Civic Sedan Build - JTCC Inspired

[RC_dc2]

Hey mate, good meeting you the other day (thanks for the diff!). Hopefully I can get around to installing it soon.

Just re-read through your thread, some good things going on. We have fairly similar setups, so I am finding this thread very useful!

Maybe I missed it, but have you got any feedback on your final roll centre and toe link adjustments on the track or even just general driving?

Also, what did you base the swap from 15" to 17" rims on? Do you feel that the swap gave you any specific benefits?

[Grant@Honed]

Hah yeah same to you.

In regards to the rear roll centre modification and front toe arm set up, it's hard to isolate just these two modifications and say in absolute terms what they translated to in terms of handling

What I can say with confidence is that this car:

- Has exceptional turn in, i'm yet to have the car understeer on turn in and I attribute at least some of this to the front bump steer correction. I will take standard tie rods with me to the track on day and test the difference back to back
but it's logical that the front would turn in better with toe out in bump rather than toe in.

- The increased rear roll stiffness due to the angle of the LCA can be felt, similarly to bolting on a stiffer rear swaybar except this doesn't affect how the left and right wheels track. Again this modification helps the car with feel on turn in and in transitional
sections (eg sweeping right to left )

I chose to go to 17" front wheels to get the 245/45/17 tyre, i don't have enough power to make use of this size tyre yet but that day will come.

[Grant@Honed]

A while back I noticed that my LHS front outer brake pad shim had fallen down out of the caliper and was rubbing on the hub

I saw it and thought it was weird but maybe it had just fallen out

When I pulled the caliper off and inspected the brake pad shims on both sides it was obvious that they had gotten way too hot

So much so that on the one that was hanging down the little tabs that hold it to the brake pad had just fallen off

The other shims were also all blistered and buckled so I decided that I should order replacements

I was originally thinking of just ordering a set of OEM brake pad shims but then a friend mentioned he had replaced his with a titanium set from Hard Brakes in the US

I looked up their site and was suitably convinced that the titanium pad shims would be beneficial in terms of reducing heat soak into the brake fluid, so I ordered a set

They come without the tabs bent up but this is not an issue, you just clamp the pad and shim together in a vice then use a propane torch to heat the shim up and bend the tabs over



You can kind of see the condition of the old brake pad shims here



Ready to go in the car

[Grant@Honed]

It’s been awhile since my last post, the roaring pace of modification to my car that was going on last year reduced to a simmer over summer but things are slowly starting to happen again.

If you recall back to the start of 2015, I purchased and fitted a 17”/16” staggered set of WEDS sports wheels to the car.

My thinking at the time was to make the jump to a 17” rim upfront so that I could run a tyre wider than a 225 and keep the rear a 16” rim so that the rear roll centre/rear LCA angles didn’t get too out of control.

I ran that set up at a few events and on track it works really well, but the car always looked a bit funny with the 16” rim at the rear.

When I buckled one of my front WED sports I replaced them with the RPF1s but only bought two for the front at the time.

I decided to use a 17” rim on the rear now, this should make the car look a bit better but also since i’ve done that modification the trailing arm which relocated the LCA mounting point my rear roll centre and LCA angles won’t be as bad as an unmodified car.

I intend on re-modelling the suspension soon, and if required, i’ll modify a second set of trailing arms that I have to suit the 17” wheel set up.

I still want to run a 205 section rear tyre but wasn’t sure what size/offset rim I could get away with so I decided to test fit the 17 x 9.5 +35 RFP1 rims on the rear







Looking at it the 17 x 9 clearly sticks out a bit far but it does clear the trailing arm on the inside (just)

I then used this online calculator and played around with the rim widths and offsets until I came up with a combination I thought would work well*



I settled on 17 x 8 +45, this should give me the most clearance to the guard. If i need to I can get a small concentric spacer made to reduce the offset*

Turns out this size was out of stock with my rim supplier but I have put a deposit down and the rims should arrive in the next 6 weeks

[Grant@Honed]

When my friend Tom (ChargeR on here) and I developed our tie rod components the intention was always to make extra sets and offer them to other Honda owners

I’ve had the components installed on my car for over a year, and Tom’s had them installed on his Civic and his Crx.

I know for my car with its lowered ride height, increased castor and aggressive camber settings that I would have detrimental bumpsteer with the stock tie rod ends but I wanted to know what the*bumpsteer of more typical set ups was like.

What was the bumpsteer like of cars that were just lowered or just lowered but also had adjustable camber arms?

We also wanted to build up a database of bumpsteer measurements so that we can offer set up advice for other people, ie *“for XXX ride height, set rod end height to YY”

So we asked around our friends and got a few of the common cars to measure

Stock EG5



EK with camber arms



JDM Dc2r



Latter we installed a set of tie rods on the Dc2R and tuned his bumpsteer for more toe out in bump. He is due to hit the track on the 3rd of April so will be interesting to hear the drivers feedback.



