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EDPO55 - ED sedan track hack

9K views 83 replies 11 participants last post by  EFB055 
#1 ·
Hi DSO,

Thought i'd post up the latest project i've been working on. A mate and me have always thought it'd be cool to get a cheap ED and go halvsies in a track car. The plan would be to strip most of the interior, add a bucket seat / harness, coilovers, EFI conversion and find a salvage car to pinch the running gear from.

Then this popped up:









140k kms, bit of paint fade and it'd been tapped in the rear but otherwise pretty original and straight. Also auto which isn't ideal, but my mate builds the EF'ED hydraulic clutch conversion kits so we weren't worried.

Picked it up a couple of days later.

 
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#2 · (Edited)
Literally the next week another sedan popped up for sale for basically nothing, manual, silver (mostly) and tapped in the front. Also it had a set of OEM alloys which i quite liked the look of and an OEM Honda Access lip spoiler which i think looks sick.

So went to go pick it up without seeing it in person and there was definitely a reason it was cheap haha. It literally felt like everything had been removed, broken and then tek screwed back on. But it starts perfect in all conditions which is rare for these twin carb setups, its manual, and the back end was straight.









Driving it home felt dodgy as, the indicators would only go on solid, the mirrors were all broken and the front end as you can see was barely hanging on. Also i was driving it with concessional registration so the car had no plates haha.

When i got it home i took the front end off and straightened it up a little to see if i could get it looking reasonable, as i was planning to drive it to my mates place where we're going to be working on them... Was actually pretty straight under all the ruined panels:





Anyway, drove it out to my mates place where we had to decide which shell to keep and which to scrap. Both had their perks.. One was manual, one was low kms, one wasn't mint coloured lol. We ended up deciding that we're going to keep 'Minty' and scrap the Silver Bullet.

 
#4 ·
Didn't have a huge amount of time, but we managed to swap the back end off the Silver Bullet onto minty. Also someone had vinyl wrapped the roof black because the paint was fading underneath, so we took that off because faded OEM paint>black vinyl roof





Also started stripping the bits of interior we're not going to need / audio etc. Found a family of cockroaches nesting behind the trunk liner :tank:



and that was about it. We've been keeping an eye on auctions for a salvage DC2/DC4 or CRV that we can pinch the motor from, and then a mate of mine offered me his old DOHC ZC. If any of you know me, i'm pretty partial to the old DOHC ZC haha, so we're going to go pick it up this weekend.



The goal is still to eventually go B series, but the DOHC ZC will get us out on track at least, and we get convert it to EFI / manual etc so we can be a bit more picky when waiting for the right salvage car to come through.

We'll be running with the trans from the Silver bullet, and because it's a SOHC box it wont have the equal length driveshafts which is a bit sucky, but probably wont be too bad.

More to come, but that's it for now!
 
#6 ·
Yeah it's super mint ... by colour haha.

Drove up and did a little parts swap, picked up the motor from a mate up north who's currently building a badass wagon which used to be a DOHC ZC, now a b18c, he just got it back from paint:



Then we head out to the wreckers to pick up a rear disc setup:



Looks rough, but with fresh rotors / pads / bushes it'll be sweet.

Check these beauties out:



By the time we actually got back, it was getting late and we only managed to spend about an hour actually wrenching. We started by stripping off the garbage panels off the front. Ideally we'll be sending this shell to the EF heavens ASAP.

If anyone chasing carby or RHD bits hit me up.



The motor didn't come with manifolds, but we'll just run the SOHC header, and luckily i had a spare DOHC manifold lying around. I spent a couple of hours piecing together all the sensors and cleaning it up:





Also picked up some buddyclubs for cheap:



Pretty surprised how light these wheels are with tyres. should make a good track wheel.

That's pretty much it for a couple of weeks.
 
#8 ·
So started working on the EFI conversion last weekend. I've got a PM7 to run that DOHC ZC on that was in my car before switching to Hondata.

I'm planning on unplugging the carby cabin harness from the ECU and running a harness that i make between the PM7 and the engine harness, and then splice in the couple of wires that need to connect back into the carby cabin harness.

Luckily enough, when i redid my cabin loom on my EF, i pulled all the wiring needed to run the motor out (depinned and didn't cut) so i began repinning the ECU plugs which i kept for my EFI sub harness.





This is why i don't throw stuff away! You never know when it'll come in handy haha.
 
#10 ·
Someone bought the parts shell for their own project, so we spent the weekend ripping in and removing all the bits we wanted to keep off it. Mainly all the parts we need for the manual conversion. I sold the car with the motor though, and we had to fab up a mount to keep the motor from flopping out of the car while it's getting towed to its new home:





Turned out sweet actually.

