Vtecmec's 4th Gen

[Vtecmec]

It's been a while since the last update, so probably worth some words and pics.

I'd had a longstanding niggle with vibration at 40-60 mph for quite a while, after going through everything I finally thought that I'd not replaced the radius rod bushings, the original ones looked ok but it was worth a shot.

I replaced them with hard race uprated replacements, OEM's were not available and they don't seem well suited to poly bush aftermarket replacements.



Anyway, the replacements did the job and the vibration issue was finally sorted.

And that was pretty much last year. Bought a nice indoor cover for it and stashed away in the garage until 2021.





Let's hope 2021 is better than 2020 on multiple fronts.....

So come the spring of this year and a small issue that had been bugging me was the very slow speed behavior. Getting the throttle to roll on gently was proving problematic, making the car uncomfortable in car parks and round slow speed corners.

One thing I tried was to play around with various throttle wheels, the one on the left is standard, the one in the middle off the skunk2 and the one on the right is an aftermarket one for some other car (cant remember what).



Using the one on the right made a bit of a difference, though it messed with the pedal travel, so I could only get 70% with the foot right down, so back to the drawing board.

Next thing I tried was a new TPS sensor, with the thought that the fidelity of the one I had being flakey and possibly the problem. So I went out and spunked good money on one made by Blox. Disappointingly, it made no difference, indeed, it seemed to be a rebadged cheap one that can be had off eBay. To add insult to injury, it failed after 6 months.

Still thinking that it could be throttle body causing the low speed issues, I dragged out a standard 62mm ATR that I had in storage, swapped it over and the difference was night and day. Seems like the 70mm is too big for the little old 2.2 engine and just cant open slowly enough at low revs.

Anecdotally, the ATR 62mm throttle wheel is eccentric in its design, I can only think Honda did this to improve low speed driveability, which asserts the assumption that 70mm is probably too big for the 2.2 engine.

So pretty much sorted mechanically, though I have found that the gearing is a little low for the power available, I'd built the gearbox with an NA build in mind, but subsiquently gone off on a turbo tangent.

With this in mind I swapped out the gearbox for something with longer gears and also threw a new clutch in for good measure.




With the mechanics effectively done, I switched my attention to the aesthetics, namely the rims.

I wanted something period specific and clearly JDM in nature. Sadly 4x114 wheels are relatively hard to come by these days.

After searching various forums, I cam across a pair of Blitz 01's for sale on Driftworks, sadly only a pair but only an hour from home and a snip at £200.

I took the punt, bought them and set searching for another pair. Amazingly just the day after I collected, I spotted a pair for sale on Yahoo Japan auctions, so I placve a bid and won them for the princley sum of £130! Though it cost me more to have them shipped across.

A trial fitting of the Lincolnshire set:



When the other pair arrived, I whipped off the bolts and sent them off for powder coating:



They came back 2 months (I know.....) later looking rather smart when reunited with the 160 original bolts that I painstakingly hand polished.



A shot of them on the car just before I sorted the ride height...



So thats the looks, the car does need a repaint really though, so the plan is to enjoy for the rest of the year, go to a few shows and then have someone repaint it over the winter ready for some minty prelude goodness next year.

Then about a month ago I went for a spin to the post office, a 10 mile spin via some nice A roads, about halfway back the cabin suddenly started filling with smoke, and then I saw a lick of flame from the bonnet.

Err...

So I quickly pulled over, grabbed a fire extinguisher (bought only 2 weeks earlier), and opened the bonnet to a huge fireball filled engine bay.....

I managed to get it out, just, but it's done some serious damage..







The morning after...



And after a clean, still not great.







Thats all folks.

[toadster]

So sorry to see this
Hope it's not too much damage.
All the best with fixing
Cheers
Toadster

[RattyMcClelland]

Interesting about the throttle body. This bugs me.
The car jerks on and off throttle. It's doesn't roll of when you release the throttle, jerks at low speed and it's very much on or off. I's hard to judge, mixed with the skunk 2 pro2 cams that need to hold a rich a/f below 3k to stay afloat. Mine is a 68mm spunk2.