We measured my car for reference



I’ve tried to summarise the findings in this graph

The solid lines are the bumpsteer curves and the dotted lines represent each vehicles ride height

In this graph the red line, the stock EG5 is there to represent what bumpsteer characteristics Honda have built into the EG geometry.

You can see that from ride height, the EG5 toes out in bump (above the dotted lines is bump, suspension compression)

This is a characteristic Honda have deemed best for their FWD chassis*and part of what makes these cars turn in so well from stock.

What was interesting (and the issue the adjustable tie rod is designed to correct) is that the EK, this particular one set up with a ride height much lower than factory @ 295mm from wheel centre to guard,

Toes IN from its ride height position.

The implication of this is that on track when you’re easing off the brakes and looking to turn in (the vehicles weight is transferred forward during braking, compressing the front suspension) the front axle has toe in and this reduces the potential of the front tyres

This also explains why some people have found that running 1mm or 2mm toe out at the front static has improved the turn in of their cars

You can see from the blue line, my car fitted with the adjustable tie rod I can set the tie rod height such that even with my castor and camber settings being wildly different from stock and the ride height lower than stock I can still have the same toe out in*bump curve as Honda intended

To achieve this i had to set my tie rod height higher than the stock ball joint!

[eskimo_firefighter]

Great post Grant, always a wealth of information in your posts. You and Tom are doing some awesome work. Keep up the great work mate!

[Grant@Honed]

Thanks, Pete!

[Grant@Honed]

About 6 months ago we had a new engineer start at work, a friendly guy who made his way around the office making introductions in his first week.

When he got to my desk he noticed a photo of my Integra that I had behind my computer monitor and that led into a conversation about Hondas

As it turns out that he owns a couple of Hondas, a CRZ and a Civic, so we had the normal conversation that ensues when two car guys meet.

A couple of weeks later I noticed this super clean white civic sedan in the car park,

I was halfheartedly thinking about re shelling the parts from my DC2 into a sedan (for no other reason that I love super tourers) at the time and this car would be an ideal candidate.

I realised that the car belonged to the after-mentioned engineer and went and had another chat with him, turns out the civic was his first car.

He was proud to say that it'd always been run with Mobil 1 and cleaned weekly, I could tell*that he was quite attached to the car and so I went away with the impression that he would not be open to a low cash offer for the car.*

Fast forward to the start of April 2016 and said engineer comes up to me one morning and asks if i'd be interested in the civic, if not he was going to scrap the car

Apparently he had been driving the car in the weekend and on his way back from the airport the crank pulley fell off. The car had been serviced by a local Honda dealer (who just changed the timing belt) but when he took the car back to them, they told him it was his problem and it wasn't worth repairing (damaged the nose of the crank)

One of the Honda service techs offered him $100 for it!

I told him that i would give him a little more than that and give the car a new life as a track car, which he was happy with

So the following weekend I hired a trailer and went and collected the car



You'll have to excuse the photos in this post, they're all from my phone

Right around the same time I moved into a new place with a double garage, all things considered this worked out perfectly as without the space I would have had to decline the Eh

The garage is wide enough that I was able to fit the Civic and Integra side by side and still have a little bench space

I bought myself some work lights and started putting in the long hours to strip both cars, then clean the EH body and re-fit all the good bits into it




Today was the day the DC2 went off to the wreckers

I reinstalled the suspension and steering rack into this shell, it's got the d series engine and gearbox in the engine bay and two cars worth of interior stuffed into it!





It's been a long wait but on Wednesday I received my rear rims (RPF1 17" x 8 +45) and this morning I had a pair of AD08R's fitted

Here's how the EH sits



The front wheels don't fit at all with the front guards the way they are and at the height shown above the car would have no bump travel so there is still a ways to go preparing this chassis

The B18c2 is out on an engine stand and over the next couple of months I will do some prep work on that before it gets re-installed.

[plAythiNG]

nice, cant wait to read the next chapter!

[felixR]

Very cool.

[eskimo_firefighter]

Look forward to seeing with what you do with the EH there Grant.

I don't know about you, but this is pretty cool.

[Emmanuelchibs]

About 6 months ago we had a new engineer start at work, a friendly guy who made his way around the office making introductions in his first week.

When he got to my desk he noticed a photo of my Integra that I had behind my computer monitor and that led into a conversation about Hondas

As it turns out that he owns a couple of Hondas, a CRZ and a Civic, so we had the normal conversation that ensues when two car guys meet.

A couple of weeks later I noticed this super clean white civic sedan in the car park,

I was halfheartedly thinking about re shelling the parts from my DC2 into a sedan (for no other reason that I love super tourers) at the time and this car would be an ideal candidate.

I realised that the car belonged to the after-mentioned engineer and went and had another chat with him, turns out the civic was his first car.

