Todds new EK1

[stephen8512]

nicely coming along mate!

love the plates too. EK mdk! haha

[ken_twolves]

Great pick up on the daily! Keep the red recaros they look boss. I think red tends to hold more value than black.

[felixR]

Nice work with the alignment!

[Toddxxx]

nicely coming along mate!

love the plates too. EK mdk! haha

thanks man
plates will change once i can come up with something that i like

Great pick up on the daily! Keep the red recaros they look boss. I think red tends to hold more value than black.

yeah the recaros are nice. just get dirty really quickly. thinking of buying some covers for them but we will wait and see
red seems to be the more desired colour. ive yet to see a nice black pair. some of the sets i was offered... -___- haha

Nice work with the alignment!

thanks felix

[Toddxxx]

New update time

Sold all the original bracing off the car and thought it'd be a good idea to buy some more :P
Spoon Sports front and rear strut braces



This was after i polished them up and made them look nice again. They were pretty scratched up and dull looking when i got them but nothing a quick polish and clean cant fix.



I was never going to install the rear one as i didnt want cut plastics and you lose the functionality of the boot with a brace sticking across it. Sold the rear to a friend and installed the front. Still not sure if i'm going to keep the brace. No real purpose for it and the bonnet is never going to be up haha. Maybe i should neaten up the engine bay a bit? Probably a bad idea but we will see how bored i get :P



Around this time i was really getting over the Buddyclub coilovers. Just wasn't a fan. My 12kg amuse coils in the S2K were far more comfortable than the Buddyclubs in the EK. So i pulled them out and was intending to grab a set of stock shocks for the time being but happened to find a set of stock shocks with brand new Tein S Tech springs for a steal. According to their site the springs are twice as stiff as stock and should drop the car about an inch.



Threw them in and lowered the car back down. This is how it sat when they were first installed.



Kind of high in the rear as there's no real weight there but over the next couple of days they settled and dropped and i had about 2.5 finger gap all round so not that bad.
What i like though is that the ride is about 32632873298x better now than with the old coils. So much smoother, not as jarring going over speed humps and joins in the road. A lot quieter inside the car too due to dampening and the fact that the interior isn't vibrating and rattling so much any more
With the car being 100% daily and no intentions of tracking i didnt have to put up with the harshness of coils for every day use so this spring option was an excellent choice. In saying that though a couple of times now i've just pushed the car a little harder and gone around a round a bout a bit faster or through a chicane just to see how the car performs and the springs are actually quite good still. Combined with EK9 front sway and EK4 rear the car doesn't roll much and can still take these turns at speed.

One thing for sure though is that the 15s just weren't going to cut it anymore. Never liked the look of the 15s on the car but now they just looked completely dwarfed in the guards so the search began for new wheels.
I knew what i wanted so it was a very limited search but almost like fate a set of the exact wheels with the tyres and everything i wanted popped up for sale for cheap so i jumped straight on them and went and picked them up the next day.

Pretty happy on the drive home!



I'll leave it there for now as i still need to get an alignment and then ill take some proper pics of them and how they fit and everything

[Yue_Will]

very tidy! I can't believe you're going to keep us hanging haha. I spy rpf1's?

[Toddxxx]

very tidy! I can't believe you're going to keep us hanging haha. I spy rpf1's?

Haha I installed them yesterday and took one pic
Need to get alignment and stuff first then I'll take some nice ones

[Toddxxx]

And yes they're rpf1s

[Toddxxx]

Okay pics of new wheels.

They were pretty clean when i got them but gave them a once over and cleaned up any left over marks on them.



Annnnnd on the car
Still need to get an alignment so it's the only pic for now.



Lots of nostalgia with this car as it is now. Reminds e a lot of my old EG from 4-5 years ago.

[iwearmoccos]

I like your enthusiasm for cleanliness, one particularly part of car ownership I'm not great at.

[Toddxxx]

I like your enthusiasm for cleanliness, one particularly part of car ownership I'm not great at.

Yeah but you cut sick lap times which is way better!
Clean cars are good cars

[Toddxxx]

Continuing on from the success of the recaro clean I decided to give the rest of the interior the same treatment.

First the door cards got a scrub. Surprisingly while they didn't look dirty a lot of containments still came out of them.
No pics of process here

I then moved onto the rear seat. This was the piece I was most keen to clean as I had picked it up at the wreckers so who knows how long it had been sitting there for.
While it didn't look overly dirty I knew there was probably a lot of dirt and contaminants hidden in the fabric. These suspicions were confirmed with the first wipe of the wet towel. I ended up producing 3 buckets of black/brown filth.

Bucket #3



And an after shot of them. They're back in the car now but I might pull them out again and give the bottom section another round of cleaning.



The front floor mats also received a clean. The driver side has a bit of wear as seen on the pics but those areas have come up darker after the wash so doesn't look as bad now which I like.

Before



After



The passenger side actually looks lighter now. This isn't just because of the lighting. The passenger mat was full of contaminants. The majority of the bucket sludge came out of it so not too sure who has been in that passenger seat and what's been on their shoes haha



The carpet is actually in really good condition. Being covered by mats helps a lot obviously. There was just a few spots around the front seat rails that I had to clean but nothing major.

Now with all the fabric components out of the car and cleaned I pulled the 3/4 trims out as they had been cut to accommodate a rear strut brace. As I'm not going to run one I wanted fresh ones without holes so I grabbed some off a friend and threw them in. Also grabbed the bolt covers for the rear seat belts as they had been removed for the c pillar brace.

Out with the old and in with the new



And how the nice clean interior looks now.





If you have a keen eye you'll notice a few extra goodies in the first pic. Spoon gearknob and rear view mirror. Thanks renel and Bede at Gaijin Garage.





Also note the mirrored passenger side sun visor. First trip in the car with my girlfriend she pulled the visor down and complained of no mirror so I had to sort that out quick smart!  wreckers came in handy again.

And that's it for the interior for now. Nothing else to really add. Still deciding what I want to do with the recaros.

[Toddxxx]

First long trip in the civic completed! 🙂
Went away with my girlfriend for the weekend up to Nelsons Bay.
The car performed perfectly for the whole trip.
502km on the tripmeter and still a quarter of a tank left. That fuel economy 😉

Before leaving I went to the wreckers and grabbed a wind up jack to complete my travel kit which now includes a jack, jumper leads, rattle gun and a few screwdrivers and sockets. Shouldn't have an issue now on those long trips.

Some notes about the car that i realised on the trip.
1. The speakers aren't the best. Need to replace the fronts and the rears.
2. The ku31 are quite loud when not on totally smooth road surfaces. This added with the speaker issue and it gets quite annoying at times. I'm definitely going to look into dynamat or something similar for the rear section under the false floor and maybe even down the side panels.
3. The carbon bonnet bounces and lifts like crazy when driving at speeds. Few times when trucks went the opposite way the air being pushed under the bonnet would lift it and I got worried it'd rip off haha. Need to fix that.
4. Starting to hear a 'ticking' noise coming from the front wheels at low speeds (>20km/h), not sure which one it is but need to look at that too. Probably a rock that's got stuck in the rotor/heat shield
5. D16 struggles so much going up hills haha

A couple pictures from the weekend trip. Hopefully more trips away with the civic soon!

[felixR]

Where is that second photo?

[Toddxxx]

Where is that second photo?

Just a little further round from Mount Tomaree. Moretowards Fingal Bay.