Finally got around to fabricating the pin-style rally jack stands for the Civic.

Unlike most rally jack stands, these are adjustable height, which allows us to get the car up high in the shop, but lower when servicing in the field. The t-handle shoulder pins were sourced form from McMaster-Carr.

Overall the stands turned out pretty well, but I’d do them a bit differently we were to do it again.  First and foremost, I’d use round DOM tubing for the adjusters for one (square has a bit of slop and took a lot of time to get to slide properly). I’d also reconsider doing a tripod-style setup rather than a triangle, to help with the stability–and indeed we may end modifying these ones.

The gallery also contains some photos of a modified Bilstein “Monkey In A Tree” VW/Porsche jack that has been converted to use the pin and socket setup. We’ll be replacing the original bar (tree?) with a taller unit, and putting a wider base for better stability on soft surfaces.

View the complete gallery

I am selling a bunch of motorcycle stuff that I’ve accumulated over the years.  Email me if you’re interested in anything!

Dainese Ducati Sport Womens Jacket, Size 52

Very lightly worn

Retails for $500

Would fit a man, roughly size M

$200

Fieldsheer Mach 1 Mesh Jacket, Size XXL

Bought this for a trip to Thailand, but is too small.

Says XXL but fits really, really tight. I wear XL or XXL riding jackets, suit jacket 48 but this is too tight for me. I think it is supposed to fit tight, but even so would say its probably more like a Large or XL.

Has CE approved armor on back, elbows. Really nice warm weather jacket.

$70

Arai Signet GT Helmet - L

Came with a bike, too small for me.

Fits tight, not designed for folks that have round heads

Really, really nice helmet, is too nice for a guest rider helmet

$180

“Bike In Action” Leather Riding Pants Size 52

Very lightly worn

$75

Last year Evan Herling of 360 Imports and I went to a new kind of motorsports event: Professional Auto Barell Racing.  It ended up being a bit of a goofy experience–kinda a combination of drag racing and drifting.  More of a show than a competition.

Anyway, posted a small gallery of Evan’s EG Civic from the event, shortly before he started shoehorning a J32A2 V6 into it. Car handled great!

If I ever go to another one of the events to compete I’ll probably bring a tweaked version of one of our rally cars–will try to give everyone a heads up before we do it!

Okay, well we made a fair bit of progress on the green Z600. We’ve refurbished all the brakes, rebuilt the fuel tank.

The fuel system was in pretty bad shape. The fuel tank itself was dry, but full of probably 8-10 cups of ‘crud/dirt’. We’ve done this before on the N600–and I remembered that leaning/repairing fuel tanks is a messy and time consuming task. This time I outsourced the cleaning of it to a local shop. We etched the tank and poured in the sealant, reinstalled in the car. When testing it we discovered that although the fuel pickup tube was clear, it wasn’t picking up fuel. We filled the tank and discovered that only the first 1 gallon would get picked up–our pickup tube was rusted right at the very top!

So we had to take the tank out again. We weren’t looking forward to redoing the sealant and were concerned about the safety welding the tank. So we fabricated a pickup tube / patch that could be riveted on with sealed blind rivets and epoxied in place. All we had to do was drill out and remove the old tube, and rivet/glue on the new patch. Fuel system works great now!

The brakes were in pretty bad shape, we ended up having to rebuild or refurbish essentially the entire system. Both the rear slave cylinders, both front cylinders and the master cylinder and the front brake lines (lines were seized when we rebuilt the MC), rotors, front pads, rear shoes all needed work or replacement.. Did not cost a who lot, but took a fair bit of time and some specialized tools.

After we got everything finished up and bled the brakes, we fired it up to take the car on it’s first drive in over 20 year. Went to pull the car out of the shop and it wouldn’t budge. I knew that the car was capable of self-propulsion, as we have moved it in and out of the shop on several occasions (with no brakes–interesting times). Initially, I figured we must have incorrectly adjusted the rear brakes.

