Thursday, September 3, 2009

Legal to Drive

I got the emissions done and renewed the tag. Since we've fixed the lights Our Lady is now legal to drive on the road. Perhaps not safe, but legal. I drove her to work.

Driving the car, the first thing you notice is the power. This is a whole different animal from the old Civic. The second thing you notice is the steering. It feels like an old jeep. The steering has a dead zone of about 3" where the steering wheel does nothing. The third thing you notice is the scary sounding clunk from the right front when you hit a bump.

So after I got home from work Craig and I took a look at the alignment using string and some jackstands. We expected it to be off since we swapped the Integra knuckles into it. It was. When we started making the adjustments to correct the toe, we noticed that we weren't getting much closer to our goal, every adjustment seemed to keep the tires our one way or the other. Then we found our culprit. The tie rod end was shot and had ~.060" play. Fortunately we still have the Integra steering rack and the tie rod end looks similar. We'll be swapping that in tonight.

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