Throwing my hatch into the ring... a 2012 challenge build - 1989 Honda Civic

It is kind of late in the game to start my 2012 build but hey why not...

This will be my third challenge. I did the original $1500 challenge with a 1989 Civic hatch as well as the $2008 Challenge with my 1984 RX7/BMW engine abomination.

Anyway here is the fun stuff...

I will be the proud owner of a 1991 Honda Civic DX hatchback as of tommorow morning. The car is equiped with an OBD1 B18b1 engine, DC sport header, Hasport Mounts, Del Sol seats, Ebay intake, Ebay coilovers, Chrome wheels (thankfully Painted black)

I saw the car listed on the local craigslist for the bargin price of $1200.00. Fortunatly the ad was poorly written and had no pictures. The car has no rust, and the paint is OK.

Unfortunatly the vehicle has a dented passenger fender and the wiring is "jacked up" to the point where it will not run. According to the seller it has not been driven in quite awhile due to the wiring. He said that one day he went to start it up and there was wire burning smell from under the dash and now it is not getting fuel. Looking at the vehicles poor wiring job this is not suprising. The seller dismantled the interior in an attempt to repair / diagnose the problem and lost interest after realizing he does not have the expertise to fix the car.

After looking at the car and explaining the risk / work involved, etc.. I talked him down to..... drum roll please...... $700 :)

My dad is picking it up with his roll back tommorow.

My immediate plan is to clean up under the hood, change the oil, and fix the wiring issues. Once I have the Civic running I will go over the brakes (Bleed, change pads etc.) install some new shocks (Not new but new to the car) I have two used Illuminas that I pulled off of a car in the junk yard several years ago. I am shooting for the local autocross in June as a test run for the car. Once I get it driving safely. I plan to install the Integra Turbo kit I have sitting in my attic ;). I currently have $700 in the car. I figure $1312 leaves me quite a bit of room for improvement...

Cool. See you in Gainesville.

clean up and sell the chrome rims and you can recoupe more. OR keep them and add more bling.. you can go as "ricer X"

The Chrome/black wheels will probably be looking for a new home in the near future. I may also sell the Del Sol seats to recoupe some of the budget.

I have a Sparco Sprint seat that I bought 4 years ago for $60 that might find its way into the car instead of the Del Sols. Since my B13 SE-R shares its bolt pattern with this car I have the option to use 4 different wheels not counting the chromies. (The Sentras RPF-1's might not fit in the budget unfortunatly).

Once I get the car to my house I need to inventory what I have and start a list of what to sell and what to purchase.

That's mad tyte yo!

Congrats.

In reply to amg_rx7:

Hopefully this will be faster then my last civic...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-OZz6MnSII

Looks like a good challenge entry! I'll be following the build.

i love those cars. nice find!

That car fell from Challenge Heaven.

pimpm3 wrote: In reply to amg_rx7: Hopefully this will be faster then my last civic... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-OZz6MnSII

So long as you enjoy it, doesn't matter how fast it goes really. The car looks like a good starting point.

My father picked the car up this afternoon. It should be sitting in my driveway tommorow morning. I will try to get some better pics up after I have it firmly in my posession.

On a positive note the seller threw in a box of undisclosed misc parts.

"I have a box of parts for it that I accumulated to put on the car, I guess I don't need them any more so you can have them." Score!

I don't know what the box contains yet. I guess I will have to wait until tommorow, the suspense is killing me

I thought about picking that car up for a donor and to part the shell off. Good to see it actually being put to use.

Got my hands on the car this morning...

The first thing I did was pull out the "jacked up" fender so that I could turn the wheel. Much better now, it is definitely salvageable.

Once I got the car onto the side of my house I went through the mysterious box of parts that I mentioned earlier and I found......

A headgasket kit and a new valve cover gasket. (I hope the owner bought these for future use and they are not a sign of things to come.)

I called him after opening the box and he said that there is nothing wrong with the headgasket on the car. He went on to explain that he bought the kit when he first purchased the car with the intent of eventually rebuilding the motor. We shall see, hopefully my faith in humanity will not be destroyed....

Here are the Del Sol seats. A little dirty but they should work out great if I decide to use them.

I briefly looked over the wiring and I noticed that the car has a cheese ball after market alarm, poorly installed. Did I mention that I hate alarms. When I owned the car lot alarms were the bain of my existence. Anyways I noticed several wires that were out of place and I will start by removing the alarm from the the car. Wouldn't that be sweet if the problem was caused by a poorly wired alarm. We can only hope.

I will mess with the car more this weekend. I need to go get ready for work.

looks like a great start... lots of ways you could go with it if you wanted... don't envy the wiring work in front of you though

This is what I started with this morning.

I figured I would start by removing the stupid alarm. Of course I didn't stop there...

I started rooting through the car in an attempt to inventory what I had. I discovered this new oil filter in the hatch area. I will definetly put it to use. I also pulled out the gauge cluster that was with the car. It is probably out of the car that donated its engine to the civic. Here are the two ECUs that were in the car when I got it. One is an OBD0 ECU that probably runs the stock DX drivetrain. The other is an OBD1 P75 that undoubtably runs the integra drive train. I hope the OBD1 ECU is not burnt out from the shoddy wiring.

