1991 Accord LX Race Car

[ukemike]

My ebay exhaust manifold does not fit. It extends about 4" past the start of my exhaust pipe. I am not blaming the exhaust manifold maker. When we last worked on our exhuast, which was a long while ago, our muffler guy may have modified our 2-1 pipe to match what he put on the exhaust. The current exhaust pipe has a 2 hole flange and our downpipe has a 3 hole flange. I think these Honda 3 hole flanges are not symmetrical, not a equilateral triangle, but maybe an isosceles triangle.

So I need a 3 hole bracket and I need to cut and shorten the exhaust pipe. Anyone have any ideas about where I could get a matching bracket? Should I just buy some 1/4" steel plate and make one? Ugh.

... a few days later ...

Nevermind, I went to a muffler shop with the gasket that came with the header kit and asked for a flange that matched. They gave me one.

[ukemike]

The race is in 2 weeks!!! I'm not putting the header on. Thunderhill has a few very high speed corners. Turn 1 with no traffic might just be a no lift corner in 5th, but I've never had the guts to not at least lift before my turn in. So I've built a splitter. The old 91 accord had a splitter and a spoiler, but since we transplanted almost everything from that one to this one, no aero. Thunderhill is a place that can reward aero. Last time I had a 6" splitter and a 4" spoiler. This time I'm trying a 8" splitter and a 12" polycarbonate rear spoiler. Still waiting for the polycarb to show up. But the splitter is 90%. It actually bolts into factory captive nut locations.

[ukemike]

Top 100 :-(


Actually this race counts as a big win. I had a pretty good drive first thing Saturday morning, but after that our intermittent power cutoff plagued us. My fast was about 3:55.

Dennis went second and had some fuel cutoff but managed it with short shifting. Jason went third and was fast as usual recording a 3:46.2.

We had a guest driver, Ivan, a friend of Jason's. He drove last on Saturday. He had lots of power cut out AND he got hit which destroyed our right front wheel bearing. It was late so we couldn't make it to the Pick and Pull in Chico before they closed. I liked Ivan because he was humble and obviously was trying to take it easy on the car. I completely believe that the hit he took was not his fault. He's also 36 and going back to school to study aerospace engineering. I think that takes courage. He was avoiding someone who spun in front of him and some idiot in a Miata tagged him.

Ewan and I drove into Chico Sunday morning and were waiting at the pick n pull at 8 when they opened. We brought most of our tools in the trunk, but in the lot we thought out every step of the planned knuckle removal and put the needed tools in a bag so we didn't have to bring 150lbs of tool boxes in with us. We were the second group in and were followed by another lemons person. We were concerned that maybe the lower ball joint may have been damaged too so we were going to get the whole knuckle, hub and all. There were four Acura CLs of the right vintage for the part we needed. The first three we looked at were the old setup with the hub over rotor. The last one luckily was a four lug rotor over hub, so we dove in and got the knuckle off. There are three tricky parts, these CLs usually had locking nuts, the always rusted in rotor screws, and the axle nut. None of these still had wheels on, so no locking lugs, the rotor set screws eventually yielded to my manual impact driver and wd40, and the axle nut was not especially tight. Ewan got it off with strength alone, usually we have to stand and bounce on the end of a 4' cheater bar. So we bought it (50% off for Memorial day weekend) and drove quickly back to Willows where we collected Lara and headed for the track. We got there just after 9 and started installing it. This should have been a 5-10 minute operation, but one of the studs on the "new" hub was apparently buggered and once we had it all on the lug nut got stuck and that stud started spinning so we couldn't get it on or off. More wd40 and lots of the electric impact gun back and forth eventually got the lug nut off. Then we had to get the stud out which required cutting up the heat shield that we couldn't take off without a time consuming operation. New stud in, brakes, and wheel back on, and we sent out Ivan again. Heroic effort and success got him on the track with just over an hour of lost time.

