After removing our stock battery—not such a hard job since it wasn’t tied down—here’s what we had: a slightly rusty battery tray and old wiring.
Some POR-15 cured our rusty battery tray.
Isn’t it cute? The Braille battery fits in the stock location. We also installed brand-new Honda battery cables.
Our CRX has been sitting a little dormant in a very un-Honda-like manner. Turns out that the car wouldn’t start one day. While checking all of the connections, we remembered something the seller told us: One of the battery cables may have a bad terminal.
Turns out he was right.
The easy thing to do was just replace the clamps, which we did as a temporary fix. However, to install the clamps we had to shorten the cables just a touch. As a result, the wire that goes between the positive terminal and the fuse box barely reached. Since the car came without a battery tie-down, any quick motion would pull that wire loose, leaving the car without power.
The stock setup puts the battery right behind the passenger headlight, meaning it’s high in the chassis and way far forward. We’d call that highly less than ideal for a car with a front weight bias.
Traditionally, people would put the battery in the back of the car to solve that weight-distribution problem, but that raises a few more issues. For one, there’s all of that cable, which puts a strain on the electrical system and adds more pounds to the car. A trunk-mounted battery also takes up some interior space.
The new trend is to run a small, lightweight battery in the stock location. One of the lightest options is the Braille carbon-fiber race battery. According to our local postal scale, it weighs a svelte 7.5 pounds. It also only measures 5.5x3.4x4.2 inches. Its lightweight aluminum mount adds another 11.5 ounces to that total and is simply screwed to the stock battery tray. (Options for attachment include self-drilling screws or hex head bolts and nuts; we went with the latter and added some thread-locking compound.)
The whole installation went as planned, and the car started on the first try.
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