Great to see this progressing! Maybe find your self a shop that rebuilds starters and alternators? They could likely help you frankenstein something together.
Great to see this progressing! Maybe find your self a shop that rebuilds starters and alternators? They could likely help you frankenstein something together.
Spent a little more time with it today and got it set in correctly and 3 of 4 mounts bolted in.
Then I did the most important step for any project:
I sat in it and pretended I was driving it and remembered why I'm bothering with this monstrous undertaking instead of just buying an Evora or something like that.
Thanks for sharing another update on this project! I bet seeing the drivetrain in the chassis is a good motivator!
Very early yet, but have you considered the engine covering? If I may please go Lexan for this. I have one that came on my Cayman when I bought it and I love it. The double take looks the car gets when people see it is awesome.
I think it is especially important on this mental swap.
Cayman from outside the rear window:
Thanks for the kind comments. I was actually thinking about the engine covering, and I'm thinking there will be......
None!
I think I'm going to have to being the firewall all the wall up to separate the engine bay and driver's cell. The problem is that I have the roll bar in there, and the firewall has to go on one side or the other. If you look at the pictures above you can see the front mount encroaches on the roll bar space pretty closely. So the firewall will have to be on the driver's side of the roll bar. So just going straight up the while way seems the easiest way. Them maybe I'll usea camera or something for the rear view.
I was going to replace the rear window with louvers, so I'm not sure visibility out the rear window was going to be a thing anyways.
This project is so amazing!
Two design nit picks....
The Subaru five speed transmissions are not well regarded in their torque handling ability, do you plan to make any upgrades as part of your eventual boost plan?
Have you calculated the loads that your rear upper shock mounts will have to carry? Shock shaft loads can be much higher than just the spring load weight carrying of the car depending on the damping.
I always imagined the final level of un-reality in a project like this would be having a center driving position like a McLaren F1
Yikes. It's been way too long since I've updated here. Been busy with a couple other big projects in life: I'm writing a textbook (mechanical engineering of antennas) and I'm kind of starting my own business. And I have 3 elementary-school-age children. That's made it hard to find time in the garage.
That said, I've started trying to work on it a bit again. First up was to clean up the garage. I let it get a little out of hand:
So first things first was to clean it up so I could actually work on the project:
It kinda looks like I cleaned up everything but the car itself.... but at least now I can get to it.
I also made some actual progress on the project itself. The wheel bearings I had were *very* sloppy. I was worried that it meant my combo of Honda wheel bearing and Subaru wheel hub wouldn't work, even though according to the numbers they should. Luckily I have a bearing expert at work, so i showed it to him and his best guess was that they were just some shoddily manufactured bearings. I replaced them with some Timkens, and sure enough they're perfect now. I figured the cheap bearings would be cheap, but I didn't think they'd be THAT bad.
The video shows the play in the poor quality bearings:
The new bearings have zero play, as they should.
Right now I'm turning it into a roller.
In for more progress! I wish my garage clutter was that minimal.
Hopefully cleaning up the shop helps build some motivation to get working again! I like where this project is headed.
Hey all, unfortunately I'm going to have to offer this up for sale. At this stage of my life (3 young kids, writing a book, work, other work) I just can't finish this.
Because it's OPP (other person's project) I'm going to offer it for only $1800. I figure it'd probably make a good $2000 project car. You could probably trade/sell some of the stuff that comes with it to recoup some of the purchase price.
The good:
What needs to be done:
I can supply some engineering design stuff that I've worked on for it, and it shouldn't need much heavy fab work. I designed the whole thing that pretty much everything runs from off the shelf components.
If anyone is really interested, let me know here and we'll figure out how to get in touch.
PS, located in Atlanta, GA.
Sad to see this one moving on. Hopefully the new owner can keep us updated. You've accomplished some very impressive work!
equally.... All the best and hope someone pick this up and complete this as your originally intend
Soooooo......
I've got a bit of a problem:
While the white car is down I've been running the red car at time trials. It's been a lot of fun. At the Road Atlanta time trial in November, on the very first lap as I dove into turn 10a I downshifted into 3rd. No problem there. But then I remembered that the car and the corner are pretty slow, and I could should probably be in 2nd. So I dropped it into second. I probably did it a bit early, and it felt a little funny, but nothing seemed or sounded off so on I went. About a quarter of the way around the next lap I noticed the car was *really* slow. Too slow for even a '99 Honda with 297k on the clock. I glanced down and saw the check engine light flashing at me. Uh-oh, but maybe I can just pull off, restart, and it'll clear whatever code it's picking up on.
Unfortunately I pulled off on the tower side pit instead of the pro pit (that the event was using). So I had to pull all the way back around and as I'm pulling up I can hear the car:
tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick
Not super loud, but not normally, either. So I pull to the side get out, check some things out and figure out I'm done for the weekend.
Go home, rent a tow dolly, and pull it home:
At this point I'm guessing a over-revved it on that corner and bent a valve. I pull the spark plugs:
And that top one seems to confirm my suspicions. So I go ahead and pull the head. I'm just kind of poking around when I see this:
One of these things is not like the other.....
