Civic Sedan Build - JTCC Inspired

[Grant@Honed]

Hi All,

I recently moved to a new city and as many of you know yourselves the main concern for any car nut without a car is what car to buy next!

I was initially just looking for a daily driver and after weighing up the cost and performance of a few cheap Japanese cars I purchased a Dc2 Vti-R (GSR) with 280000km's on the clock.

When I brought the car it was 100% stock and drove fine if a little loose and rattly. After driving the car for a few months I started researching modified Dc2's and Type Rs as you do. I originally intended to leave the car stock but after reading some of the great build threads on the web I convinced myself modifying the car was a good idea. The Dc2 Type R is touted as the "best handling FWD ever" and I wanted to experience the full potential of the Dc2 chassis.

Given the mileage of the car I wanted to refresh the essentials. I started by replacing the timing belt, water pump and rocker cover gasket.

The car then developed a squeal under brakes, I pulled the wheels off and sure enough both the front and rear rotors were heavily worn. I replaced the pads and rotors all around with cheap Repco replacements. Looking back now i wish i had researched brake pads a little more and gone with a more performance orientated set of pads.

I found a set of Tanabe Street sport struts for sale on ebay and decided they were the way to go because they reuse the factory top hats. As I intend to daily the car I want to keep the rubber damper bushes and spring isolator.

I ordered a combination of Mugen and Spoon hard durometer rubber top hat bushes and replaced the bushes in the UCA and LCA. I sourced a set of Hardrace adjustable camber and toe links for the rear, these let me set the toe and camber back to stock settings.

After a short time on the forums I noticed a large number of DC2's running the ASR subframe brace and 23mm Type R rear anti-roll bar, i picked up the bar from ebay and the brace from ASR. I was pleased with the quality of the ASR brace and found it straight forward to fit.

I brought the Type R wing and lip from ebay then had them painted by a local paint shop. I found the wheels for sale in Sydney and made the seller a cheeky offer which to my surprise he accepted. They are genuine Enkei Sport ES-Tarmacs 15x7 +40. The wheels feel light but i have yet to actually weigh them.

I'm really happy with the handling of the car now. I will continue to tweek the car here and there but my intention is to keep it on the road as much as possible.

Thanks
Grant

[rtype]

clean car mate! keep it like that, im sure if u need any help with the car all the guys on here are happy to help! =)

[spyda00]

that's a really nice example of a vtir,
how did she handle after replacing the bushings, did you feel the difference?

[stalis]

Very clean car, saw you at the cruise, originally thought you had the jdm 96 itr rims ahaha

[Setanta]

looks fantastic!

JDM front would finish it off beautifully

[Grant@Honed]

I have been driving the car everyday and fixing small issues as i go

The car had a small oil leak from around the V-Tech solenoid, you know that stain on the bellhousing that never goes away no matter how many times you wipe it off. I replaced the solenoid o-rings and de-greased the front of the gearbox and block while I was in there.

The Tanabe spring and damper combo was designed as a upgrade for the Type R and as such the rear dampers have the eyelet lower mount designed to fit with the Type R LCAs. When i installed the front shocks I wanted to drive the car so I swapped the Tanabe rear spring onto the GSR rear damper so the car would sit level until I got some Type R LCAs. The car drove terribly like this and the rear felt really unstable. I attributed this to the Kenda Komet rear tyres I was running but when I finally got the Type R rear lower control arms installed they completely transformed the car.

I'm not sure if the issue was lack of preload on the rear springs due to the oem dampers being longer than the Tanabe units or the heavier damping or the stiffness of the hardrace type R LCA but the resultant of getting those components installed has restored balance to the chassis and increased grip in the rear tremendously. The car can now be pushed right to the limit and when you exceed the tires the chassis responds really predictably. I took the car for a drive in the hills and was blown away, it has great turn in and feedback to the driver.

[IMG][/IMG]

I made some centre caps for the Enkei rims to add to that 96 spec look that i'm going for, I think the centre caps make the car look a bit tidier overall.

I've installed a short shifter with 50% reduced throw and rebuild the shifter assembly with urethane bushes. I added a 100mm extension to the shift rod and now it has about the same throw as stock but the knob is much closer to the steering wheel; cycling through 2nd and 3rd feels really good now.

I found this picture on the internet, it's a CRX i believe. I really like the clean functional look I think i'm going to try pick up a fixed back bucket seat and harness as you really can't hold yourself upright while cornering anymore.

[IMG][/IMG]

I also have an Airbox set up in the works. Ill post some pictures when it arrives and i get it installed.

[Grant@Honed]

I purchased a OEM Type R exhaust last week. The pipe work has already been coated in a hi-temp paint and it came with the 2.5" JDM high flow cat which is a bonus. The muffler is a Fujitsubo Legalis R which i'm told sounds really good. I'm looking forward to getting it installed.

I don't want a loud or drone-y exhaust just something a bit more aggressive than the factory vtir pipe. I'm undecided on what to do about the headers, I'm thinking about Private Label Toda replicas.

