Chubbykai/TheNextEpisode : 1989 Honda CRX HF

[TheNextEpisode]

the car is coming along nicely man. love it. those rims were somewhat of an inspiration for the color i painted my rims

Dude... that's awesome. I feel honored.

looks freaking awesome!!!!!

Thanks man, we trying.

need to finish it and post more pics

I'll be keeping my eye on this build thread for sure. crxes are some of my favorite hondas ever made!

I apologize for my lethargy in updates, especially with this interest.
This is ridiculous, I've been lagging too much. Update tomorrow, finals be damned.

[Shadow1]

Dude... that's awesome. I feel honored.

glad you do man heres a pic. or at least the best pic i could find. someone else might have a better pic of it rolling too:



ive yet to see any other rims this color other than some BBS meshies on a VW and yours. so i like this scheme. i need to find another set of cheap rims tho. i keep wanting to repaint these. lol. but i dont want to get thru all of the trouble.

This is ridiculous, I've been lagging too much. Update tomorrow, finals be damned.

lol@finals. you got school work man. its all good. get to it when you can. i know school can be tiring.

[TheNextEpisode]

glad you do man heres a pic. or at least the best pic i could find. someone else might have a better pic of it rolling too:

ive yet to see any other rims this color other than some BBS meshies on a VW and yours. so i like this scheme. i need to find another set of cheap rims tho. i keep wanting to repaint these. lol. but i dont want to get thru all of the trouble.

lol@finals. you got school work man. its all good. get to it when you can. i know school can be tiring.

After you mentioned your rims, I checked out your member's ride page and saw that picture. Very cool

And yeah, I haven't really seen that color before getting the rims that we did. Elite stuff.


Taking a break from studying right now, I'll start writing the next installment, probably in two parts again.
Keep an eye out!

[TheNextEpisode]

The EX knuckle brake mounting tabs are further out from the center of the hub compared to the HF knuckles. This is great for any kind of brake upgrade, but is terrible for anyone stupid enough to run HF brakes on EX knuckes.

We were stupid enough to try it.

The farther out mounting tabs on the EX knuckles means the HF calipers are positioned further out than normal. This means that about half of the HF brake pad hits the HF rotor, while the other half of the pad hangs off over the edge of the small HF rotors. Also, the calipers were a little too far outboard (as in low offset, for a rim), so we spaced the calipers inboard a bit with washers.

DON’T EVER RUN HF BRAKES ON EX KNUCKLES.

We did it, and looking back on it, I don’t know why we did. It is SO dangerous. Fortunately, Jon (chubbykai) was the only one to drive the car a long distance with that brake set up, so if disaster did strike, we wouldn’t have lost much.

That long drive was the trip from Jon’s Holiday Inn garage to my hovel-garage. We drove over to a muffer shop near my house and had them weld the sway bar brackets next to the rear LCA pivot point. The sway bar’s not coming off, so we didn’t see the point of using small bolts to attach it.





At this point, the BAR emissions tests had been temporarily banned in California. For that reason, we decided to forego the smog and BAR legal F22 swap and just go straight for the H22 swap. The weezing D15 had to come out first, though.







We actually used the F22 removal guide that cp[mike] posted on this forum. Everything went smoothly, with the shifter linkage being the only real difference. It was also nice not to have to deal with power steering, cruise control, and air conditioning.





The catalytic converter/downpipe piece still makes me laugh. Honda really did everything they could to reduce weight, and the increased exhaust temps in the cat certainly don’t hurt. The old axles were also of no further value to us.





Pretty much ready to be yanked.

At this point, we were ready to get the D15 out and the H22 in. The H22 was still in the accord, though. The H22/F22 transfer to the Accord would have to happen first. As this was a good time to clean the F22, we did.













I also purchased new intake manifold gaskets, which we replaced. That finally killed the lopey idle I had been dealing with for the previous 4 years. I was ecstatic.

We then pulled the D15. To be honest, it’s been a while since it happened, so I can’t really recall if we had any snags. I’m pretty sure it went smoothly, so I’ll just say that we skillfully pulled it without a hitch.








Getting more cluttered, but there’s a diamond in the rough. Axis RacerX rims. Woooo!
Also, Falken Azenis RT615s. Woooo!

Continued

[TheNextEpisode]

Continued










I apologize to the car for the solder, chubby takes no blame on that. It was ridiculous. We were removing the immobilizer relay from the old alarm system when I made that piece of… art. Heat shrink has covered all my previous bad solders, and it covered this one, too.

Foreseeing the H22 swap, I grabbed an F22 half shaft and shifter assembly at the j-yard. We also got the ESP H22 mount kit and front crossmember in the mail, which we had ordered unpainted. The paint booth went up and the Delfleet was once again broken out.





In order to compensate for the different shifter bucket, Jon started cutting up the center console. With some luck, we hoped to reattach most of the plastic and hide the sharp edges.







Became:







At this point, I pressed in the EX hubs and Jon started washing the engine bay. The HF hubs were useless now, we would never use the HF axles again.











It’s pretty apparent at what point dinner was served and Jon went up to the house.


I think I’ll end it here. I'll write more notes shortly, but the Laker game is starting right now. The next installment will be more meat on the H-swap preparation, as well as the front brake install.

[93F22A6]

Looking good. Really like those rims.

[Shadow1]

so the F is going in the accord and the H in the CRX?

[TheNextEpisode]

Looking good. Really like those rims.