[Vtecmec]

This bugs me.

Yes, it bugged me too. Might be worth playing with a smaller throttle body for the day to see how it goes.

[vanzep]

Truly gutted for you
I know you do all the work yourself so it must be really hard to bear....
Stick with it and things will come around
On a positive note the wheels look good as does the new car cover
Guess its too early to say what caused the fire
I am more than willing to help out with any spare parts you might need to put things right - i do have a lot of parts and phantom grey stuff So dont hesitate to pm a list of what you require.
62-65mm tb ftw

[Scott560]

That must be gutting - but everything is fixable. Any ideas on how it happened?

[Vtecmec]

So the morning after I cleaned up the general area with a hose pipe and some marigolds.

The extent of the damage was actually worse than it initially looked.

The heat had whipped down under the intake and take out much stuff from down there too.







The bonnet took a battering too:



From what I gather, the oil feed to the turbo seems to have failed due to being so close to the heat of the manifold, this then sprayed a nice mist of oil which ignited, this then flicked over the rocker cover and added the fuel lines to the equation, which then obviously made everything rather messy.

[Drax]

wow what an update, i really miss these kind of threads they are rare to be done here now so thank you Vtecmec!! but also very sorry to hear about the fire - looks sortable though.

interesting about swapping the bushes for poly ones to sort the vibration, i'll have to remember that as i've not plunged into uprated ones yet.

that car cover is a beautiful fit though

quite a few people have mentioned over the years how a 70mm TB is too much and that a 68 is the max these should run without any issues.

loving those new wheels!! i seem to recognise them from another lude ive seen with them on - may have been in a scrapyard many years ago haha i got caught out big time when i purchased my wheels from Yahoo Japan auction on the shipping costs! it was worth it as i love them but the price at the time was

im guessing you'll need a new engine loom to sort that lot for a start though

[Drax]

if you start to make a list of various parts, wiring, hoses etc that you need post it up as a stock quite a few of these items!!

[Vtecmec]

Thanks @vanzep , @Drax and @wurlycorner for the offer of parts for this, though I might be almost there...

Not to worry about all this though. Best to use this as an opportunity to build on the experiene gained from first time round.

So I walked the car with a clip board and wrote down all the things that probably needed replacing, turned out to fill 2 sides of A4 paper!

Turns out it needed the following:

MAP Sensor
Ignition Leads
Dizzy
Rocker Cover Gasket
Full EngineWiring Loom
Turbo
Oil Feed Line
Oil Return Line
Vacuum Hoses Throughout
Fuel Lines
TPS Sensor
BOV
PCV
PCV Grommet
Brake Booster Valve
Accelerator Cable
IAT Sensor
IACV
Wideband Cables
Firewall Sound Deadening
Alternator
Heater Solenoid Valve
Rad Cap
Battery Earth Connector
U Bend Hose Intake to Brake Booster

Plus lots of various clips, fittings and so forth


Then I spent a morning like Mike Brewer and set sourcing all the bits. Some I already had spares of so not too bad there.

Then I stripped all the bad stuff away, leaving:



I took the opportunity to adjust the valve clearances when I did the rocker cover.




Intake manifold, yum yum:






I am also in the middle of demolishing some parts of the house, so was able to make use of the spaces for painting:



I fitted a non vtec wiring loom to the car (all I could source quickly) and went about adding what was needed before fitting back in the car.

I found a nice new strut brace online which looks like it'll do the job nicely, the old one was saveable but not the best design and probably not worth the effort:





You can probably see that I've swapped to a log manifold, this will result in a neater setup, allow me to use the standard Prelude radiator and with a bit of luck allow for the reintroduction of air conditioning.

And on that note I also obtained some new parts for the air con:



So thats how it currently sits, waiting on parts to arrive in the post......