The car snapped two exhaust studs last week, this looks like a major pain in the ass to fix!



The exhaust manifold has overheated and warped snapping the studs as it's moved. The manifold needs to be faced(or replaced) and i've got to replace the studs. One of the studs snapped off inside the head making removing it a real problem as we can't just weld a nut to the end. I will source a 90deg drill and attempt to remove the broken stud with an easy out.

Since the header had to come off to fix the studs, I took the opportunity to weld a baffle plate into the sump pan. After welding the plates in i cleaned the welds with a wire bush to remove any loose bits then rinsed the sump out with brake cleaner followed by some old engine oil before refitting it.

I replaced the sump seal and gave the whole area a good clean.



Here's a blurry teaser of my Airbox set up.



The Airbox consists of a Mugen copy fiberglass Airbox that will house a K&N 3" Inverted filter. The reason i went with a cheap copy is that i have decided to covered the filter housing in heat reflective tape. It just seemed wrong to buy a Genuine Mugen Airbox then cover the beautiful carbon and logo devaluing the airbox. I sourced the Mugen Copy air box from China and unfortunately it is really poor quality, out of the box it didn't have provision to mount the filter inside and the fibreglass is really rough (it's ok on the inside). No matter though, it will serve my purpose as a duct from the bumper to the engine bay and cost a lot less than a genuine Mugen. It came with a bell mouth not shown here. A good reminder you get what you pay for!

I will fabricate an aluminium flange with 76mm tube through the back and make it all work with the rest of the factory pipe work (are most full tube CAI 76mm?) .The heat reflective tape is pretty neat, this product is claimed to reflect 80% of heat up to 850 degrees!

[Grant@Honed]

I've been continuously working on the car since the last update.

It's now got the Type R exhaust system installed, initially I modified the V-Tir header to fit the cat back system but then I managed to acquire a b18c7 Dc2r header and swap that on. I modified the secondary and It's 2.5" from the secondary collector all the way back now. My butt dyno tells me the exhaust has made a difference and if in the future I head down the intake/cams/tune road it will support those mods too.

I entered the car in the Exe Haunted Hills Hill Climb event, i was really happy with how the car performed and had a lot of fun chasing the times of a very quick EF!


Credit to C2888 of Exe Forum.


Credit to C2888 of Exe Forum.


Credit to C2888 of Exe Forum


Credit to Peter McG

[Grant@Honed]

After Haunted Hills i got back to the garage, put the car on the hoist and gave the car an inspection as you do and found the left hand side front upper control arm had twisted!

In addition to the control arm damage i inspected my tyres and found the scuffing on the front tyres quite far down the sidewall. I recall the car pushing the front end quite badly on the downhill sweeping corners toward the end of the course and that driving impression combined with the tyre wear led me to the conclusion that i wasn't running enough camber upfront. I was running pretty high tyre pressure on the day so i don't think it was a tyre pressure issue.

I looked up my last wheel alignment sheet and found we'd only given it -1 deg camber up front, after reading up on what fast FWDs should be set to I decided that I should be running around -2.5deg camber and the car was lacking castor as well.

Since the control arm needed replacing anyway i picked up a set of Hardrace adjustable upper control arms.



I fitted all the remaining washers from my whiteline castor kit



I made myself a camber gauge at work and set the front camber to -2.5, with the washers installed castor should now be somewhere around 3 degs. Something about the installation of the washers to adjust castors doesn't sit well with me and i think the front LCA set up could be done better, expect some interesting updates to come in this area.

I wound in another half a degree negative camber at the rear taking the total rear camber to -1 deg. Front and rear toe was the reset at 0.

Interested to know how the new wheel alignment would change the car I booked a spot on Tampered Motorsports up coming Trackday at Winton Raceway.



I had some trouble with my trailer hire in the morning causing me to miss the first session but after that the day went without a hitch.

I managed a 1.50.7 which i was reasonably happy with. The car has a great attitude on track, It never fails to turns in and rear slides out just enough to help the car turn.

I'm still very much a novice when it comes to driving the car so it's hard to differentiate between poor driving technique and vehicle behavior but if i had to be picky i feel the car struggled with understeer in low speed corners and still feels like it's overwhelming the outside tyre. It would be interesting at this point to drive a dc2 with an LSD to seem what difference it makes!

[mugsee]

Great posts and updates to your thread! Nice work with the development of the car and hope to see you out there in person at the next event.

[eskimo_firefighter]

Didn't see you at the Tampered Motorsport track day. I like what you're doing with the car. Keep up the good work. And yikes at the twisted upper control arm after haunted hills, I've had my fair share of twisted components there myself.

[ChargeR]

Thanks for sharing your build guy, look forward to more updates!

[dnapol]

Awesome meeting you the other day man! Your car is very nice

[Grant@Honed]

Hey thanks mate, we had some good yarns. Is there a build thread for your eg?

[dnapol]

Hey thanks mate, we had some good yarns. Is there a build thread for your eg?

Not yet, will be compiling one soon (right now it looks like it belongs in a scrap yard) haha

Any track days coming up?