A Productive Sunday

I managed to sneak in some time and worked on my '88 today! The weather was nice and almost 50* degrees.

I finished up with the dashboard and decided to test fit it today. In an effort to lose every ounce that I can, I trimmed down the cabin wiring harness by removing the wiring that I no longer need. I think it's coming out nice so far.


















The cabin wiring still needs a lot of work. It's a great start though. A little more snipping and I will be satisfied.

As far as the rest of the interior is concerned, I am going to remove the rest of sound deadening material. In some areas there is a lot of some sort of glue or adhesive that sealing holes. I am going to remove as much as of that stuff possible then paint the interior a classic gray.

The doors are going to get gutted. I'm not going to use lexan though. I want to use the oem glass and fab up some fasteners that will attach the oem window brackets to the door itself. The window won't roll down and that doesn't matter as this is a track only vehicle.

The rest of the cabin has some little brackets and things that I will remove before I paint all of the cabin classic gray. I have always wanted to have a nice clean and bare interior. It's getting there and I have a long way to go.

Being that this is a track car, I have my daily driver that will be transporting my Civic to the track. It's a 1990 Jeep Cherokee Pioneer. I picked this bad boy up for only $500 dollars.



It has a 4.0 liter inline 6. Thankfully it is multi port fuel injected. I already looked into tuning options for the oem ecu but it doesn't have an eeprom. I would like to be able to at least dial in the air/fuel ratios to get the optimum mileage and power out of it. I read about some guys using an SAFC but those devices are so finicky.

I have done minor upgrades. It has an Accel ignition kit which includes plugs, wires, cap and rotor. Other than that it has just enough power to tow my car around.


This week the weather forecast is looking decent so I hope to get some work in!

New Parts Arrived

Today the UPS guy was kind enough to drop this off for me:





I had hopes of installing the new mounts today but ended up working on my tow vehicle. For a tow rig I have a 1991 Jeep Cherokee with a 242 4.0 inline six. The power really seemed down on my Jeep. After a lot of research I ended up getting some new parts to help increase the power output.

My Jeep's engine seemed to have a slight miss when in park and would misfire occasionally in drive. A few months ago I found a spark plug wire that had a small pin hole that was arcing against the block. I taped the wire off temporarily. I always knew that this could be causing my lack of power. Last week I bought I an Accel tune up kit for my Jeep. The kit came with new wires, new cap, rotor and Accel spark plugs. I installed the kit today. It went very easy and straight forward. I also changed the oil and oil filter.

With these upgrades, my Jeep's motor feels like a new engine! I am surprised at the increase in performance.

When I finished up with the tune up it began to snow. I hope the weather will be nice enough this weekend to do work to my Civic.

Quick Header Update

Last week Matt sent me some pictures of the progress with my Bisimoto header. It's looking AWESOME!





I hope that in a few weeks Matt can find time to finish this project up. He's super busy and many projects to divide his time with. My local track is scheduled to open in April and I want to be there the first day.

Project Dashboard Continued

I finally got a chance to get away from customer cars and was able to work on my dashboard.

I started by going to Harbor Freight to get a cheap hole saw set. I found a decent set for $14.99. After I made it home I started in on the work. Here's what the back of the dashboard looks like:





This is what is now looks like swish cheesed up:







The battery died in my cordless drill so I had to stop for the evening. I made good progress. Here's a small pile from my efforts:



Was it worth it? My dashboard definitely feels lighter but I need to weigh it to confirm. Just by the feel from picking it up I am satisfied with the weight loss.

In the past week some new parts arrived:




I also wired up something that I think is rather cool. Joe, the NG ROM writer developed a ROM that has check engine light as a shift light capabilities. Due to the small size of the steering wheel, most of the tach is not visible. I had an Autometer 5" tach with a broken needle that had a good shift light on it. I removed the shift light and attached it to the gauge cluster bezel. I wired one side of the shift light to the cel wire located on the back of the gauge cluster. I grounded the other wire. In theory this should work and will allow me to watch for the light instead of staring at the tach. I think it came out nice:



Later this week more parts should show up. I am excited for them to arrive!

Project Dashboard

In this installment of my blog I am working on my dashboard. An '88 Civic dashboard is a little bulky and weighs a decent amount, roughly 15 lbs with the gauges. My plan is to lighten up the dashboard and to remove some excess wiring that I won't be needing.

Before I go further, I feel the need to mention that my '88 isn't going to be driven on the streets any longer. The chassis has over 250,000 miles on it and has quite a bit of rust. My Civic was also given to my as a birthday present many years ago so I will always have it. I don't want some idiot driver to take away my precious chassis so no more street driving it is. In light of this I don't need most of the stock amenities.

I am going to attack the dashboard in two segments- first to minimize the wiring and second to remove plastic from the back of the dashboard.

Here's what I started with....



This is stereo harness and cigarette lighter plug that I will be removing....



After cutting off the wiring loom I dissected the harness and de-pinned the wires from the fuse box plugs. It came out looking rather nice...






That didn't turn out to be that much in wiring, but what can I really expect? At least I was able get a few ounces out ha ha.



In the next phase I will be taking a variety of different sized hole saws and will get to work removed plastic material from the back of the dashboard. Stay tuned!

Chassis Motivation

This is going to be a short and sweet post about the parts I am going to use to motivate my chassis into the 13's.

