Southern Discomfort Day 2

We slept in.

Thinking the car was toast, the day ahead seemed like it would be a relaxed nirvana of drinking beer and watching cars go off in turn 1.

I had slept a bit better than my compatriots. During our last trip to civilization I purchased a second sleeping bag to double my insulation in the freezing weather. The previous night I talked to a couple of the Duff Beer guys who had agreed to check out the damage to the Civic if I tore off enough pieces for them to get a good look. I got started.

The damage was pretty apparent when I got the oil pan off. The bottom of the pan was a hearty stew of tar and metal shavings and the oil intake was stuffed with what looked like lathe turnings. The damage seemed to be contained to the #2 lower conrod bearing. It had been completely consumed and the rod was just rattling around on the crank.



Having expected only to see mass carnage, this was some great news. It meant we might actually be able to put in one of the bearings Nick and I had picked up at the Pull-A-Part and get the Civic back on the track. Craig and I set to work grinding the conrod bearing surface smooth and getting the bottom end back together while Mark and Nick removed the excess metal from the oil pan and pickup.

We got her back together, dumped in a gallon of oil and started her up. The horrendous racket we had heard earlier was gone. We sent Mark out to see how she did. He came back in after a few laps to check the oil. It seemed OK so we sent him back out. At this point it was already past 2pm. The plan was for each of us to take one of the three remaining hours in the race.

I gave Craig the next stint knowing that the car's odds of making it to my stint were low. I wanted to drive the car at the checker and I also knew that I wouldn't be able to resist winding it out a little bit more than the 5000 RPM we were trying to limit ourselves to. When Mark came in we could hear that the gnome's little brother had moved in and had started pounding the inside of the engine with his own little hammer.

Craig drove a short series of successively slower laps, barely making it into the pit before the engine quit.

We watched the remainder of the race, happy that we had gotten her back on the track even if it was for only a couple of hours.

Hanging out near the judging station we happened to be around when the awards were being decided, so we had a little advance knowledge that we were likely to get the Dangerous Homemade Tech award. I'm not sure that we had too much competition this race, but it still made our day.

Southern Discomfort Day 1

Discomfort is an understatement. Friday was nothing but rain, cold, and wind.

Since the track was still wet Saturday morning, we put on the T1R's that came from the Miata wheels. The better rain tires and big wing proved to be a big advantage and after a few ginger laps Craig was passing cars. One small problem became apparant during Craig's stint. The steering has a 60 degree dead zone. We'd be fine if we only had to make right turns, but the one sharp left on the track required some real planning to execute. After Craig had been out for 1.5 hours of racing I got in the car. I had a good run once I figured out the car's quirky steering. I almost went off track the first time through left-hander because I thought the front end was sliding. It turned out that I just hadn't turned the wheel far enough.

Mark took over once the gas ran out (I was in the car about 45 min). Mark drove fast but he picked up a black flag for passing on yellow. We were given the Bob Ross penalty. We probably spent a little too much time, but we got lots of compliments on our artistic skills.



I went back in the car after Mark's flag and turned some fast laps. The track was drying out and the other cars were getting faster relative to Our Lady. I got into some trouble trying to hang with the same cars I was passing during my first stint. I went 4-off after going wide and getting into the gravel and debris in the outside of the tight right-hander. Jay let me back out without a driver change, but his leniency was not rewarded. I ended up 4-off again just 8 laps later.

They contemplated a more severe punishment, even toying with making us teach Chantelle how to drive stick, but decided against it given our horrible, horrible steering. In the end we just sat out for 15 minutes. Craig went back in, and Nick and I went to the Pull-a-Part to try and get a replacement steering rack. They only had 4 Civics of our generation, but fortunately two of them had manual steering racks.



Just as we were about to leave I got a call from Craig. He had not only managed to get a black flag for contact, but there was a pretty horrible noise coming from the engine and they were going to start taking off the head to diagnose it. Nick and I checked out the two Integras that were on the lot, grabbed a couple of valves off an '87 whose head was already off, and then started trying to get the slightly better head off the '91. With 5 minutes until closing Craig called with some more news. The valve cover was off and the valves looked OK from the top, so a conrod bearing was the new suspect. With mere minutes before closing, Nick and I tore off the oil baffle on the '91 and were able to extract two conrod bearings.

Once we got back we took a break. We hung out with the Swede Sixteen guys that Craig had hit and ate some of thier shrimp. While we were hanging out the Duff Beer guys stopped by with thier wagon full of homebrew. The berry beer was excellent.

