A lot of you have been wondering what my car and I have been up to the last couple months. The last meet I drove it to was in Nov or Dec and even then it was borderline broke. I’ve since corrected a number of things and it is finally almost road worthy again. For what seems like forever, my car has looked like this:



I finally got around to getting it back together. Here are the highlights.

Back in Nov/Dec I had all sorts of issues that made me believe my motor was fubar’d. The beginning started when I put the car on they dyno (you may remember that thread) only made 350whp. I knew a lot was wrong, but I had no idea it would all compound at the same time. Here’s the rundown: I had two or three cracks in my manifold and my wastegate was hanging by a thread which caused my wideband to read astronomically lean. Also, my turbo (journal bearing Precision 5857) was blown due to insufficient oil drainage. My return bung wasn’t mounted in the oil pan high enough which blocked the return of oil form the turbo and clogged up the seals. This caused the car to smoke and eventually ruined the turbo shaft. On top of that, the oil feed line I had running to the turbo was sourced from the vtec solenoid which isn’t the most ideal since the pressure varies when the motor is not in vtec. So at this point I needed to:

1 – repair the cracks in the manifold and reattach the wastegate properly
2 – reroute the drain line from the oil pan to the girdle
3 - tap the oil pressure switch to be the new turbo feed
4 – get a new turbo lol
5 - retune for the new turbo

I dropped the car off with, IMO, one of the best Honda mechanics in town – Colin @ RI Automotive in Temple Terrace. Since the manifold had to come off, we decided to thermal coat the manifold and downpipe. Made a HUGE difference. But, getting the parts coated pushed everything back 2 weeks and the car wasn’t back together until the end of Dec. We also went a little bigger on the turbo, I now have a BB Precision 6262.




New BB Precision 6262 .63 ar


Rerouted return into the girdle. You can see my old return and the new coated downpipe also

We put it on the dyno and did some tuning to get the AF’s safe to drive around in. My wideband was confirmed to not be reading right so this dramatically cut down on the amount of fine tuning Colin could do to get things optimal. After every pull, we had to get out of the car, walk over to the computer, make mental notes, make the changes in Kpro and do another pull. With an hour of tuning we pulled out 390whp of it at like 14psi and called it a night. My dyno graph right now is an absolute joke so I won’t bother posting it up. Suffice to say, there’s a LOT left on the table.

So that brings us into the new year. I drove the car for about a week after the above and decided it was time to park it. My tires were trash, my brakes weren’t really stopping anymore (although I think that had more to do with the tires, more on that later), and my AP1 front end was tired and beat to hell. So, I decided to stop putting things off and get somethings done. Here’s a short list of the work I’ve done in the last month or so:


- New front rotors/pads (Hawk HP+). The rotors kicked my black ass. The retainer screws were damn near welded in and I was too lazy to go buy an impact. Took me like two weeks to drill them out lol. New pads dust like a mofo, but they stopppppppppppp.


- New fluid (ATE Superblue). My old fluid was beyond trash. Smelled like burnt coffee




Check out my helper lol


- AP2 front bumper
- New driver fender (had a dent from back in the day, figured I might as well)
- New single exhaust cap



- New CR front shocks


I had all the parts painted at Gene Perez off of FL Ave in Tampa. Funny story…they don’t take credit/debit cards. Checks only. Work looks good though, I would recommend them if you need paint/body work done. Talk to Mark.

Oh and btw, you can’t just swap the AP1 bumper for the AP2 without a little modification. Don’t try doing this with a battery powered dremel. Ask me how I know.



Of course, I couldn’t imagine doing all this sober:


Well, its probably not the best idea to drink and wrench:

That's not kool aid.


There’s a lot of little stuff in the list above I didn’t mention but I will pass this little nuggest of information over – the clips that hold the fender liner in are very hard to preserve and they are over a dollar a piece from the stealership. I lost the first bag of 12 I bought which A) pissed me the hell off B) pushed getting everything done back another week because I had to wait for them to order them. Do your best to keep them if you remove them because they’re relatively expensive and not a well stocked item.

Lastly, I needed to figure out why my kpro wasn’t reading my wideband correctly. No matter what, it was always flatlined @ 12.3AFR. That’s fine for a NA car (which is why I didn’t catch it when it was installed), but FI cars run significantly richer under load. After countless tests and ‘discussions’ with Hondata, they finally conceded that it was the ECU that was the cause. Had to take out some resistors on the main board:




Works as advertised now.

So as it stands now, I need new front tires. You may have seen this pic in the other thread:



Going with Hankook Ventus II Evo’s this time around. For all intents and purposes, they perform equivalent to the Dunlop Star Specs but at a fraction of the price. I’ll get an alignment this time lol

So when you add up all the $$$$ and time from just the pics in this thread, its easy to see why I haven’t been around. Add in the fact that half you Tampa clowns never show up to anything and the weather has been like an arctic freeze…I wasn’t in a hurry. So yea, I seem to always have an “excuse” but in reality I have a lot going on. Between all these issues and my personal life I don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to this POS. Now that the weather is getting better I decided to get off my ass and get it together. Hope to see you guys around with it before something else ‘breaks’.




PS - One car garages absolutely BLOW. I will never, EVER purposefully own one again.

 

it will be good to see ya on the road again

 

!! very nice! !

What numbers do you / are you hoping to put down now?

 

WOW DUDE!

You been busy with all that ship! Glad you're making progress and I'm surprised with the Mace kit install - "NOT GOOD!"

By the way, good move on the ceramic coating!


Maybe see the S Thursday!

J

EDIT: Looking alittle low!

 

Can't blame Mase's kit or install. The oil return debacle was my doing.

I'd be happy with lower 400's on pump gas which this setup should certainly do. I'm debating whether I want to play with it on the dyno myself or call in some help. I don't know enough about ignition timing yet to feel comfortable so I may leave the duties over to someone that knows wtf they're doing. But first I've got some partial throttle knock issues I'm trying to sort out.

I highly recommend that bottle of Appleton I thank JP Money for getting me addicted to that.

 

Glad to see you are getting it right! GL finishing it up.

 

lol glad to see it coming together. good luck finishing her up!

 

Wow - looks like a ton of work - good luck with it all, glad to hear there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

 

good to see your getting things sorted out.

are you going to brace the manifold to support the weight of the turbo? or have you already or does the kit come with a brace?
where did the manifold crack at?

 

I wonder if thats the same Colin I knew of back in the day. He used to have shop in an industrial park off of sligh and 56th. He used to be the man with Honda's back in the day.