The CR-X

[ievaq8]

looking awesome as usual tom

[stalis]

this is amazing! loving the electric ps pump instead of a cutout in the hood for the stock unit. And the voltex!

[ChargeR]

I had to put wider high tensile washers on the under side of the bolt to help spread out force of the wing. Without it, it had bent and de-formed the boot mounting holes.

Bummed I won't be seeing it tomorrow at Winton!

Yeah I'm thinking the same thing, I'll need a fairly substantial spreader plate on the underside of the hatch, and I might drill out the holes in the base brackets and go up a size in hardware. Don't worry, you'll see it soon enough!

Nice wing! I have the same one on the s2k but with 295mm stands haha

Thanks guy. 295mm stands on a CR-X would be massive haha, as it is the wing is nearly higher than the roof.

looking awesome as usual tom

this is amazing! loving the electric ps pump instead of a cutout in the hood for the stock unit. And the voltex!

Cheers guys! Unfortunately there's still going to be a hole in the bonnet, but I'm trying to keep it as small as possible with not too much stuff poking through.

[ChargeR]

Last night wiring the car began in earnest. An unlucky acquaintance of mine has been roped in for this, since though I might have been able to get the job done given enough time, time is not a luxury I have. His methods were a bit different to my typical approach, there was a lot of cutting with only a moments consideration and we ended up with a big pile of left over wires . I'm sure everything will still work though, it's a simple car after all. This pic gives an idea of the carnage:



At this stage the ID725 injectors have been wired up, the engine and charge harnesses modified and re-routed awaiting re-wrapping and mounting of the battery and ECU, and most of the unnecessary B series and HVAC wiring in the dash harness has been removed. Hopefully some time this week the wiring whisperer will return and finish off the parts that remain, which includes the dash wiring and the power steering.

Today I made a bracket for my fire extinguisher out of a 50x25 aluminium RHS with a few bits cut out of it and bent (I'd run out of self tapping screws so couldn't just screw it straight through the floor), and welded threaded bosses on the bottom instead of using nuts to make installation and removal of the extinguisher bracket a single tool operation, rather than having to hold a spanner on a nut on the underside.



I put some oil in the car so I don't forget later in the excitement of the first start. As usual I'm using Red Line in the engine provided by Mugsee at Autosphere. I'll use Red Line MTL in the gearbox, and ATE brake fluid. Here you can also see the mostly complete re-routed engine harness.



The poor guy roped in to doing the wiring also donated a piece of stainless steel to make an ECU and battery mounting panel and put a 45° bend in it for me. I tidied it up, drilled some holes (one in the wrong spot) and welded on some M6 threaded bosses to mount the ECU raised off the panel. Battery tie down still to come. Thanks to itsu-san for the loan of the battery, it's a Braille B129 and only weighs 4.3 kg. The passenger will have to be careful where they put their feet though.



Also put the car on the ground and rolled it around a bit. A nice milestone, though the effect was spoiled by me somehow setting the ride heights on the right side nearly 50mm higher than the left .



More updates tomorrow.

[Shakeel]

Wow great progress Tom. I too love rolling around on the ground!

You seem to be really confident when it comes to welding now. Teach me please

Only 33 days to go now. If you don't have the car ready in time then I'll gladly help you push it around SMSP for the quickest "human driven" lap

[Beatz]

I look forward to seeing it finished, I bet it'll look great

[Toddxxx]

I promise to be careful with my feet when I'm passenger...

[Flippit]

bloody brilliant !

[felixR]

That looks fantastic.

[ChargeR]

Wow great progress Tom. I too love rolling around on the ground!

You seem to be really confident when it comes to welding now. Teach me please

Only 33 days to go now. If you don't have the car ready in time then I'll gladly help you push it around SMSP for the quickest "human driven" lap

Thanks Shak, 28 days now! Yep starting to get a bit better with the welder, some of it looks pretty bad still, but I'm fairly confident it won't break .

I look forward to seeing it finished, I bet it'll look great

I promise to be careful with my feet when I'm passenger...

bloody brilliant !

That looks fantastic.

Thanks guys! Todd you're welcome to a ride in it at Wakefield if I fit a passenger seat by then .

On Sunday I did a few more small jobs on the car, after getting a hand from a Grant/itsu-san to push it on to the 4 post hoist, thanks guy. I fitted the rear bumper with new hardware, as I needed it on to route the end of the exhaust correctly as I'm starting to fabricate that now. The bumper fits pretty poorly unfortunately, and has obviously been hit before, so I will fit a spare bumper support I have at some point to see if that improves it.