Turned off car, started checking the brakes–all four wheels seemed to be freely movable. After a minute of head scratching, got back in the car and it wouldn’t move again. At this point we realized that it it only locks up the front brakes when the motor was running–had to be the vacuum operated booster. So we disconnected booster, plugged line from motor. Problem solved, car now freely moves (and stops!) under it’s own power.

Hopefully we can get the booster fixed, although a lot of folks drive the cars with the boosters bypassed or disabled. I’d prefer to get it working–or perhaps we’ll just have to retrofit a larger master cylinder.

On the way back from the test drive around the block, the car started to sputter and backfire. Naturally it wouldn’t start. We re-adjusted the points and it seemed to fire right back up and run properly.
Didn’t have time to do another full test drive, but pretty sure that was it. Think I’m going to that electrical/optical system and get rid of the points.

When we first got the car it seemed to have an exhaust system. That is if you look at the exhaust manifold it had a pipe going towards the back of the car. Further inspection revealed that the exhaust pipe only extended about 6 inches from the header and then simply ceased to exist.

So we’ve started fabricating a new custom exhaust system. Hopefully once we get it finished we’ll be able have a full system bent up for us (which we may be able to provide to other owners). Finding mufflers with 1.75″ inlets and outlets is actually kind of difficult. Frankly there isn’t a lot of space to put a muffler so it has to be rather small to begin with.

We’ve got collector plates already for the car, so hopefully after the exhaust system is complete, we’ll be able to drive it around town.

Next step is to fix the rust, prepare the car for a fresh coat of paint. We’ll simultaneously be working on restoring the interior–recovering the seats, replacing the headliner and fabricating a new carpet. The project continues.

Brake / Fuel System Rebuild Gallery

Z600 Gallery

K&K (52)

Originally uploaded by Auto Otaku

There is a great photo gallery on Flickr from the K&K Clubman Meeting in Japan. Great vintage Japanese racers.

Full photo set @ Flickr

Article/Blog Post at Auto Otuku

I’ve posted the stage times and analysis of the 2008 Mt Hood Rally.  This is actually a first for us in that Mt Hood had a RallyMoto event for motorcyclists.  We’ve posted the results of both events separately as well as combined:

Mt Hood Rally Regional Rally
Mt Hood RallyMoto Regional Rally
Mt Hood Rally Combined Regional Rally

For additional rally stage times and analsys see our Rally Database at http://fatboyraceworks.com/rally/

We’ve been concentrating on the Rally program lately, evidence of this is that the last time we raced the CRX was in late 2006 (I think) at ICSCC event at Mission Raceway in BC. We had a problem with the oiling/cooling system on the B16A and ended up melting a piston and DNFing.

In anticipation of being able to run the car again eventually, one weekend while we had some downtime, we were able to install a new B16A into the CRX. We took the opportunity to plumb in a 2 quart Accusump, to help with oil starvation issues under the high cornering loads that the car sees.

Other subsystems of the car will be undergoing upgrades shortly: we’ll be installing a spherical bearing rear lower control arm setup and a NSX big brake upgrade that we purchased from the C-Speed Racing team. We’re also considering dropping the spring rates of the car, which while not unheard-of, are on the aggressive side, especially considering the short-wheelbase the car has. We’d like to install a new front cross-member and radius rod setup similar to the one we recently fabricated for the Civic–have to check on the rules–we may be forced to just run a spherical bearing instead of stock radius rod bushings.

Hopefully we’ll have time to fabricate a nice adjustable rear touring-car style swaybar system–nothing else I’ll put a beefier rear swaybar I have sitting around (which will require reinforcing the subframe) .

Am also hoping to fabricate a new front splitter for the car, and coming up with a matching rear wing.

If you haven’t been to our photo gallery, it may be worth a look.  We’ve got literally thousands of photos of the various project vehicles over the years–and we are constantly adding new ones.

I recently posted some photos of the rally-spec front subframe and radius rods that that we fabricated for the Civic.  Result is stronger components and better overall handling (don’t get dynamic castor, toe changes under braking like we did with the stock stuff).