The night before we had puzzled through several things trying to fix the power loss issue. Unfortunately none of it worked and it was back with a vengeance. Ivan only got another 6 laps and came in after most of a 5 mile lap limping along. We spent most of the rest of the day working on it. We had found a spark plug wire was not staying firmly in place, but that would cause different symptoms. We took off the valve cover and climbed on top of the engine to look in the hole. There was something different looking. I fished around in there with a hook and guess what came out... the crush washer from a spark plug! As I got it out it fell off and landed in the oil pool under the camshaft, so another 15 minutes of fishing for it and I finally found it and got it out. After that we put the plug back in and at least that was solved. After each of our attempted fixes we'd send Ivan out and he come in 2 laps later, still cutting out. Eventually he said he didn't want to do that again.

Then I had an embarrassing idea. The aftermarket tachometer takes it's signal from the coil signal wire. What if something about that was to blame. I sat down and searched through this blog to see if I had installed the tach just before Laguna Seca. Independent of that Ewan found my spliced in signal wire had melty insulation.

So I just cut that wire and secured it and we sent Jason out. At this point there was only about an hour and 15 minutes left in the race. Jason stayed out there and it appeared it was working. He kept going around and almost beat his fast time from the day before. Jason came in because he had contact with another car and got a black flag. The contact was minor and barely left a mark on our car. So we put Ivan back in since he still hadn't had a full stint yet. He went out and brought us home to the finish! Even then about half that time was under full course yellow. Ivan had terrible luck. We finished around 90th place. Ivan got us 2 places back in that last half hour.

https://youtu.be/KBuXkXPLWqU

So our power cut off issue turned out to be my janky wiring of out aftermarket tachometer, which proves one thing without a doubt. I'm a mechanical engineer not an electrical engineer.

We all agreed that the handling was a bit odd with a slight pause after turn in before it hooked up. We ditched the aero after day 1 but it still did it. It might be because we have hard bushings up front and old soft ones in the back. So I'll work on some solutions for that before December at Sonoma.

[Raf99]

Thanks. Can't say I've ever seen a spark plug crush washer come off before. You using an impact to change plugs :P & yaa if the tach was not grounded, or other issues, you are stealing spark away from the distributor. Good find though! You must consider that the back window of this car is a sail right? Can you take it out ? (Add plastic w/ holes)

[That_Wood_CB7]

I won't be getting to it any time soon but I'm curious how the Delta 262 worked for you in the last race. Did you have any sort of fuel management or chip tune for it? I've seen people recommend the 272 but with the caveat that you should have it tuned.

Edit: and 3:46 is FAST! My best in the Junk Ranger was a 3:48 and I was on the ragged edge that lap.

[ukemike]

I chose the 262 because it can be used without a tune using the f22a6 ECU. Getting a custom tune on one of these is not trivial and add to that difficulty the hassle of getting an unregisterable car to a tuner shop... I'd have to rent the whole Uhaul getup that I use for each race.

I believe that the cam gave us a bit more power. My only objective data that supports this is that there were fewer cars passing us at the last race. I'm guessing we are in the neighborhood of 150hp. We can totally race with the 944s now. (I used to have a 944 and they had 150hp until the S and the Turbo)

edit:
I should add that the folks at Delta were responsive and pleasant.

[ukemike]

Race this weekend. There will be a few things different. The weather forcast is looking like rain most of the weekend, so I've been scrambling to get the wipers and squirters working, and will be installing a cheap aftermarket defroster blower. I'm a bit nervous. I've never raced in the rain. Also my son Ewan will be driving with us this time. It'll be his first full race, he drove one stint last year at thunderhill. I'll have a nice race summary after it's all over.

[Domesticated]

Racing in the rain is a blast! Other than the racing line being water depth dependent, just be more cautious and remember things happen slower.