I also finally fitted up the ASR sway bar. I made up some 100x25x3mm mild steel plates with M10 nuts welded on and then snuck them in through the end of the chassis then bolted it up, as the JDM shell doesn't have the female threads for the tow hooks like the US cars the ASR bar was designed for do. Here's the ASR bar all fitted up. I've left the sway bar end links loose for now until I set my ride heights and corner weight the car, so I can adjust out any pre-load on the bar.



After that I took a couple of days off and then got back in to it last night and tonight working on my track exhaust.

Here's the front section tacked together and bolted on loosely. The flex pipe is from ASP with the header, the muffler is the 17x4.5" Burns that I bought a while back, so for this section all I needed to do was add a couple of straight sections of tubing and a V band flange on the end. I'll finish weld it tomorrow once I rig something up to back purge the welds. Forgive the fairly rough fabrication, this is my first attempt making an exhaust.



The muffler is tucked up quite tight against the body and ground clearance is surprisingly good for 3" piping. From there I started turning this pile of bends into the rear section:



I'm experimenting with making the rear section out of aluminium. I'm not expecting great longevity, but the material's cheap, light and it's good welding practice. If it falls apart I can just make one identical in stainless, and it should be pretty straightforward as I'll know exactly what bends to use and the dimensions already. Here's where I got up to tonight, I need to decide where I'm going to put the next V band so it will be accessible and easy to remove the back section:



Tomorrow night I'll finish up the exhaust, do the final fit up of my radius rods and get the car back on the ground ready to finish up the wiring and start fitting some panels. No sign of the radiator yet, but I've still got heaps of time...

[ChargeR]

Got a bit more done tonight, with the help of itsu-san. Added a couple more sections to the rear part of the exhaust and tacked it all together.



At this point I ran out of bends. I'd originally just planned to run a 90° from here toward the passenger side of the car, and then a 90° to turn it back toward the rear, but I realised with it in place that it would either foul the swaybar or hang too low, so I'm going to put another 45° in there to bring the section of pipe running across from right to left upward and back a bit.

Hopefully a big weekend of updates to follow.

[ChargeR]

Yesterday I moved on to assembling the radius rods to the traction bar and fitting them to the car. I've had the parts for a couple of weeks, but had to order in a 5/8" UNF LH tap to clean up the thread in the radius rods before I could assemble them. Here's the rod ends fitted up to the fabricated radius rod, the spacers are from QA1 with a 3" long 5/8" SAE grade 8 bolt fixing it to the traction bar:



I set the rods to the same length as the standard arm and installed them in car, and installed the axles while I was there. Radius rods are just installed loosely at the moment as I need to modify the alternator slightly to gain clearance between it and the radius rod:





After that I started fabricating an intake pipe, with 3" bends and off cuts from the exhaust. It runs down through the hole where the windscreen washer bottle was located to tuck the filter down behind the bumper:



All welded together, and I hit it with some sand paper and polish to tidy it up until I can get it powdercoated. Clearance to the head light is very tight, so I may have to trim a bit of sheet metal:



Here's how the filter is positioned. It hangs fairly low but I should be well protected by the guard liner and splitter. I still need to add a bracket to support the pipe and provision for the intake air temp sensor and the breather hose to the valve cover, but as expected I ran out of gas just as I was finishing the last join.



Also the dash and steering column are now in the car to help my unlucky wiring guru finish up the harnesses. I haven't decided which steering wheel I'll use yet, either the Nardi Deep Corn that's in there now or an older style Momo Monte Carlo:



Here's how the car looked when I finished up:



More updates today. Thanks to the folks that came round to supervise/help and to YB for the photos.

[Toddxxx]

Momo Monte Carlo always! Literally the best/only wheel to use

[ievaq8]

awesome updates man...

[ChargeR]

Momo Monte Carlo always! Literally the best/only wheel to use

Looking at it again, it's not a Monte Carlo, must be some other similar older model. Does that affect your decision?

awesome updates man...

Thanks mate .

Finished off all the brake hard lines today to suit the new location of the proportioning valve. Mismatched tube to suit the mismatched wheels. All it needs now is a few clips and brackets for support, and the prop valve needs to be bolted to the firewall. I also ran a length of hard line from the clutch master cylinder, and I'll get a section of flexible braided hose made up this week to connect to the slave:



Prop valve has obviously been leaking, and maybe master cylinder too, so I'll get a replacements for both on the way.


The wiring guy is still cutting and joining and those sorts of things. I didn't really follow what was going on with it today, but it looks like the power steering is all wired up, and the relays for the PS pump, fuel pump and the fan are going to be mounted on the plate I made earlier next to the battery.