So that is the cylinder that the ticking was coming from. It may just be glazing, I can't seem to feel any actual damage to the cylinder. I have to order a special hone because it has the FRM (Fiber Reinforced Matrix) cylinder liners that Honda liked to use for a while in the 90's. I'm hoping I can just hone it and then fix the valve and I'll be good to go.
Unfortunately, I now kind of have TWO Prelude projects, which is really 2 more than I want. But I really don't want to get rid of any of them, so I think I'm just going to have to put my head down and actually finish them both. The red one first, for sure. It work, but it's just a straight forward repair.
I guess wish me luck!
Woohoo! Good luck, rooting for yah
Yessssss. Please finish the white one. You have a long way to go but you've come a long way already. I predict once you get back to it, you'll develop a momentum!
BA5 said:Soooooo......
I guess wish me luck!
You've got this!
-I'm super curious about the failure mode and repair for the FRM sleeves. Was the sleeve the only damage to the block, and what was the cause? Will you try to DIY repair, or will you send away to a shop? I love the idea of a Challenge Prelude, but the engines didn't appear to be as shade-tree friendly as the D and B series stuff.
-Don't sell the white car. It's such a unique project that not many people are going to be able to finish it.
Another vote for you to finish the white car, even if you only log a couple hours per week on it. As you've described your love for it, I think you would forever lament the one that got away.
Apparently I have a bad relationship with Honda's reciprocating parts.
The left is the piston from the red Prelude I just pulled. The middle piston is from the engine I spun a bearing on when I did the hill climb. That's what led to this whole mess in first place. :) The bearing half is from another time I spun a bearing on the white Prelude's engine, and the little piston on the right is from an F4i that I broke at an autocross in college when I was on the FSAE team. I wasn't the sole contributor to that breakage, it turned out that the oil pan drain boss was below the chassis. We had been smacking it into a brick transition on the autocross course all day; I was just the last (and fattest) guy to drive it and so I finally cracked the pan and toasted the engine. The guy who rebuilt the engine gave me one of the pistons as a memento.
I suppose 4 wrecked engines over 25 years of racing isn't actually too bad a rate.
I've about got the engine out of the red Prelude, so this thread might turn into the red Prelude rebuild thread for a while until I get back to the white one. But I'm not doing anything crazy with the red Prelude, so it shouldn't stall out or get tough. :)
So I've been working on the red Prelude. First thing is that the engine has to come out"
At this point I've stripped the engine block, too.
I took a look at the bearings. There's a little bit of damage, but overall I wouldn't say too bad for just under 300k miles, including racing on them!
I think I've found a machine shop that can do the work. so now I just need to pull the block off the stand and get it over to the machine shop!
Nice work.
Any thought given to going to an Accord F series block to get iron sleeves back? Could also move to 2.3L of displacement.
Or is your car an SH model with the different block for the ATTS?
It is an SH model.
Also, I'm going to do some minor prep work on it so I can keep TT it in the SCCA 'sport' category. That means no engine swaps or really anything fancy. It also means those won't be a long term project to totally derail the white car. Just fix and get out back out there.
It's been a while, but I was able to get the block repaired. We werent' sure it was going to be fixable, but luckily it was.
Bores are looking shiny and smooth now. I even got to start putting parts back into it.
Packaging for parts is a lot fancier these days. I feel like engine bearings used to just come in a basic box all shrink wrapped together. Like this:
Now I get a fancy box:
And they come in a little tray:
Getting some basic assembling together so I can check clearances:
Sourcing new pistons has been a pain. Apparently Honda one's are out of production, and all the aftermarket ones are .020 over instead of the factory recommended (and what I had the block bored out to) .010 over.
So for the first time in my experience of car ownership, I had to order parts from overseas.
I think i might've gotten the last set of oversize Honda H22 pistons available. But got them I did, so I went on to assembly!
I was curious if balancing would be worthwhile. So I weighed each individual component. Turns out everything is pretty well balanced. I just mixed and matched components until everything was really close:
Even that one rod that was a bit heavier was still well balanced and the big end was only a fraction of a gram heavier than the rest of the rod big ends.
Everything plastigauged out correctly:
So now I'm all set just waiting on some crank girdle bolts so I can gauge the crank main journals:
The new plan is:
I'm going to build out the Red Prelude for S6 in the SCCA time trials division. That doesn't involve re-engineering anything, and I've really enjoyed running the Red Prelude. I'm going to build it correctly (modify it to the extent of the rules, putting all the correct safety items for TT and HC in this car) and that should keep me going for some years while I finish up some other things in life and get back on track with the White Prelude.
So getting this engine buttoned up is the first step in the process.
Progress continues. I got the bottom end all put together.
A few interesting things from the assembly process.
I love finding original QC inspection marks. I wonder what they inspected that gave it the ok? I also find it interesting that they use an english 'OK' when the part was very likely made in Japan.
I also replaced this original oil seal in the crank girdle with a new one. The old one is on the left, the new one on the right.
Besides the pretty obvious size difference, the old o-ring was completely hardened. You can't tell in this next picture, but I'm squeezing it pretty hard.
This shows how flexible it should be:
Everything is coming together pretty nicely!
I'm starting work on the head. The piece of cardboard underneath the engine is a holder for the valves. I got the idea from the shop forum, here, actually.
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