About 6 months ago we had a new engineer start at work, a friendly guy who made his way around the office making introductions in his first week. When he got to my desk he noticed a photo of my Integra that I had behind my computer monitor and that led into a conversation about Hondas. As it turns out that he owns a couple of Hondas, a CRZ and a Civic, so we had the normal conversation that ensues when two car guys meet.
A couple of weeks later I noticed this super clean white civic sedan in the carpark.
I was half heartedly thinking about reshelling the parts from my DC2 into a sedan (for no other reason that I love super tourers) at the time and this car would be an ideal candidate.
I realised that the car belonged to the aftermentioned engineer and went and had another chat with him, turns out the civic was his first car.
He was proud to say that it’d always been run with Mobil 1 and cleaned weekly, I could tell that he was quite attached to the car and so I went away with the impression that he would not be open to a low cash offer for the car.
Fast forward to the start of April 2016 and said engineer comes up to me one morning and asks if i’d be interested in the civic, if not he was going to scrap the car.
Apparently he had been driving the car in the weekend and on his way back from the airport the crank pulley fell off. The car had been serviced by a local Honda dealer (who just changed the timing belt) but when he took the car back to them, they told him it was his problem and it wasn’t worth repairing (damaged the nose of the crank).
One of the Honda service techs offered him $100 for it!
I told him that i would give him a little more than that and give the car a new life as a track car, which he was happy with.
So the following weekend I hired a trailer and went and collected the car.
You’ll have to excuse the photos in this post, they’re all from my phone.
Right around the same time I moved into a new place with a double garage, all things considered this worked out perfectly as without the space I would have had to decline the EH.
The garage is wide enough that I was able to fit the Civic and Integra side by side and still have a little bench space.
I bought myself some work lights and started putting in the long hours to strip both cars, then clean the EH body and re-fit all the good bits into it.
Today was the day the DC2 went off to the wreckers.
I reinstalled the suspension and steering rack into this shell, it’s got the d series engine and gearbox in the engine bay and two cars worth of interior stuffed into it!
It’s been a long wait but on Wednesday I received my rear rims (RPF1 17″ x 8 +45) and this morning I had a pair of AD08R’s fitted.
Here’s how the EH sits.
http://i907.photobucket.com/albums/ac280/itsu-san/EH%20Build%20Thread/EH_on_RPF1s.jpg
The front wheels don’t fit at all with the front guards the way they are and at the height shown above the car would have no bump travel so there is still a ways to go preparing this chassis.
The B18c2 is out on an engine stand and over the next couple of months I will do some prep work on that before it gets re-installed.
– Grant
[irp posts=”1117″ name=”JTCC Inspired Civic Sedan Build 2: Touring Car Suspension and Custom Intake”]