This is a prime example of the quality workmanship I am dealing with. Notice the power wire from the battery to the underhood junction box. Keep in mind this is how the entie car is powered electrically... ....words fail me

I continued to root and I found two things that are even more exciting then the free oil filter. One is a half used bag of zip ties, and the other is a truely horrible shift knob. I should put it on craigslist in an attempt to recoupe some of the money spent on this project. If any of you want dibs on it hit me up I pulled the battery from the car and hooked it up to my multimeter. It is in great shape and is obviously new (1/11 according to the sticker). I put it on the trickle charger and let it charge. While I was walking back to the car after hooking the battery up to the charger I looked at the rear wheel for some reason. That is when I noticed that the car has rear discs. Score!

I decided to remove the dash in order to better access the ratsnest of wires. To my suprise it was only held in place by two bolts. On the bright side it made it really easy to remove....

Arghhhh.... Its worse then I thought

Before I delve into the wiring nightmare that is my 2012 challenge car I will post some pictures of the transmission and its components.

First of all I ran the VIN on the transmission in an attempt to determine the specific year of my motor and to figure out if the mileage on the cluster matches the drivetrain. The picture sucks but you get the idea. Turns out the transmission is not from an integra at all. It is from a 2000 Civic Si that has been wrecked twice according to Carfax. It had 130k miles when it was removed from the civic. Sweet! I am pretty sure B16 tranny's have shorter gearing then the LS transmission I was expecting.

The Si transmission and the LS transmission for that matter are hydralic, whereas the EF civic normally has a cable clutch. There are two solutions to this and interestingly enough this car is equiped with both.

Apparently the previous owner tried to convert the EF to hydralic but was unsuccesful. If something doesn't work lets just leave it in the car. Hey why not. This picture shows his upside down Hydralic master cylinder by the stock EF pedal.

When his first attempt didn't work he went with plan B, which is buying the correct part. Here is a picture of the Hasport clutch cable / Hydralic conversion. He left the slave cylinder there to keep it company I guess.

Back to the wiring. Like anything complicated you just have to take it one step at a time. I started by labeling the wires and where they connect. This does two things, first of all it helps when I reassemble everything and second it helps with understanding what is what.

There are two ways to install a OBD1 engine in an OBD0 car. The easiest and most popular way is to use a harness from an EF Si CRX or Civic. You also use distributor ECU etc from the OBD0 car. Esentially you are converting the engine to OBD0 from OBD1. This allows you to use the stock Civic body harness and gauge cluster etc...

The second and more complicated option is to convert the car to OBD1. This has its advantages, first of which is reusing all of the stock engine components like the distributor and the ECU. As an added benefit you can use any number of the freeware tuning programs like Turboedit or Chrome with a chiped OBD1 ECU. There are less options in this regard with OBD0.

Of course the previous owner of my car did not like to do anything the easy way, so you can guess which route he took. I will give you a hint... Notice what gauges were being used on the car.

I started labeling and organizing.

I pulled out the Integra dash harness and was able to fix all of the broken / cut connections. I believe there were 7 wires that I needed to repair, reconect or cover bare wire on. I used shrinkwrap and the small crimp things you can see in the picture. They are great, if you have never used them. They are $2.17 for 25 at radio shack and they are designed for phone wire / alarm wire. Coincedently they were my first purchaese for the car on top of my initial purchase.

On a side note notice my sweet red tackle box organizer thing. I use this one to keep wire crimps etc in. I have one for washers, another for lightbulbs, etc... I got them at Lowes awhile back and they are great for organizining small items. As an added benefit the clear top lets you see inside and I can stack them two high in the drawer of my rolling tool chest.

Last but not least here are the two Chilton Manuals that I will be using for this build. I have a pretty good collection of manuals that I have accumulated over the years, and these two as you can tell have seen some use. The wiring diagrams have already proved to be very helpful.

Camel Towing. Best towing company name ever.

AngryCorvair wrote: Camel Towing. Best towing company name ever.

worth at least a handful of extra points for this entry at the concourse judging

AngryCorvair wrote: Camel Towing. Best towing company name ever.

That's what I thought

When my dad started the company he was trying to come up with a name. My buddy out of no where goes "dude name it Camel Towing". From that point forward no other names were even close. The best thing was my mom didn't know what it meant for like 6 months.

He constantly has people taking pictures of the truck with their cameras /phones etc...

I woke up early with the intent to work on the car for a few hours before work. Of course as soon as I made my way downstairs it began to rain.

It finally stopped raining about an hour before I had to get ready for work. I took the opertunity to label cut wires etc... I didn't take any pictures because it was more of the same. I was able to successfully isolate the fuel pump and sending unit wires, as well quite a few wires that will be unused in the civic. Power windows, cruise control and power locks have no place in the challenge civic..