Currently I have a cable dohc zc transmission with zc 1 - 5 gears. I've been running this transmission for the last two years. Matt from zcspeed.com rebuilt the trans with oem bearings and parts. A p20/booo differential was installed with a Si 4.25 counter shaft and ring gear. We used these parts so I could use standard d series axles. Plus the diff pin in the hydraulic transmission is actually stronger than the L3 series of pins. I already blew up one diff on street tires and didn't want to go through that again. When budget permits an MFactory diff will replace the oem diff.

Connecting the engine's power to the transmission is done through an Exedy 8 lbs Cromoly flywheel and a XTD stage 3 clutch. I know, I know, XTD stuff has a terrible rap and most people think that they are junk. For my less than 150 whp motor I can count on this clutch to not slip with my slicks.

Putting the power to the ground is a pair of Diamond Racing 13x8" wheels with MH 22x8" slicks.


Here are some pictures from last summer. Enjoy!










This summer I am going to make it to the track no matter what!

I recently received my camera back and will take some much needed newer pictures soon. I haven't made much progress yet this year. Beave is still working on my header and it's been a little too cold outside to get much done. Soon I will kick into high gear. Especially when I get my tax return. Then it's really on!

Thanks for reading.

My High Compression Engine

To reach my goal of running 13's all motor I knew that I would need a lot of compression, the biggest engine I could possibly afford and a proper close ratio gear set. Being the broke family man that I am, I stuck with a d16 engine. I started with a d16y7 block and crank. I used this block in the past but had boosted it. In a past life this y7 was fed 13 psi from a 44 trim turbo for two years. I sold the turbo parts I had and tore down the engine for all motor duty.

Compression plays a major factor in making power especially at my elevation. In my area of Colorado Springs, Colorado the elevation is over 6000 feet. My local track is over 5000 feet about sea level and has a dense altitude of over 8000 feet above sea level. The best pistons I could afford is a set of Nippon Racing p29 pistons.

Before you go thinking, "oh God, he has those pistons," hear me out. I'm not going to go into flame propagation or theories on combustion. I know of three cars in Puerto Rico running 12's with p29 pistons. They can get the job done.

I couldn't find a set of p29s in 76mm so I had to settle for 75.5mm. I had my favorite local shop, Lee's Machine bore the block and hot tank it for me. It came out great.





I chose the NPR 75.5mm pistons because of the 30mm compression height. This places the pistons flush with the deck. It looks so nice...



 

Lee's also set the new pistons on for me. I left the pistons alone and did not modify them. I plan to build a few of these engines and want to take each engine to the next extreme. This engine is pretty basic and will stay that way. Each engine will be an improvement and I have to experiment to see what breaks first.

I used King bearing and ACL thrust washers. Don't ask me, that was the combo that was sent. The crank, the rods and rod bolts are stock and unmodified too. I bought a new oem oil pump from Honda and left it stock too.

After I built this block I had it sitting around in a bag for a couple of months before I needed to use it. I had a ported y7 head with a Delta 272 cam that I was going to run on this bottom end but it dropped a valve with a different bottom end before I could try it on this one. I had a stock y5 vtec-e head laying around and decided to give it a shot. I used an oem y8 head gasket from Honda with stock y5 head bolts. An AEM y8 cam gear, Bisimoto prototype header, 2.5" short exhaust with resonator, stock air box with custom internal air foil, 3" aluminum intake piping, 60mm throttle body, gasket matched Blox intake and DSM 450cc injectors finished out the modifications.




This set up is obdo. I am a tester for the latest ng series of roms that work with TurboEdit and BRE. I have a stock Si distributor, self chipped ps9 ecu, Moates Ostrich 2, Hulog and a Innovate lc1. Using Ecucontrol I was able to tune the engine in rather well.

The engine did have it's quirks. The y5 cam wanted vtec-e to activate as soon as possible. Like at 2000 rpm. Other than that it ran good and seemed to like 25* degrees of total timing and 13:1 afr.

I took this set up to the track once. I had three runs and only one of them went well. The runs were on street tires on the side of the track which lead to horrible 60' foots. Here's a video of the two full runs...





I ran a best of 15.7 @ 88 mph with a 2.58 second 60' foot. Horrible! I know I could do a lot better with a set of slicks and some changes. Before I knew it summer was over and the season ended. That was in 2010.

2011 was a slow year in regards to progress. I had the battle with my Bisimoto header that you can read about in another post. That really held up progress and I wasn't able to dyno the set up or buy other parts. While the Bisimoto header was off I was reduced to using a ceramic coated Pacesetter header. I certainly did not want to go to the track and run with that crappy header.

That didn't stop me from making some changes. The first major change was getting rid of the vtec-e parts. I swapped in a y8 cam and y8 rockers. Right away that made a positive improvement in not only the mid range but in the top end as well. I was able to bump up timing to 28* with the y8 cam.

I replaced the stock fuel pump with a Walbro 255 fuel pump. I also ditched the stock air box and went with something that was yielding results for others- a long tube air intake. Not only that, I bought a BPi flow stack to go along with it. I ran the intake down and out of the engine bay. The velocity stack is sticking out of the front bumper. I think it that the long tube intake and velocity stack made more a difference than when I went from the Bisi header to the Pacesetter header.




2012 is already turning out to be a great year. I plan on making more changes, tuning on the dyno, testing parts and hitting the track as soon as it opens! Stay tuned!