Once this thing is out of the yard we can start focusing on minty. We've already started accumulating a bunch of parts, so i'm keen to start getting it ready.
 
#13 ·
Had a big weekend on the pos, probably the last weekend we'll get to work on it before the new year... :|

It's also finally allowed into the shed now that the floors have been epoxied.. So much nicer than working in dirt haha.





As you can see, lots of typical scunge buildup







Quick degrease though and it came up mint!



Some comparo pics:









Also stripped out all the HVAC garbage that we don't need anymore:



I picked up a CRX dash that i had intended on putting into my EF, but i wasn't too happy with the condition of it, so i think it'll end up going into this... Pics to come in the new year, but we mocked it up and it looks SICK.



Our goal is to get the car under 900kg's/~2000lbs... They're apparently 950kg/2095lbs factory, but with the bigger DA brakes, bigger DOHC motor and swaybars i wonder if we'll be able to hit the target...
 
#14 ·
Not without Swiss cheesing it. Rear window regulators, crash beams, glass for lexan, rear firewall, speakers, radio, heater core, many ways to get 50kg out of it.

How did the BC Racing Coilovers work out?
 
#15 ·
They're installed but haven't driven on them yet. Keen to see how they perform though, i bought them second hand for a steal.

Everything under the dash will be gone, and if i can figure out a way to keep the rear windows up without the regulators i'll take those out too. Have considered running lexan rears, but i'd prefer to stick with the glass for now, and see where we're at in terms of weight. All the stereo is stripped, and will be lifting all the sound deadening too.

In the Honda workshop manual i've got it lists the factory weights for the different trim specs, apparently the lightest ED sedan sold tipped the scales at 875kg/1929lb!! That's ridiculous for a full interior road legal car. I know those things have tiny brakes, a half rad, a 1.2L single carb D series and manual everything, but still...

I'm hoping to pick up a DOHC ZC gearbox this weekend to make a short ratio box between that and the SOHC box we've got. Should liven it up!
 
#22 ·
Pretty decent weekend on the pos last weekend. We bought some dry ice and took up all the sound deadening:





It was hot AF, and we used about 4kg of the stuff. I also managed to accidentally lay on it at one point and now i look like i've been branded, lol. The floor came up great though:



We decided that we'd run the front half of the carpet so it didn't feel like a complete POS:





We weighed the insulation that we took out, and including the rear half of the carpet we removed a little over 5kg's. Which, tbh is more than i thought it would weigh. We're planning on running a harness too, so i removed the stock seatbelts which were a little over 1kg each and a couple of rear trim pieces which added up to a total of around 10kg.

We've got a seat lined up too from my mates yellow EG which some of you have probably seen from my build thread, but I didn't get a chance to grab it before i head over... So we'll probably work on fitting that next time.

Besides the insulation, we also finished up the motor so it's ready to get installed. This motor is a bit of a parts bin special, we're piecing it together from various bits and pieces i had left over from old motors and builds, so there's a couple of bits and pieces we had to fix to get it to run properly:

It's running an OBD1 intake manifold, and the TB is supposed to run an FITV, so i had to make a blanking plate to block the vacuum port:



The alternator was also OBD1 which means it runs a 4 rib pulley which would be fine because the back spacing is identical, but the clearance between the alt and the shock tower is tight in the ED chassis, so we swapped the pulleys over to the 3 rib pulley from the oem d15.

Checked and set the valve lash, which was pretty bang on and installed the PS pump which we ended up deciding on keeping.



We're not running any of the HVAC system behind the dash, so we welded the port closed from the Tstat housing to the heater core:



The hoist is mostly installed, still have a couple of bits to do on it, but hopefully next time it'll be finished off and we can get it up and sort out the fuel tank, because trying to sort it out on the floor sucks.

 
#27 ·
Couple of updates. Picked up a sparco seat that my mate had been using, shown here sitting on my workshop stool which makes it look like one of those tacky office chairs haha:



Also picked up this section to weld in to replace the auto trans tunnel section:



We had a couple of bits to rip off the DA first:



Then it was time to get the POS on the hoist:





My mate mark had been working on converting the carby fuel tank to EFI, the carb sedan tank doesn't have a built in swirl pot, or the hole for the fuel pump. So we cut out the hole, lasercut the flange you see here: and welded up a stainless swirl pot to lower the pump into:





While he was working on that i was working on installing the EFI engine harness which went fine, but it's just time consuming splicing everything into the factory cabin loom.

We installed the tank, and that was about it. Crazy how fast time can fly...
 
