Oh, again?

Picking right up where we left off..

 I'd immediately mounted the new exhaust on the NSX, found some OEM 91 exhaust gaskets which are apparently a rare as hens teeth, realigned the bumper and adjusted the diffuser for the new exhaust. The car is super close to being all the way street spec, only thing remaining is swapping the NT01's that are currently on the car with something more street able. I have some new Falken 452's in storage, just need to actually get around to getting the car up in the air with the wheels off and taking everything into the tire shop. Honestly if I had the space I would buy my own mounter and balancer. It would pay for itself within year. 

Drove it to BW for RD.1 of HFF. I miss driving this thing as much as i used to.

A little out of chronological order but for the sake of keeping the different cars grouped i'll move onto the the CL7 Spoon car. After researching and generally being up in the air about how much I wanted to change on it i'd decided that the damaged/hood pins, as original as they were, would be a liability on track. 

At some point in 2010 the hood flew up and smashed the front glass and tweaked the hood. This was the reason for the windshield being replaced and all the factory black euro R trim being missing when i bought the car. I replaced all the euro R trim pieces but i'd still been bummed on the damage to the hood for aesthetic reasons. After some waffling I made up my mind that i would kill two birds with one stone and fix the hood as well put some better pins in place.  I could've pretty easily got and OEM hood (as was run on the car when campaigned) but the US version of the car had a slightly different shape than the CL7 Euro-R. After looking around I came across a real-deal Spoon sports Dry carbon hood for a CL7 Euro-R that happened to be in the US already. It was used and had the standard clear coat cracking that is prone on dry carbon parts but i'd be refinishing it anyways to look identical to the hood i was replacing.

 After taking a TON of measurements and scouring for the correct colors I dropped everything off. A week or so later I was on my way to pick up the new hood.

I also had some replacement stickers recut for the ones that i couldn't find originals of.

Looking sharp

 

When I say light i mean LIGHT, less than 6lbs replacing the 45+lb one that was on the car.

I left the bottom raw dry carbon just because that's f'en cool

Color is a PERFECT match to the fenders (the bumper had always been a few shades darker even from the earliest photos i can find) In the pic below I had yet to install the Aerocatch latches to the hood. This will happen in the next month or so when I get the time.

Compare the new hood to the old one.. Glad I made the investment.

Now onto the CRX. Lots to tell. This fucking thing is an ongoing saga of a build..


I had some time to while preparing the car for the next Buttonwillow day to build some splitter feet to attach to the fences. Again, as with every aero part on the car, this is a massive guess-tunnel aero part. I have been reading quite a bit and taking hints from the 2017 gt3 racecars. apparently these can have a compounding effect to the splitter effectiveness and air wrap under the car. They also look cool and only weigh about 6 grams, so yeah, thats pretty much a good enough reason for me.

I also pulled the white HFF banner off the windshield and replaced it with a flat black strip and removed most of the stickers on the outside of the car. I wanted a much more subtle look.

I also went back to my old style number plates. 

 

 I was excited to try the new pads on track that i'd posted about last time so I put them on the car and went around the block. They never actually felt like they were fully clamping during my neighborhood putt so I pulled everything apart to have a look. Sure enough, they were only wearing on the front surface of the pad.

It turned out that since the pads were custom made they also included a weird rivet in the backing plate that i ended up needing to file it down flat for it to play nice with the Spoon calipers. It's things like this that would be a bummer to only find out when you go to get ontrack and don't have your full tool kit handy.

Friday rolled around and the car was ready to go. It was a Non HFF day but i was eager to get back to BW with the new motor and set up.  I had some unfinished business since blowing the motor up the last time i drove there. I'd really been expecting to PB but didnt want to make a big deal of lap times. The goal, as always, was to go see what the car had in it and work on reliability. 

The car at LEAST looked fast, if nothing else

Loaded up and ready to go.

Made the drive out mid-day Saturday for the Sunday event, my plan was to catch the tail end of the bonus session on Saturday to be able to bed in the new pads and get a feel for the car on track before the faster morning session of Sunday.  I knew some people driving Saturday so we all gridded up together.

