No time to waste.

Back quicker than ever. 

I think we left off last time just before getting back out to the dyno. I had learned some things from the first session and after calling it quits early I got busy rectifying them before I would get the car back in again; now that was done, I was headed back.

Now it was time to load the car up and get back to finalize the tune. Its always an anxious time before embarking on a trackday or a dyno session after changing a bunch of stuff on the car. Especially so since being basically a full blown race-car at this point my 'after install' testing is limited to idling up to temp in the driveway and driving up and down my street less than 25mph and 1500rpm. Getting the car on the trailer isn't a huge deal itself but is just that one step farther and you really want to make everything count. To do so you need to make sure you crossed all the 't's' and dotted all the 'i's'. 

loading up

Back at Church again we got the car off the trailer and hooked back up in no time. I explained the changes I'd done since the last time to Sean who listened intently and made a mental notes. Once we were both ready he hopped in the car and started to finish up the tune. After about 6 pulls and some clicking away at idle he announced he was finished.

The car had made 234hp and 156tq. wow.

3rd dyno pull 

He'd set the soft redline to start at 8500rpm and full to come in at 9200rpm. The car sounded absolutely beast with the short pipe dumping under the car. After the dyno we chatted a bit and Sean mentioned that if I could I should nix the floor dump exhaust for a rear or side exit if I had room, Something about sonic pulses bouncing back up into the exhaust and up the header back into the motor. Advise taken, so now that's back on the list again.

    Before loading it up onto the trailer to head home Arman told me to give it a full throttle blast down the street stop sign to stop sign. Since hes a cop in that area I felt that i could take his advice this one time and finally give the car some beans. Mind you this was the first time I had been able to really drive it since taking it all apart over a year before. First gear was no good, I had zero traction all the way up the street- so on the run back I started from a second gear roll. I was totally blow away buy just how much faster it was now than before. A proper tune and the new gear ratio basically transformed the car into something that could be mistaken for 'fast'. I insisted Arman hop into the seat and do the same so he would know what I was talking about on the drive home. He too returned with a stupid grin and we both agreed that the car should be 'pretty fast' once I was able to get it back to the track.

Back on the trailer after the hoonage

Got it back home and tucked in for the following weekend where hff round 2 was set to take place

I decided that since I had a few days I may as well finish putting together the diffuser i'd started to build. I was 75% finished already, and as much as i hate laying on my back to get everything all measured up I had nothing better to do.

After much mounting, unmounting and cutting of carbon and gnashing of teeth I had  finished the diffuser,  sans vortex generators this time. I had also extended and shaped fences that run 60% of the cars length and channel air away from the wheel wells. 

 You can see how it sits here, flat to ground with the kick-out that clears the turn down exhaust up front. You can see its missing some of the finalized mounting bracketry. Once on the car its a super sturdy but light peice.

 

I'm still going to figure out a way to get the mate some the flat panels onto the bottom and perhaps connect this forward all the was up to the splitter and all the way out to the sides of the skirts. For now though, this is going to be good enough.


The weather for HFF round 2 was touch and go all week leading up, I was super excited to go but the forecast called for non stop rain and storms. Even if the weather was good the day of the event the track usually still muds in pretty bad from all the people going off and dragging the clay back on. Saturday it rained, but didn't totally pour and saturate the ground as expected. I was changing my mind up to the last hours before leaving but in the end I was convinced that it would be apocalyptic storms and would do me no good to try and have the cars maiden shake down in the rain.

I still drove out early in the AM to officiate the HFF competition. After some short down pours on the grapevine the rest of the day was beautiful and warm. The beeming sun dried up the off track mud and the cool thick air and warm asphalt temps proved PERFECT for personal best times across the field. I was kicking myself for deciding not to bring the CRX. But oh well, there is always next time.

The Westend civic. A personal fav of mine. 

Seans EG hatch up from San Diego sits under cotton ball clouds and blue skys. 

Once back home and not having been able to drive again I decided that id start to chip away at things that I had been meaning to do. The next HFF event was about a month away and I was determined to get a few things on the car that I had been meaning to build. Ideally I would get it out to a test/tune day at Willow Springs Raceway before an actual event and give things enough time that if I needed to rethink or rebuild something I could get it done. Ideally i would be able to do yet another Test/tune day even after that before Rd.3.

I spent some time measuring and marking a template for a radiator vent I had been scheming up. I'd been putting it off mostly because I didn't want to go buy a metal break to bend all the angles cleanly. Also cutting thick aluminum, while doable in my garage with the tools I have makes a huge mess of grinder wheel powder or small aluminum splinters if I were to use my jig saw.