He was proud to say that it'd always been run with Mobil 1 and cleaned weekly, I could tell*that he was quite attached to the car and so I went away with the impression that he would not be open to a low cash offer for the car.*

Fast forward to the start of April 2016 and said engineer comes up to me one morning and asks if i'd be interested in the civic, if not he was going to scrap the car

Apparently he had been driving the car in the weekend and on his way back from the airport the crank pulley fell off. The car had been serviced by a local Honda dealer (who just changed the timing belt) but when he took the car back to them, they told him it was his problem and it wasn't worth repairing (damaged the nose of the crank)

One of the Honda service techs offered him $100 for it!

I told him that i would give him a little more than that and give the car a new life as a track car, which he was happy with

So the following weekend I hired a trailer and went and collected the car



You'll have to excuse the photos in this post, they're all from my phone

Right around the same time I moved into a new place with a double garage, all things considered this worked out perfectly as without the space I would have had to decline the Eh

The garage is wide enough that I was able to fit the Civic and Integra side by side and still have a little bench space

I bought myself some work lights and started putting in the long hours to strip both cars, then clean the EH body and re-fit all the good bits into it




Today was the day the DC2 went off to the wreckers

I reinstalled the suspension and steering rack into this shell, it's got the d series engine and gearbox in the engine bay and two cars worth of interior stuffed into it!





It's been a long wait but on Wednesday I received my rear rims (RPF1 17" x 8 +45) and this morning I had a pair of AD08R's fitted

Here's how the EH sits



The front wheels don't fit at all with the front guards the way they are and at the height shown above the car would have no bump travel so there is still a ways to go preparing this chassis

The B18c2 is out on an engine stand and over the next couple of months I will do some prep work on that before it gets re-installed.

This is awesome I have a white eh/eg8 aswell, you commented on my build aswell. Keen to see the outcome!

Sent from my E6653 using Tapatalk

[Grant@Honed]

The idea with this sedan is to re-create the look of the 1994 JTCC civics

In the picture I posted above of my EH, its front ride height is about 310-315mm (guard to wheel centre) and the rear is 295 -300mm

I've spent hours looking at pictures of the JACCS cars and other EG9s from JTCC and by best guess is that*ride height of those cars is somewhere in the 255-270mm range

Now I know from my suspension modeling that the standard suspension geometry can't achieve that kind of ride height and maintain anything close to stock camber gain/toe curve/bumptravel etc

I also know that i'll be physically limited by the tyre contacting the inner wheel arch so undoubtedly*there will have to be some modifications to the sheetmetal



I plan to design and have manufactured a pair of front knuckles for the car

The trailing arm suspension will be replaced with a new design too

The new knuckle will be designed to re-position the wheel hub approximately 40mm up from stock

At this stage i'm thinking i'll reuse the forged lower control arm but instead of staying with the high upper ball joint design i'll try and package a s2000 upper control arm inside the wheel

I'm currently looking into bolt on hubs to suit RWD or AWD vehicles that might have the same bearing dimensions or same spline as the Honda front hubs/wheel bearings

If i can find something that matches the honda stuff it should reduce the amount of work required for the knuckles



I like the look of these fabricated knuckles, they are designed to receive a bolt on hub of some description



I'm already into the rear suspension design

It's early days and the CAD model is still very rough but you can see the general shape of the idea





The rear suspension design is inspired by this photo I found on the super tourer register website

Its of the rear suspension from a Honda accord super tourer



Now without a doubt all of this is going to be costly and time consuming but its not quite as bad as it seems

I already own all the rod ends I*need for the rear suspension and that was a major factor in swaying my decision to go whole hog with this thing

When I dismantled my sports car project I boxed up all the suspension links and rod ends and brought them to Australia with me and so now i have boxes of QA1 1/2 UNF rod ends..



The rod ends are not the only thing i want to re-use from the sports car project

I also have the custom intake manifold that was designed and manufactured for the sports car by my friend Martyn

This is such a cool piece a total one off, I'll take some good photos of it as i get it finished off

I realise it's kind of a waste to put this on a stock b18c2,*I want to use it just for its sentimental value

The original flange for this intake was made to suit the b16a so to use it on my b18c2 I have to get a new flange machined (yellow)



I'm part way through re-modelling the flange



On Sunday I went a local pick-a-part and procured a VZ commodore e-throttle and accelerator pedal

The throttle body ID is 70mm

In this photo i've got the throttle body bolted down on the CMM table



I used the CMM to measure the mounting flange of the TB and from this i'll get a mounting plate machined up to adapt the TB to the manifold plenum

[felixR]

Wow. So interesting.

Keen to see your next steps!

[tinkerbell]

I also know that i'll be physically limited by the tyre contacting the inner wheel arch so undoubtedly*there will have to be some modifications to the sheetmetal

yeah, I think they used various BFH or CTS or both to achieve that ride height...