   One of the people I was introduced to was a racer that drives in the Pirelli World challenge in a Honda. He was borrowing another friends Integra type-R to help him with some set up advise.  As our out lap started he was immediately inches from my rear bumper. Like I said I was planing to use this session to bed in the brakes while warming up the tires but had to scrap the idea since jabbing on the brakes on a straight away or too early into a corner would have would have caused a rear end collision. Still, I knew my car would be faster than his once on the hot laps so i wanted to maintain the position.  By the time we were 1/2 way around he was so close that i was sure if i modulated the pedal a hair too long after my down shift i would've got clapped. I also knew that my rears were still too cold to make it through Phil Hill... Sure enough, the car turned in but just kept rotating around the warmer fronts and I went off in a semi graceful pirouette to the muddy bog on the other side of the turn. I was worried that the thick mud had ripped off some of my aero bits and I knew for sure what a mess it would be to clean the thick mud out of the cracks and crevasses in  everything. Even though i went off (this was the first time in a few years) I was glad that it wasn't from car to car contact- i have to admit was a little annoyed to have been pressured so hard on a warm up lap and would contend that it wasn't entirely my fault.

I made it out of the muck on my own but the tires were filled with heavy mud and its imbalance makes the whole car shudder and shake at anything above 10 mph. I had also noticed that i was getting a battery light flicker on my gauges. It'd flashed a couple times in the hot pits waiting to go out but now it was constantly flickering. Next my tach died, and I knew that i was running out of battery since the tach needs at least 10v to work correctly. I'd either lost a belt on the alt or the alt had taken a shit or that battery was bad. I was hoping for the first option since the alt was BRAND NEW.

 

Muddy carnage, but at least all of my aero was still on place. 

After pulling in and looking over the car I saw that the alt belt was still there. Which meant that my battery or alt was toast. I asked around and no one had a replacement Odessey PC680... and I had STUPIDLY left my spare at home which i usually bring to every track day for this reason.

    After looking at a potential ruined Sunday and thinking it over I decided that i would unhook the trailer and make the drive 3 hours back to LA that night so i could grab my spare alternator and spare battery.  If we left right then I could be able to get back around midnight and swap the new battery in (which is somewhat of a pain in the ass) cross my fingers and be ready for the first session of the morning.

I took the mud caked wheel with me so id be able to hose and brush it off properly at home.


Once at home everything was right where i'd left it when pulling things out of the my spares box thinking i was so cleaver 'travel light' to this event. Never again.

 

Another 3 hours fifteen min drive back to BW. It was going to be a long night. 

 Finally back at the track i swapped the battery out and decided that doing so had a good chance of fixing the issue and i should actually try and get some sleep. it was around 12:45am.

That was one of the COLDEST nights i had ever spent anywhere. It dropped as low as 20 degrees and my trooper of a girlfriend and i had to huddle together to keep warm and wait it out. The next morning i was up long before the sun, it was just much too cold to sleep. After starting the car and idling it around the pits I found out that the battery itself wasn't the problem, rather the BRAND NEW alternator i had just put in the car, W   T   F . I'm having the worst luck with this kind of shit lately.

All the morning dew froze, and there was a layer of ice over everything.

So AGAIN for the 4th time in 4 track days i was going to miss the first (and fastest) session for one reason or another. This time it was going to be because I was changing out an alternator in 30* weather.

I got it done but now i had to wait another hour for my next session to start.

Having driven 7+ hours the day before and had had basically no sleep, i was feeling kinda run down. The car was finally ready to get on track but i was just beat. I told myself that I was going to at least try and salvage something from this weekend but not push it. If the car felt good and i had a clear track i would try and bank a hot lap. Otherwise i'd just wait and try again some other day. I gridded at the back of the pack and did a proper bed-in of the pads like id failed to do the day before.
 Second lap felt good, I had some heat in the tires and a clear track so i figured i'd push. I was FAR from my mental peak and was missing shifts (not entirely my fault by now 3rd gear was getting notchy for some reason) and i was still figuring out the new pad compound.  Several smokey lock ups and over driving into the back sweeper causing some understeer. I wasn't expecting all that much for my efforts and had stopped looking at my predictive timer at about the second corner. As i crossed the start/finish line i was pretty surprised to see a 1:56:5 flash across the display. I hit some traffic at the end of the next lap and decided to cool it down and bring it back in.

Sure enough on the official time sheet.. i had somehow managed to run the ugliest 1:56:5 lap ever. A new PB for me at BW, even faster than my NSX. Mission accomplished.

After that session i decided that i needed a nap. I only ran one other session that day the temps had heated up considerably and the track had been mudded up so I spent the session dicing with this 993 Porsche.

In the end of the day was worn out, happy and more than a bit annoyed that my car was continuing to refuse to just work like it should. By now this was almost regular, i'd get a glimpse into how much potential the car had but repeatably would be stymied by something small and dumb. The biggest bummer of the weekend, however, was going to download the footage off of the memory card and seeing nothing at all recorded... shit.