#30 ·
Had a decent weekend on it last weekend, we got the two transmissions apart and swapped the SOHC final drive into the DOHC box for a super short gear set which should liven things up a bit.





The inside of the box was actually super clean. I'm guessing it'd been apart before. Synchros looked ok, about the same as the SOHC box which i know shifted good.

Ended up getting bogged down on a couple of dumb things for a while. First off, we used a SOHC sump because the motor we're using didn't come with a sump, so we pinched one off the silver parts car. Now the header juuuust kisses the sump before the flange seats, so dumb:



As you can see, we tried shaving down the booger welds off the OEM manifold and it still kisses it. We'll probably try and cut/shut them back together to angle them slightly away from that side for clearance.

We also got a spare DOHC ZC donated to the cause by a mate who had it sitting around. It came with a DA1 gearbox (marked CG) which we're not going to use. Does anyone know anything about these boxes, or if they're useful for anything?





I took these pics if anyone is interested, it looks like it would bolt up to the 3rd gen ZC if you tapped the starter hole in the gearbox, and didn't feel bad about running 4 out of 5 bellhousing bolts, otherwise the dowels and other holes line up perfect:





Anyway, we got the motor in:



The SOHC powersteering hard line is bent from factory in such a way that it juuuuust wont mount onto the DOHC motor, the fitting is the same, but the line wants to occupy the same space as the powersteering bracket, so we had to mess around with that for a bit to get it to work. Eventually though it bolted up.

My mate mark also whipped up these sweet mounts for the factory rails:





Was really hoping to finish the harness off, but we ran out of time. Only managed to wire up the reverse lights which were missing because it's an auto chassis...

I feel like we're getting close though!
 
#35 ·
The "CG" trans can be made to work with the newer style motor. Bisi used to run one on his D15 powered CRX. A former member on here also took pics of it and was posted on RPR, Red Pepper Racing. We both dynoed our cars, on separate days, back in September 1998 @ Dave's Honda Haven in Memphis, TN.

(trying to jog my memory banks)
 
#37 ·
Our CRX's here all have the bigger diff L3 boxes, so i reckon i'll probably only be able to sell it to someone with a 3G civic or early DA. I doubt anyone else would be bothered to make it work in an EF. Pretty interesting that it could be used in a pinch though.

Both are also quite bad for spinal compression in an accident, but look nice.
Yeah i keep reading that, which is a shame because that would be the easy option!
 
#38 ·
Did some more POS'ing last weekend. We got it started briefly last time to confirm my EFI conversion harness was working OK, but there was no coolant in it at the time so we switched if off after running it for a few seconds. So i pulled all the wiring, made it a bit more presentable, reconnected everything, put coolant in, fired it up and it runs for about 10 seconds before falling on its face. Super annoying is that we only had about half hour to diagnose things, no codes, it's not the ECU, not the distributor, fuel pump is still running when it dies, and it's got fuel.

It makes me think that when you prime it, the rail has pressure, but then its just running off that pressure and dying... We've got a fuel pressure gauge we'll hook up and see what it says. Then i guess i'll do a continuity checkover on the engine harness... Anyone got any other ideas to throw out there?



Also added this RT4wd wagon to my fleet a couple of weeks ago, it's very tidy considering how old it is:







It's got a twin carb d15 in it, which is the same motor these all had over here. Unfortunately the idle controls systems in these are all getting old now and they're so complicated its not easy to diagnose issues with. The cold start is garbage. It was throwing a code for a MAP sensor which failed a bench test so i replaced that, it also threw a code for ignition signal which is common because there's an oil seal that is prone to leaking internally in these vac advance distributors. I cleaned it out and that code went away, but still it idles like garbage while it's warming up. So my options are, find a set of carbs that run ok for now or yolo and sink a couple of grand EFI converting it...

Still undecided yet!
 
#45 ·
It makes me think that when you prime it, the rail has pressure, but then its just running off that pressure and dying... We've got a fuel pressure gauge we'll hook up and see what it says. Then i guess i'll do a continuity checkover on the engine harness... Anyone got any other ideas to throw out there?
So we threw the fuel pressure gauge on, the feed line has pressure when it primed, and maintained pressure while it ran and died. I pulled the return off and we primed again, and the damn thing was dry. I figured we must've left on a protective cap or something in the fuel filter which was between the pressure gauge and the return line. We pull it apart and find that the banjo bolt that attaches to the end of the fuel rail was jam packed full of spiders and insect nests/eggs.









Pulled the rail and inspected the injectors to see if any stray crud had flowed through but it all looked good. Slapped it back together and it now runs mint!

What a dumb problem lol. Also had a visitor:

 
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