Back at the track we swapped in the new steering rack. It turns out that the two bolts holding the rack in had fallen out and the rack was shifting left-right on the rubber bushing. The only thing keeping the rack from shooting out the side was the splined shaft to which the steering wheel connects hitting the sides of the clearance hole in the body. As long as the steering inputs were light the rack wouldn't shift, but during racing the steering gets pushed hard enough to shift it back and forth. This is what made the left-hander and the following right-hander so interesting all day.

We drained the oil to find that there was less than a quart of tar where 5 quarts of engine oil had been that morning. We tried adding fresh oil and running the car for a few minutes, but it still sounded like an imprisoned gnome was trying to beat his way out of the engine block with a 3 lb hammer.

We tried a compression test to see if we could narrow down what was effected. We got 155, 60, 60, 160. Obviously we had at least two problems. Thinking the engine was a goner, we gave up on the car for the night and joined the Tuna Chuckers. The Chuckers had started drinking earlier in the day when their oil got dumped on the track and their engine ate itself.

Seat Brace

One of the items we needed to address for the next race was the seat. To be in accordance with the rules the seatback must be restrained from going backwards. In many cars the harness bar will serve this purpose but in the Civic the harness bar is about a foot back from the seat with an average sized driver. We snuck through tech the last time by having the seat back a bit further than normal. Not wanting to risk it again, we decided to get a brace installed.

The off-the-shelf solution is a bar like the one from I/O Port Racing:




The I/O Port model is aluminum and ~$90. Being cheap we decided to make one at 1/2 the cost and about 4x the weight. We bought some telescoping steel tubing from McMaster-Carr and welded up some scrap. Here's the result:

Sway Bar

The Civic sedans didn't come with a sway bar from the factory. There's not even a place to mount it. We got the rear swaybar from the Integra when we swapped out the rear brakes and lower control arms. It's a paltry .5" in diameter. It was suggested that we need something like 1000 lb/in rate at the wheel. The stock Integra bar is closer to 15 lb/in.

Fortunately the front sway bar from a Jeep TJ is about the same length as the Integra bar. It's also 1-1/8" in diameter. Since torsional stiffness is related to diameter^4, the Jeep bar will be over 25 times stiffer than the Integra bar. Of course it's lever arm is also longer, so that reduces the rate by a square factor.

We couldn't find a place to make it fit underneath the car, so we mounted the bar to the cage and used some tubing to connect it to the wheel. I think we ended up with the right balance between hoopty and clever for LeMons.

Oops!

We were all ready to put the transmission back together when we had a scary realization: the LSD isn't going to fit. After doing a little research we discovered that the S80/Y80 transmissions had slightly different guts depending on whether they were bolted to a B18B (non-vtec) or a B18C (vtec). The B18C transmissions got a different final drive gear, pinion shaft and different bearings. The final drive gear is on a different bolt pattern than the B18B version, so we can't swap our final drive gear onto the B18C LSD.

We were basically left with three choices:
1) Put it all back together with the old diff and give up on our dream of LSD.
2) Buy a final drive gear and pinion shaft (~$800) and turn our transmission into a B18C version.
3) Get an OBX LSD (~$350) for the B18B and sell our B18C OEM LSD.

#1 is unacceptable after all this effort. #2 blows our budget. That leaves #3. We heard enough scary stuff about the OBX during our research that we went with the used OEM unit in the first place, but now it's looking like the only option.

Almost Famous

Murilee put us in his LeMons Legends post!




Link here!

LSD

So we've finally started to make some progress. We ordered a used limited slip from Japan on eBay. We were pleasantly surprised that it actually showed up.

We found some YouTube videos that make it look pretty easy to put in. The first video shows how to take the open diff out. The second shows how the limited slip differential goes in, and the third shows how to put the transmission back together.

Evans Tuning Video 1
Evans Tuning Video 2
Evans Tuning Video 3

So we pulled the motor out and got to work. While the motor is out we'll take the opportunity to modify the motor mounts. When we first put the motor in we noticed it came close to the front radius rods that run from the lower x-member to the lower links of the front suspension. Lowering the front x-member on spacers fixed the problem but created a new one. The reduced caster makes the car feel a bit more squirrely. Moving the motor up .5" will allow us to put the geometry back to stock.

Here's what the inside of our transmission looks like.

The videos are great, but they assume that you're doing the job right and not "the LeMons way". They used new bearings and bolts. We're going to use the old bearings and cross our fingers because we don't want to spend another $70. You'll notice that the old differential has sealed bearings and the LSD that came has tapered roller bearings. We'll need to press the bearings off and put them on the LSD without destrying them.

Mark also took the time to take the puny front anti-sway bar off. We need a stiff one at the rear to let our front tires have more grip. Hopefully we can find something off a bus.