From that Sunday I had 1 week before the next event at Streets of Willow being run CW. This was another track and direction that I had been looking forward to. I knew the car would be fast there and if I could drive problem free i was aiming at a 1:23 lap or better.

Not having a lot of time before the event I cleaned out what i could of the mud from Buttonwillow and tried to address my developing grinding issue going into 3rd gear. After all the guts of the trans were brand new and i was religious about the fluid changes so i looked for an external solution and swapped my long weighted shift knob to the lighter and shorter NSX shift knob i had in the garage. This was in hopes that it'd improve the shifting feel and be a little easier on the syncros if i happened to miss a shift.

loaded up, ready to head out.

I was excited for the day. The weather was perfect and we were there in plenty of time to get everything set up for first session. We did the drivers meeting and I hopped into my drivers suit while I was warming the car up. As i was getting my helmet and gloves together to head out to grid we were standing around my car when we all heard a metal to metal "twack"

"Dude wtf was that"?

After coming up with ideas of a broken oil squirter being tee'd off by the crank into the oil pan or a tappet nut that fell inside the motor. i decided that the LEAST i could do was check the valve train.

This was now the 5th time in a row that i'd miss the first session. It was almost like a joke at this point.
I got out of my drivers suit and prepared to work on the car, again.

Nate lending a hand pulling off the valve cover

After pulling off the valve cover and seeing everything in its place we decided that it was a good idea to pull off the flywheel inspection plate to see the flywheel and see if anything was amiss.  Nothing was obviously out of place from what little we could see and i decided that since I was at the track i may as well give it a few laps of recon. Within a couple laps at 70% pace it was very difficult to get the car to shift into 3rd gear and I called it 'done' for the day. The rest of the day we hung out and i drove Dan's car in a session and marveled at how simple and reliable it was.

The next week at home i started to pull the motor out of the car, again, to the bottom of the issue. Taking the starter off i saw damage to the bolt heads that hold the clutch housing on. WTF.

I also noticed as i was pulling the header off that the metal exhaust gasket had burnt oil residue on it. Checking the valve and valve guides i saw the reason..

cyl 4 was the only one that looked semi decent

cly 3

cyl 2

cyl 1

Cyl 3, 2 and 1 all had what looked like serious blow by around or through the valve guide. This is all HIGHLY suspect because everything was literally less than 100 miles old... and the head had been at Portflow and again at RS machine for inspection in that time. This shouldn't be happening. I'd over built the motor and was running a conservative tune just so this type of thing wouldn't happen.  I called over to Dave at RS Machine and he said bring the motor by and we'd get to the bottom of it.

Plug color looked good though

Thankfully i didn't find any flakes in the oil pan this time. I'm really hoping the bottom end is still good this time around.

Once I cracked the trans off the long block you could see that there was something bouncing around inside the transmission case, it was poc marked and there was a large gouge where something was trapped between the clutch disk housing and the transmission case.

Likewise you could see where the same thing was pinging off of the housing and the flywheel bolts.

It didnt take long to find out what was causing the damage. It turns out the 3 of the 4 locator pins that go through the clutch housing on the flywheel itself broke off and were bouncing around the case.

You can see the the one that was still attached here

 I also found that the pass through holes in the housing for the flywheel bolts had oblogned themselves allowing movement on the pins that eventually caused the shearing.

One of the pins had made its way into the housing and managed to crack the clutch disk material.

The flywheel bolts themselves were brand new and straight out of OEM bags when i assembled the clutch, My guess is somehow the flywheels tolerances were off or used weak metal. The imbalance or incorrect threading on the fly caused the bolts to back and allow movement in the housing which sheared off the pins that caused all the damage. I can tell you with 100% certainty that i assembled everything maliciously as always together with another experienced Honda nut. I bought all new hardware and torqued everything to spec across the board. Having things like this happen, new parts failing or the weird one off problems is REALLY really testing my patience.

As if the flywheel wasn't already ruined, i had to back the beat up threads through the fly and take the threads with them.

The motor and trans both went off to the builders while i try and figure out what i want to do. Thoughts of going K series have crossed my mind and I have plenty of people trying to convince me that its a great idea- but the cost associated with it are a turn off. Its about 6k for a decent k20R motor and transmission and another 6k to get it in the car and running. I already drew out how to integrate the wiring so that is not a big deal, its more just a hard pill to swallow knowing that i have spent so much time and effort building my car to fit a B-series motor- and to have it continually fail is maddening. Its gone to all the right places it has all the right parts and still i have yet to find reliability. Its a Honda for god sakes! And on top of that its a B series motor which is basically one of the most tuner built motors on the planet. Why the FUCK is this so hard?

