach to set the headlight into its socket, so I let the camera be.

 

Here is a full on shot of the front of the car as I started work today:

Note that I have done some painting and improvements in the under hood appearance; detail shots of that will come after the summary of today's work.

 

And a couple of detail shots, first showing the front radiator support area (the "T-bar" has been replaced with a junkyard pull by the kid I bought it from)

 

 

The passenger side is "largely" undamaged, which is to say things don't look 100% regular but it isn't in need of serious attention and is (except maybe in a few minor ways) a useful guideline on how the other side "should" look (the most noticeable exception to this is some irregularity in the vertical pillar between the headlight and the radiator opening)

 

This is the headlight socket/radiator pillar/corner fender mount junction that requires such an absurd amount of ridiculously subtle bending in order to move an inane handful of points an infinitesimally small distance relative to the rest of the car.

 

 

One might ask why the string of multi-syllabic adjectives; with good reason. In the end, when I mount the driver headlight, there is a wide gap between the headlight housing (eyeball) and the radiator pillar/eyebrow angle. (By which I mean, the pillar and its upward, rightward extension up until it becomes horizontal.) The corresponding gap on the good side (and the good car) is maybe 3/8 inch, not enough to get a finger into by any means.. the bad headlight is more like 5/8 or more, my index finger slides in up to the second knuckle. Additionally, THIS position leaves a fairly significant gap on the other end of the "see-saw" headlight (once the screws are loosened enough to allow wiggle room to see what adjustment I might need to make) so something needs to be pulled in out there...???

 

note: the headlight in this picture is NOT bolted in by the two top bolts that lift it up about half an inch; however, the gap between eyeball and eyebrow is visualized better set like this. The move upwards also includes a slight move outwards that maintains the same clearance as shown, and tucks it up closer to ther horizontal aspect of the "eyebrow".

 

This is how the headlight socket area looked at the end of the night; I had done alot of work smoothing the angle of the channel that forms the driver side radiator pillar by using a piece of 2x4 bracing it, with another 2x4 bracing THAT against the AC compressor. Fortunately the compressor has two ears on it that have a slope to them, so I was able to slide the backing 2x4 in between the channel 2x4 and compressor and get it good and tight. I hammered at it with a rubber mallet and got it looking pretty nifty TBH.... but that was before virtually ALL the rest of the work I did tonight, so in the end I am not certain how much of that straightening survived

 

Here is a detail shot of the radiator support area at the end of the night.

 

In addition to this, the hood latch plunger is too far to the passenger side, slightly. I have adjusted every adjustment possible to the extreme and it still wants a bit more.. but on top of THAT, when I close the hood fully (it will pop over and engage easily enough) the hood seems to want to go down about another half an inch relative to the headlight tops and the fenders. the hood release/radiator support T bar definitely needs to move down a bit.. BUT....

..Down at the base of that T, where it bolts to the lower red/rad crossmember (NOT a frame crossmember, that is the pretty black shiny behind the red crossmember) the holes are misaligned in a way that indicates the top and bottom red/rad crossmembers need to spread apart about 1/4 of an inch. So, it seems that the lower red/rad crossmember needs to move down from 3/4 to an inch, and the upper needs to move down from 1/2-3/4 of an inch. Sounds straightforward.. but its REALLY hard to see that lower red/rad bar being THAT far bent upwards!! It doesn't look that far off to me.

 

So I am somewhat stymied! Intimidated to say the least. The body guy at the shop has been SUPER NICE in letting me borrow his tools, helping me with little push clips etc, and advice.... but I get a vibe that he really doesn't want me to friggin bother him anymore so I REALLY can't go to him and ask him what he thinks it needs. Fortunately we do have a family friend who is great with body work and loves to come by and chew the fat and help show people stuff he is good with, and get us to show him crap we are good with and he needs help with. His name is Dave and it fits him SO perfectly. Hopefully we can get in touch with Dave and Dave can come to the rescue. I *might* look into buying some hydraulic equipment at harbor freight; there is reasonable chance of it being very useful in the future (on my Z, for instance)

89.99, hard to beat.

 

Other than Hydraulic equipment, here are a few other tools of the trade:

The big bar and chain is called a Pogo Stick; I will post another detail pic of that in the discussion thread and explain it a bit.

 

 

 

 

And on to photos from the beginning of the day showing the fruition of the asinine chores of the previous two weeks while waiting on Mister Bumper to come in the mail!!

 

This shot of the battery tray/air filter area shows the area I painted the most obvious. (But its also the most Shiny!!)

 

The plastic battery tray, airbox, vacuum junction cover box, and air intake tube were all given a scrub with a gentle scotch pad and a potent but gentle degreaser, and then a gross overtreatment with my favorite exterior rubber/vinyl dressing. Fortunately, the rusted areas were limited in extent such that I could mask off a line that was mostly concealed by the airbox once it was installed. The entire panel downwards got sprayed, but the shock tower area was almost wholly untouched (just a bit around the base.)

 

 

Here is a shot from a more realistic POV; you can see that the stark color difference fades substantially with a minor shift in perspective.

 

This shot shows underneath the vacuum junction box, and also shows the AC equipment installed below, and the overall fantastic condition that this vehicle is in for 389,000 miles on the chassis and wiring. The longblock was replaced, but AFAIK everything else on the car is original. One exception to that is the aforementioned adjustable Konis.

 

Theres a good bit of surface oxidation on the hardware in the vacuum block area. There is a good bit of surface oxidation EVERYwhere, but the valve cover and the assorted metal hardware are easy to take care of piece at a time once the car is on the road. As for the stuff under the cover.. I think I may try a half-fast attempt at getting it off with a scotch pad or something, then treat it with some oil and let it lie.

 

The really bad looking surface oxidation on all the aluminum surfaces irks me though. Obviously the valve cover needs to be totally redone (piece of cake) but the trans casing, the block, etc?? Any ideas PM me or hit up the feeedback thread.

 

 

So, thats it, for now!!