As luck would have it Art had been asked if he could weld up a titanium armor on a Battle Bot for some of his friends at a company where hes used to fabricate. In turn I was asked to helped him back purge the welds for and in trade they would let us use the tools that had in the facility, which to my luck included a metal sheer and break. I brought over my template.

before cutting or bending

Sheering done, setting up the industrial brake  

cut/bent and ready for test fitting on the car.

 Of course when I am working the last thing I want to do is to stop and wash my hands to take pictures of things that are not finished. Every now and again I do, but I'd always rather keep working instead. Because of this I cant post pictures of the parts where I was figuring out the location of the water hose in a 3d space or riv-nutting the vent in place. It happened though.

You can also see how close I had to get to the header and the valve cover, another trick was to figure out the height of the hood and a way to seal the gap between them so there would be no lip on the inside that would reduce the efficiency. I had to make this transition as smooth as I could since I was already limited to only being able to utilize the space to the right of the header where there was just enough room fit everything. I moved the oil cooler over to be within the footprint of the sealed vent and concluded that doing at least HALF of the radiator would be better than none of it (which is what I had before)

Next three are from the mock up and test fitting stages.

Now that everything was lined up I was able to mark and cut the existing hood .

After making the hole I partially filled the larger back gap with a 14x1" c-channel riveted into place. And since the hood was slanted I didnt want the incoming air over the front to act as a scoop. Instead I would need to create a low pressure zone using some carbon fiber riffles I had that would suck the air out of the radiator vent. When looking at the car from the front they would need to be staggered as to completely cover up the hole itself.

Side view of the riffels

After completing that I sealed off the remaining holes in the hood with some aluminum sheeting and installed an air extractor over the drivers side motor mount. Im deciding on if I want to also channel the air from in front of the header via duct to it too. Ultimately I decided that I would see how the temperatures were before embarking on another fabrication headache.

 

By now the car was ready to get to its first real test/tune day. I felt pretty confident that I had done everything to get it to a place that I would feel comfortable beating up on it for a while. The main things I wanted to look out for would be any issues with leaking fuel/water/brakes and putting some G's through things like the fuel cell mounting and suspension for the first time. 

I towed the car out to the Oval track behind Streets Of Willow and unloaded it.  We gave everything a once over as it got up to temps and i suited up and pulled through the dirt onto the flat oval track. 

After a few laps of taking it really easy I started to increase the pace, let it rev out and started to really jump on the brakes.  It was a very measured approach that you just wouldn't able to do on a normal track day. After about 10 min I would come in and put it up in the air and made sure everything was looking like it was holding together.

I did about 4 of these sessions and only had to wrench on a few things in between, stuff like pushing the coils back down onto the plugs etc. I made notes in my note book as I went of things id want to address. On the 3rd session i had the fuel pump shut off, I thought I had hit a big enough bump to trigger the fuel kill button. I pulled off to the side turned everything off and gave it a second then fired it all back up. As I was pulling back into the pit it sputtered to a stop again. After poking around again I had realized that the connection from the battery to the relay had not been pushed on all the way onto the relay finger (impossible to tell given its design) and created an electrical load and thus heat. The heat had melted the relay holder and the liquefied plastic had run between the contacts of the wireend and finger and cause the failing connection. The relay was fine and the 20amp fuse at the other end of the 12inch wire had not popped either.

I cleaned off the wire lead contact and relay finger with a razor blade and pushed it all the way on then wrapped it all in electrical tape to be fixed later on when I got home. 

On the last session out I had worked up the pace again and taking note of the brake pedal being inconsistent in its application. It would stop every single time but it would also have a bit of a longer throw if I had not touched it for a few laps. As I was testing this and coming around a  sweeping corner and felt the familiar jerk on the steering wheel. I knew right away that my axle had given up. I was a bit annoyed because these were the same ones that I had just rebuilt and was hoping that they would've lasted at least a year. I parked it and let it cool down, day done.  Before pulling it onto the trailer a once over revealed that I had oil coming from somewhere, I suspected that it would be the vtec solenoid area or cam seals and took another note to check that when I got home.

wet trans housing

After getting home and pulling the axle apart I confirmed its demise. It looked like I had perhaps damaged the locking ring that seats the spline inside the spider gear on the outboard side. You can see where it had started to work its way down the shaft and finally got to a point where it couldn't hold on any longer and stripped.

To be sure this was the only damage I drained the bran new trans fluid to look for flakes, other than the standard clutch plate brass present everything internally looked OK. 

To address the oil leak I pulled the vtec solenoid off and immediately saw that I had mongo-torqued it and damaged the brand new gasket, this is likely where the leak was coming from.