So yeah, as of right now my stubbornness is telling me to stick with the B-series and get it driving consistently for a season or two. I KNOW it can be done, i have see it happen. It's also the cheaper of the two options and requires the least amount of fuckery to make happen. I'm not saying that i wont eventually go K20 i'm just saying i'm going to give this one last shot.
I KNOW i have potential to end up in the same situation, only that much further in the hole after another rebuild and replacement of parts that i JUST bought.  Whats to stop then next version of the motor from taking my money and leaving me broken down at the track? I guess nothing but if it happens i can at least move on saying i gave it a fair chance.

Go home, you're drunk

Come back when you've cleaned up. 

Meanwhile since the car is down I've decided to work on some things that i'd been putting off. I hit up Kingpin for a set of his EF camber arm spherical bushings a while back and they showed up with the astounding quality as i've come to expect.  I had the PCI ones pressed into the Skunk 2 housing but was never really happy with the quality of the Skunk2 stuff overall, they are prone to slipping camber while on track. I paired the Kingpin stuff to a newly released camber arm from PCI. I really liked the design of the serviceable ball joint and that the adjustment is done with 14mm hex head instead of a 4mm allen tool. These also apparently have much more inner fender clearance, not that im running my car super low or anything but its good to know the travel is there in case i have a bad off track excursion. 

Purdy.

Close up, PCI upper arm and Kingpin sphericals

Old VS new.

The next thing that i decided to do was FINALLY admit defeat on the cable clutch. I tried to make it work but at this point with the heavier clutch im thinking about running the cable actuation was going to be a limiting factor. Also im future proofing a possible k swap since i would need to do this anyways if I went that route.
   Once I decide what im going to do with the motor and trans im going to have all the guts of my current YS1 cable trans swapped over to a type-R S80 housing that has provisions for a slave cyl.  I also bought the hydro style transmission mount from Hasport to replace the one id been running on the cable YS1.

Anyways, to be able to run a hydro trans i'd need some way to actuate a slave cyl. There are a few options out there, but the one i liked the most was from Hush Performance it bolts onto the existing pedal assembly. Install and plunger adjustment is a bitch but it uses a wilwood master cyl and stainless braided line to connect everything. 

Yanked pedal assy and steering column

Reinforcement bracket and MC fitted

has a beefy billet clevis that comes as part of the kit too 

 And here's what it looks like when everything is bolted into the car. the black line is the hydro line that will eventually bulk-headed to the firewall. I need the motor in to decide its optimal placement. 

The next thing on my to do list, now that it was easily accessible, was to remove the sub frame and clean the years of baked on grime so i could inspect it for cracks and damage.

I had heard that these were a known weak point and once cracked it could cause weird shift arm alignment issues. Even though i had just taken apart my trans and seen a good reason for the shifts there was a part of me that wondered if this was maybe a contributing factor.

After pressure washing everything for an hour i couldn't see anything that was cause for alarm. Regardless I dropped it off at the welders to get some stitching done for reinforcements sake, again this is partially a future proof decision its a good idea now.. but definitely required if I decide to go K series.

 

I had bought a Quaife quick steering rack a few months ago but didn't have a good reason to pull the sub frame, tie rods and have to get re aligned. Now that everything was apart and had just replaced the upper camber arms anyways this was the perfect chance. 

I bought all new dust seals, retainers, guide shims, bushings and bearings along with a donor non-SI EF civic rack. I pulled the non SI rack apart an prepped the housing for the new rack and pinion. 

The Quaife rack is 1.3 turns from center to lock, much quicker than the 1.8 center to lock that comes in the car

A quick word for anyone looking to do this in their SI crx. You need to get a NON SI RACK to put the Quaife stuff in. There is a lot of misinformation on the net about this- and i trust none of it so i took two different racks apart to find out myself.
  The difference between the two is that the SI rack housing positions the pinion about 1/3" further away from the rack teeth. In short, when the bearing is seated and the circlip is in place, the pinion gear teeth will only be in contact half of the rack teeth. Yes it will 'work' for a while (and that's good enough for some people?) but running on 50% less surface area will cause premature failure, especially if you have sticky tires and are track driving.

OEM pinion VS Quaife (bearing yet to be seated)

A funny thing; when i took apart my donor rack an extra part came out with the rack end bushing. after cleaning it off and wondering if i forgot to order something i took a closer look and realized that when someone had 'rebuilt' this rack at some point they added what looks like PVC plumbers pipe cut with a hand saw. I have NO idea what some people are thinking.. and i yet another reminder to not trust anyone to do something that you can do yourself. 