[ukemike]

Racing in the rain was off the hook. It was sooooooo slippery but after a while you start to find grip in weird off line locations. Our FWD combined with the LSD made us unbeatable coming out of corners. I was laying down power and pulling away when the RWD cars were still fishtailing and waiting to get completely straight before getting on the gas. he coolest part of the race was that my son, in his Sonoma debut and only his second race, got the team fastest lap, because he got the driest conditions, but at the time he did it he had the 21st fastest fast lap of anyone there out of 120 cars! BUT we wrecked our trans. It stopped going into 3rd and 4th sunday afternoon. And we found it basically empty of fluid though I topped it off myself less than 6 days ago. So the main reason I am here is to find my post about our trans swap so I can start shopping for a replacement of the same type.

[SaddleMtnMan]

I just found this thread a couple days ago, and damn what an amazing read. I wish I had the resources to race like that! Lots of good info here.

[ukemike]

So I found an m2f4 transmission locally and I went and bought it. I've just bought a synchrotech rebuild kit. I've got to remove the trans from our car, crack both open, extract the LSD from the old one and inspect it, get it in the new trans, replace any worn parts in the new one, and get it back in the car in time for a race in late February. It's going to be an epic race at Thunderhill. They're going to do the 5 mile track IN REVERSE saturday, then the 3 mile course normal direction sunday morning, and in reverse sunday afternoon. Three tracks, one weekend!

[ukemike]

I've rebuilt the m2f4 trans, 99%. But I cannot get the bearing on the top of the secondary shaft to click into the snap ring. I'm pretty sure it's lined up and all. I've turned it over and dropped the whole thing on the pointy end of the case hoping to move that shaft into place but no love yet.

Any suggestions? I'm about ready to crack it open again and see if I assembled that secondary shaft wrong. Maybe next time I should get the bearing snapped into place first then put the case on?

[Raf99]

You're doing it right (most times i dont need to 'drop its on its head') but sometimes you have to shift it iln neutral. And... sometimes it just doesn't want to go. Oh, and if you can't turn the gears freely something is bound up... you're forcing it at this point. Take it apart. Try to get the back of the snap ring in first then use screw driver to get the front in (while Trans is at some weird angle about to crush your finger / toe...). The case should go back on non-forcefully ...

[ukemike]

You're doing it right (most times i dont need to 'drop its on its head') but sometimes you have to shift it iln neutral. And... sometimes it just doesn't want to go. Oh, and if you can't turn the gears freely something is bound up... you're forcing it at this point. Take it apart. Try to get the back of the snap ring in first then use screw driver to get the front in (while Trans is at some weird angle about to crush your finger / toe...). The case should go back on non-forcefully ...

It does turn freely and all the gears click into place. I've tried a dozen things with the bell housing up and with it down. Nothing I do can get it to move that last mm so the ring will snap in. I'm considering taking it apart again (I'm getting very good at cleaning off rtv) and putting the shafts into the case first and getting the ring to snap in, then put the "bottom" or the bellhousing side on last. But now that I think about it I'm sure I couldn't keep the diff in place. So maybe if I put the two stacks in the case and then lowered it onto the 'bottom' trying to get it all to line up. Maybe if I just try to get the secondary shaft in alone I'll see what is keeping it from moving enough to click in. Been stuck at this point for a week now. grrrrr.

[Raf99]

OK ya.. I've only ever done it one way. That's having the master shaft / counter shaft (MS / CS) already in the case, on the table with that stupid .... metal centring thing on the top barely sitting there. Then I lower the bell housing down over top of everything, carefully trying to knock off that metal thing that sits on top of the shaft. Once I get that.... in the proper spot then the case is about 1/2" from dropping down. Then it's just a matter of wiggle / wiggle. It goes on easy.

OH..... do you have a bearing on backwards?
Is the bearing dropping into the groove where the clip also sits? (see below). If the bearing is on the wrong way I don't think it slides in to the end of the case proper.
Also too, I have taken a screw driver to manipulate the baring into place. But have to roll the trans around a bit to get the weight to release to the other side.