We wanted to test the new front suspension / radius rods on the Civic before Wild West, so we took the car out to the “Under the Wires Rallyx” in Cle Elum, WA.  The soft dust/dirt/silt surface got chewed up pretty quick, but we were able to put the suspension through the paces–passed with flying colors.

We were doing well, sitting in 3rd overall going into the last run of the day.  About a quarter of the way into the run, we came into a pretty long right-hander, which required a fair bit of steering input.  We ended up grenading the left front CV joint, a problem with many front-wheel drive rally cars, but something we’ve particularly struggled with on the Civic / Integra.

Frankly, we weren’t sure that we’d have nearly the same problems on the Civic, due to the much lower horsepower motor that we have in the car.

The good news is that we’ve come up with a solution that should solve the problem once and for all.  The bad news is that we were not able to implement it before the Wild West Rally this upcoming weekend.  We’re hoping it won’t be an axle-breaking rally due to the less technical nature of the roads in Eastern, WA.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

We learned a pretty hard lesson at Oregon Trail this year.  Due to unseasonably 100+ degree weather in April, heat management became a pretty serious issue for us, and the car was found largely deficient.

Basically when you get hot, your brain doesn’t work as well as it does when comfortable, which can and did impact our performance.

The floor of the car ran around 140 degrees, due to the fact that the catalytic converter was positioned in the stock location.  Interesting thing about catalytic converters: the exhaust that exits them is actually more hot than the exhast before it hit the catalysts.  Many rally teams deal with this by relocating the catalytic converter to the very rear of the vehicle–this improves performance as well as reduces the in-car temperatures drastically.

We ended up fabricating a complete stainless exhaust using pre-fabed 2.25″ midpipe from Dynomax (WLK-38212) as a starting point.  It came with several hangers, flanges and an inline resonator–and was less expensive than buying the raw materials.

We bought some flanges from Vibrant and basically put a Dynomax 2.25″ Race Bullet Muffler (WLK-24234) where the stock catalytic converter was located.   Our intention was to run the two resonators and the catalytic converter with no additional muffler.

The custom rear “axle-back” component was all that needed to be completed to finish up the system.  It was composed of 2.25″ stainless bends, a Vibrant 200 cell 100% metal core high flow catalytic converter joined up to the Dynomax DNX midpipe with a Reid Washbon Racing v-clamp (very nice peice of kit).

Intial testing revealed that the car was LOUD.  It sounded great idling and under heal-toe downshifts, but was obnouxious the rest of the time, especially when decelerating off throttle (compression braking).  It probably would be legal for rally, and I’m pretty sure it would have passed most road racing requirements with the addition of a exhaust turn-down tip.  But at a rally, communication is very important–even though we use intercoms, noise can be very problematic.  Futhermore, we spend a ton of time in the car over a rally weekend, and I could easily imagine getting a headache (not to mention potential hearing damage) from exposure.

We use a Supertrapp Wavetech muffler on the CRX with pretty good success.  The nice thing about Supetrapp components is that they are completely tunable.  The added bonus was that we already had a bunch of Supertrapp discs and a open tip, etc.  We opted to go for a 2.25 ID,  4″ disc only muffler (SUP-444-2503), which also is a United States Park Service approved spark arrestor, which is often required when we compete on federal and state land.  Remember: only you can prevent forest fires. The muffler has to be one of the smallest, lightest, effective mufflers out there, and it definately did the trick.  The exhaust note is agressive but not obnoxious–and we’re not stuck with it.  We can add additional discs to increase flow, or remove them to reduce it.

Overall I’m pleased with how it turned out.  I’m pretty sure it is lighter than the system we had on the car, and the heat has been reduced to a far more comfortable level.   Before, if you touched the exhaust tunnel with a bare hand it was very uncofortable, perhaps enough to burn.  Now it is warm to the touch but not hot.  I will take a infrared temp, I’d estimate it is around 100 degrees.

Mission accomplished.