Speaking of doing something myself.... I calipered the pinion snout and drilled the same size hole into a maple cutting board, I then used the handle from my engine hoist to tap the bearing down.

Quaife says its not required but I cir-clipped the new bearing down using x2 13mm circlips i'd ordered off Amazon for this very thing. 13mm is a strange size and i could only find them included in a package of like 500 assorted sizes clips that shipped from Russia.

Now that i had the pinion bearing pressed on i had to seat the bearing into the housing, for that it turned out that my jack handle was the perfect size for the race. I supported the housing and tapped the bearing down with no problems. Its always a good idea to heat shrink your splines to protect them when working with loose parts.

After that was in i put on the OEM circlip into the housing and followed it up with the dust boot.

By this time the welder had called me back and let me know that the sub frame was ready for pick up. I had him stitch down all the seams being careful not to heat warp and twist the lower control arm provisions. Its not pretty since the subframe had a powder coat from factory but the welds are fat enough to get adhesion where it needs to.

Some quick enamel coating and it was all looking almost new again.

Heres the rack installed into the subframe with new poly mounts and bellows and inner tie rods.

I put everything in the car loosely to make sure the rack functioned as expected. I was pretty excited by how much less i had to turn the wheel to get the same angle from the tires. This may take some getting used to as far as strength and feel but its always better to have a bit quicker steering in a track car. 

One thing I did realize haven taken the steering column in and out of the car a few times at this point, was due to a the sleeve being butt welded over the OEM steering shaft, my column was now no longer collapsible. This is generally OK if you're belted in the car firmly- but not OK if you hit something hard enough that the front crash structure deforms and the shaft has no where to go but towards the driver. I was also not super stoked on the way that the steering column was still mounted and maintained the tilt function. Tilt has come in useful a few times but combined with the safety issue of the non collapsible column and the increased forces that will be at play on the steering wheel due to the new quick ratio rack I decided to start looking into solutions. If you haven't ever been curious about the price of racing approved SFI/FIA certified steering columns, i can tell you that they're as expensive as you'd expect. After taking TONS of measurements and wading through part numbers , spline sizes, counts and the endless info on double staggered universal joints, i had myself thoroughly convinced i needed one and bit the bullet. I've had a few ideas for mounting that i'm currently working with; but with things like this you sort of have to take a leap of faith, trust your research, plunk your money down then adapt what you thought you wanted to do to the parts that actually show up. 

As of writing this I don't have anything to take pictures of, i'll do a full write up on it in the future as it comes to fruition. This was not a cost that I was planning on at all- but i like to address these things as i see them. 

As I always say "While i'm in there"

While waiting for parts to arrive I decided to recoat my lip and refresh some of the splitter aero that had gotten broken at the last event. 

I 100% ripped off a prototype car's winglet design. I cut them out of 1/4 inch pressed carbon these are much stiffer than the carbon weave that broke off this last  time. In fairness the old versions lasted pretty good until the last day at Streets when Corvette spit a cone at me which i hit it going about 90mph.

With winglet extension added.

and without. 

Smacking the cone hit with enough force to tear some OEM metal brackets and cause the fender to collapse and ride on the tire.

 I re aligned the fender spacing and utilized some thick L-brackets to hold everything back in place.

I also installed a cessna air guide to blow at me while moving on track. I did notice in the last two track days that with the new plexi-windows, even with the sliders open, it gets hot inside the car... i can imagine summer time being even worse.



Having the car sit with the motor and trans out has allowed me to be able to remaster a few things that were considered "done". One of the things that i kept going back wanting to simplify was the interior.   After some hard and through thought on the matter i decided to remove the Accusump accumulator from the interior as well as rework some wire paths. The removal of the Accusump and new electronic valve was something i had been tying with since installing. I had decided to give it a 'fair shake' on track to see if it was something that i wanted to keep for the long run. I mean hell it was already in the car, wired and working... It has definable advantages in some situations but also has its disadvantages- oil level uncertainty, weight, extra oil line, routing, packaging inside the cabin and overall complication of things generally cancelled out the positives in a 1:1 ratio. I may hang onto it, maybe put it in another car in the future or perhaps even sell this one to offset the steering column cost a bit.  For now, the marching order is simplification, id like to have this car  running with as little flair as i can get away with.

I just want the right parts doing the right things; nothing more, nothing less. 

More soon.