Thanks!

so the F is going in the accord and the H in the CRX?

Yessir. Here's an old related thread.

[TheNextEpisode]

I'll start writing the next installment now.

With some luck, it'll be up later tonight.
With more luck, it'll be intelligible.

With no luck, I'll fall asleep and post something tomorrow.

[TheNextEpisode]

Here we go.

The ESP H22 mount kit uses the OEM driver’s side chassis mount. The driver's side engine mount is dimensionally different and is included in the kit, but the way it bolts up to the engine and to the chassis mount is the same as OEM. The firewall chassis and engine mount are similar to the OEM pieces, but are again slightly different in dimension. ESP provided a new chassis mount and engine mount for that location. The passenger side transmission mount is fairly similar to stock, but the passenger side chassis mount is totally different. This is where ESP makes up for the size difference between the D15 and the F/H22.




That whole unit had to go.








Construction tools were meant for engine bays.








And done.

With that ready, the next logical step would be to lower the engine into the bay and mock up the location for the new passenger side chassis mount. But, we had some down time as the H22 was still in the Accord.

In the process of looking for something else in the j-yard, we optimistically picked up a pair of Acura Legend sedan front brake calipers. We got the calipers, brackets, pads, and lines for 28 bones. The discs were unusable as Legends are 5 lug.




Without those brake discs, though, we had no guaranteed way of finding out if the brakes would fit. We went out on a limb and ordered custom re-drilled Prelude VTEC rotors. The Prelude VTEC rotors are pretty much the same as the Legend rotors, except that they’re four lug rotors, rather than five. That meant there was a lot more room for the four new 4x100 lug holes on the rotors. We ordered the rotors from R1 Concepts, complete with slots and dots.







The suckers are HUGE. As impossible as their size made the swap seem, the impossibility of the swap made it all the more enticing.



Versus stock





We were expectedly ecstatic when everything at least bolted up. We continued the mock up though, only to realize that the caliper bumped up against the spokes and outer cylinder of the rim.

The necessary grinding began soon after. After completing the modifications required to get the first caliper in and spinning freely, I broke the camera out and took procedural pictures. More on that in the next post.

[TheNextEpisode]

With the proof of concept lying in the completed driver’s side brake, I moved on to the passenger side.

Starting with before and after pictures:





You can see how the outer N on Nissin, as well as several other letters, was completely ground off. This means that while most of the exposed caliper has to be ground down, the deepest grind is barely a couple millimeters deep.


The brackets





You can see that before grinding, there were several distinct mountains and valleys. Those are knocked off to a height a tiny bit lower than the lowest preexisting point on the bracket. By a tiny, I mean just a couple passes with the grinder.

Also, that surface doesn't have to be perfectly square, since that side of the bracket does not make contact with anything. It's the side that stays just inboard of the disc brake.



That little annoying point was positioned just right to require a 7” angle grinder. The rest was done with a 4” grinder.


I don't know why, but I don't have pictures of the grinding on the other side of the caliper bracket. It's almost exactly the same as the side pictured, except that the lowest point that I ground to was the same height as the lowest preexisting point. In other words, I left the low point alone and ground the rest of the bracket down to that point. I also made sure that the ground surface was square to the rest of the caliper, since that was the surface of the bracket that contacted the knuckle.




The caliper bracket mounting bolt has to be shaved down a bit. It's shaved down in order to clear the thicker disc. If it's not shortened, it'll crash into the back of the disc, pushing the disc out into the caliper bracket.

Bolt shortener:




Little tip, if you grind the bolt down, try to put a little bevel on the tip of the bolt so its got sort of a point on it. This will help when you try to thread the bolt in for the first time. You can see how I tried to match the stock bolt's tip on the one I shortened.




I checked my bracket and bolt grinding constantly to avoid grinding too much off. I eventually got lucky.






I then moved on to the outer part of the bracket. This part went much quicker, as the grinding can be done with the bracket on the car. That made checking a lot easier.



Now that the rim was spinning freely, any further dragging would only be due to the caliper. I attached the caliper and started grinding.



Ground the hell out of that, interrupted by periodic checks.



And done.



And the reward.






For people interested in doing this, it’s pretty tedious, but don't give up. Also, be weary of grinding too far. Think about where you’re grinding, and whether or not it’s safe to grind there. If you’re using the Prelude rotor like us, make sure the disc you get is a Prelude VTEC rotor. The Si and S trims have VERY different rotors. Also, the Prelude VTEC rotors have the same thickness as Legend SEDAN rotors. I don't know what'll happen if you use Legend COUPE calipers with the Prelude VTEC rotors. Probably no big deal though, the pads will have to come in roughly 4 more millimeters to clamp the thinner Prelude VTEC rotors.

Again, we got ours from R1 concepts. Some dude named James helped us.

Also, don't breathe. Pretty much ever.
Ground up brake dust and rust is nasty. Enough of it will get up your nose that everything will smell and taste like metal for a couple days.


Here's what I used for a rig at the beginning. Towards the end, all the grinding happens on the car.



With that in mind, have at it. Legend calipers can be had cheaply.

[Tnwagn]

Very nice build man!

Makes me want to get a CRX

[semitas]

dag man, when you have time, space and parents that cooperate, you can do almost anything


nice build man

[Father Time]

Wow, the work put in so far is AWESOME! You guys are doing really nice work. Keep it up. I want to see what this Rex looks like done!

[Shadow1]

dag man. looking good