As far as the coils popping out of the spark plug holes- I decided that I would build a plate to hold them down. I bought flanged brass stand-offs to space the stock valve cover studs to the height of the new coils packs.

After that I made a template and built a carbon plate out of a 1/8' thick sheet. After slowly shaping it with a file i added closed cell foam stick to the inside.

and finished it with flat nuts on nylon washers. The carbon plate flexes a tiny bit and makes a springy barrier forcing the coilpacks to stay put. 

To address the brakes inconsistency I decided that it was probably a good time to replace the Brake Master Cyl, it was after all one of the last things on the car that I had not swapped for new. It would also give me a chance to pull the booster and check things out internally. I wasn't totally convinced this would be the culprit but had never had it off of the car either and it couldn't hurt to check.

 I was also never really stoked on how close the fuel return line ran to the BMC anyways this also would give me an excuse to address that too.

Drained the fluids and pulled both of them off.

Much easier to do having designed it the was i did- but still one of my most dreaded things is to do is work on anything under the dash.

Shitty picture but you can see powder accumulation on the inside (pedal side) of the booster. Not a smoking gun, but a decent indication of some sort of air leak on that side of the diaphragm.

 At this point I had decided that I wasn't going to put the booster back on the car. Since I was already buying a new BMC and this booster was questionable I would just delete the booster itself and be able to plug the vacuum lines on the intake manifold as well. It would also gain me some clearance of the return fuel line.  I did some research to get the piston volume to leverage ratio I would need to maintain decent brake modulation. I coincidentally figured it out to be that the stock non SI CRX brakemaster is right in the ball park and utilizes a small enough fluid reservoir that I wouldn't need to buy a thick BMC block off plate. It's also a duel channel system, which should be a requirement of any racecar looking to do this.  I'd also be able to bend my oem hardlines into place once fitted, everything from the proportioning valve back would remain the same.

Since I didn't need a thick block off plate I decided to use the oem booster that I had taken off for the new BMC's holder.

Marked and cut.

Grinded down the ridge pads.

Painted and test fit

Since I was no longer using the booster I would need to fabricate a new shorter 'piston' that would connect to the pedal clevis and push the valve in the brake master cyl. Since this is the only physical part that connects the pedal to the brakes I decided that total over kill is the best policy and bought a grade 5 titanium m8 x 1.25 x 110mm bolt from Mettec. This bolt is about 5 times stronger than even a grade 12 steel bolt. I would simply cut off the bolt head and round down the shaft and thread it onto the clevis and lock nut onto the threaded end.

Mean while my new 13/16 BMC arrived and I bench bled it overnight before install.

The bolts that hold the master to the firewall are a grade 12 steel oxide bolt with lock washer and ny-lock nuts on the inside.

After a couple test fits and some trimming I had the pedal connected and installed minus the booster.  The pedal now feels amazing, firm and positive. I'm excited to test it out when I get back to the track or another test and tune day. 

You can see the return line has a much better path to the FPR now. 

After going back to fix the fuel pump relay I decided that I wanted to avoid the fuel kill switch being in line with the pumps main power. This was a bit ambiguous in the instructions and read from people on both sides of the argument. After redrafting the new set up I decided to rewire it to so the fuel kill button only sees the breaker relay ground signal. The main +12v power has a direct path from the relay itself to the pump now without going through the button. Functionality remains the same if triggered or switched at the breaker I'm just avoiding the bottleneck of t the switch itself.

At this point, after waiting a couple weeks, my new axles showed up from RAXLES. During a conversation with Marty over there he let me know that the DA axles I was using likely kept breaking because their track was 1/2 an inch too wide for the crx. This meant that they were being run bottomed out inside the cups and creating extra heat and god knows what else, something that even and OEM axle would eventually give up doing.  These Raxel replacements were not cheap but he was able to source me the correct parts from a euro civic SIR that would work with my cable transmission and have the correct length.

 Quality looks top notch and they come with everything NEW. No regrinds used in construction and the ship pre-packed with racing grease and THICK boots. Hopefully these are the last one I buy for a while.

I didn't take any good pictures but also picked up and hard wired a SJCAM as I had done with the other camera. I got this camera because it allows a 'power on and start record' mode. This way I don't need to ask someone to check if my GoPro was on and running and be worrying if it will run out of battery mid session. As mentioned, I bought a hardwire harness for 12v+  to micro HDMI and Deutsche pinned it directly into the engine harness power so if the car is on and running so is the camera.

 Finished up just in time. I'm going to go for another test n tune day this weekend where hopefully everything will go well. If so, i'll be ready for the HFF Rd3 event i'm most looking forward too at Streets of Willow the following weekend.