So a friend had a Civic. He overheated that Civic and broke it. So he sold it to another friend. Another friend wanted a cheap track rat, so I told him about this Civic and he bought it. He asked me to fix it, I found out it was more broken than he wanted to mess with, so he gave it to me. So I guess the wrong Civic is my problem now.
This picture is when I rolled it out of the garage with stuck valves and decided to let it sit and think about what it had done while we tried to get another Honda ready for Midwest Rev Up. (spoiler, that Honda didn't make it either, but that's a different story).
I usually start these threads while the car is on the trailer and then never touch it again. This time I'm starting the thread after I thrashed on it for a few weeks and am probably about to start messing with it again since it became my problem. Now to decide if I'm editing this post to death or adding more posts as I organize my thoughts and try to remember what all I did.
So the problem started with the D17 getting nuclear overheated to the point it became a milkshake machine. Decisions were made to pull the head to see how ugly it was. We looked at the cylinder bores and saw light scoring. Then put a straight edge and feeler gauge on the head and block deck services to find out they measured just barely outside of spec, using questionable methods and questionable tools....so we decide to throw a head gasket and bolts at it and see what happened.
Because the entire goal here was silly track car, while we were in there it got purple glitter paint on the valve cover, and your best quality ebay header and hot air intake. We also did a new timing belt, which also involved fixing stripped threads on an idler pulley bolt, lots of headache with this particular idiot trying to set timing by himself with the engine still in the car. All so it could not idle and make a horrible metallic racket. I then pulled the valve cover back off to find that intake valves on #4 weren't closing completely. So we abandoned it to make an effort to put the other car together so maybe one of them would make the event. (nope, like I said in the title, idiot is bad at Honda)
While I was in there I also got sent a chinese knock short shifter, crappy exhaust, a host of inappropriate sitckers, tow strap so we could get pulled off track when (not if) it exploded, and a black mesh grill that doesn't fit this bumper. We also did hood pins because the hood latch broke.
After all that was done was when i found out the engine was actually beyond saving and we put it back in storage.
starting the thread back now because we found a parts car and I might be making progress on it again. Updates to come this weekend probably.