Almost there

It has been quite a while since there has been an update to the car. That is changing right now because here is an update. Ever since we got the cage welded up and compliant it has just been an hour of work here and a few there. Not a lot of work. After doing that for a while we finally got some work done. The cage was painted and looks good. I haven't taken the time to take a pictures of it quite yet. We also installed the master cut off switch. Decided to put it on the dash on the passenger side because the battery and other wires used were right there so that leaves less cable running in the car. Next up was the sunroof panel. Since it was originally a glass sunroof we were required to put a panel over it. Below are a couple of pictures of the sunroof panel rivoted up to the car.

The only other thing that we have left to do for the car to be issued a log book is put rollbar padding in it. There are some other things going to be done to the car. Currently there is a check engine light on and the tach doesn't work. I have diagnosed that the crank angle sensor is bad which would cause both the tach not to work and the check engine light. A new distributor should fix that problem. After that there is a header for the car that needs to be put on. Hopefully it shouldn't be as long before the next post.

Door Bars

Not a lot of work has been done to the vehicle on our end since the last blog post. However, the work that was done by someone else has helped us out greatly towards getting the car done. Since the last post we needed to send the car to a professional to install door bars. We sent the car to Jesse Prather Motorsports (http://jesseprathermotorsports.com/) where he installed door bars, dash bar and window net and steering wheel removal adapter. The work was well done and makes the cage complete (other then paint).

As you can see the passenger side has no bends to it. This was done to make it quite easy. The driver's side has some bends to the door bars. It needed the bends to get around the seat but the bends also absorb some of the energy which makes it safer right next to the driver.

You can see the steering wheel we are going to use. It was actually in the car when the project started. An adapter was put on to fit the removal wheel adapter. This wheel has a great feel to it.

Once we got the car back from Jesse Prather Motorsports we took it back to 801. I took the seat out and cleaned up the welds on the seat brackets and then sprayed a couple coats of flat black paint on it. While I was waiting for the paint to dry I decided to get out the old set of intercomp scales we have laying around and see what the car currently weighed. We compared what the scale showed to a brand new calibrated scale and the old scale consistently showed 15 lbs of weight more. The car came in weighing 2157 lbs. This weight was without the seat and its brackets and with no driver in the car. I didn't look to see how much gas was in the car. Minimum weight for this car in ITA is 2250 with driver. I am confident that we will not have to add any balast to the vehicle.

Next on the list is to prep the door bars and paint them to match the rest of the cage. After that it will be on to installing the remaining required safety parts.

Sitting Down in a Cage

It has been a while since the last post. The Holidays and work are the reason why. However, this is the same reason why I was able to work on the car this past week. The office lets us have the week between Christmas and New Years off so to make my time worthwhile I spent most of this week over at 801 working on the car. The first thing in order to get done was finishing mounting the seat. Reading the rule there was a grey area about what can be removed to install the seat and what can't. Since we are trying to stay away from grey areas we decided to take the factory seat sliders. Cut out everything but the mounts and then use some square tubing and weld the mounts together. After this was done we realized that where the seat bracket would be wouldn't allow us to mount it. So Ryan came up with an idea that is actually what we needed. He suggested get some angle iron and bolt it through the square tubing but raise up a little bit to fit the bolts in there. Doing this will do a couple of things for us. One it will make it adjustable so if anyone in the office wishes to drive this car it will take about an hour and they will be fitted to it. Two this will help with ballast since we are very confident that we will need to add ballast to make weight so having fairly heavy sat brackets helps since it is low weight.

Pictures below: one of the seat brackets made and the other picture is the seat installed into the car. I still need to weld the nuts to the tubing/angle and clean up all the weld spatter and paint it.

Once the seat was finally mounted it was time to put the cage in its permanent place. First I aligned the cage where I wanted it to go. Then I drilled and mounted the bolts for the main hoop. This was pretty easy and other then some floor boar massaging it didn't really take much effort at all. Next came the rear braces. These would prove to be the complete opposite of the main hoop. First the design has an X brace instead of just two rearward braces going to the shock towers. The way the braces were they were hanging over the spare tire well which is not a place where you can mount cage. I had an idea of how to separate them enough to get them where they needed to be. I got the factory jack out of my Corolla and looked around 801 of something to put on that jack that would help extend to separate the braces. What I found was a post driver that was used for ProRally's. I put them in between and separated them. I went to the drivers side and looked under the car to make sure nothing was going to get in the way. Low and behold the frame was in the way. I did some measuring and realized what I needed to do was get the mounting plate over the middle on the frame so the bolts were on either side of it. That meant separating the brace even more. Finally after fighting it a little bit I was able to get them in place and mount them onto the car. The last part of the cage was the forward facing braces. These ended up being even easier to do then the main hoop. My part of the cage installation is now complete. We still need to send the car to a professional to make/weld door bars and weld the dash bar in. In the mean time I have a few things I can work on to get going like finishing up the seat brackets and make mounts for some gauges.

The Little Details

After thanksgiving I was supposed to go to KC for a few days and do the shopping thing. After some thought I decided that there wasn't really anything I needed to shop for and working on a race car would be some good therapy for me. So I stayed in Topeka and spent 3 days in our storage unit. The work that I got done in those three days doesn't seem like a lot was done and probably to someone that knows Honda's it is probably something that could of been done a lot quicker. in fact if I knew what I know now about the way Honda builds cars I probably would of finished up in half the time. Anyways, what I did was very minor detail things. The first thing was to finish up the hood pins. I ended up having to cut a tiny hole in the hood skeleton to get everything to fit properly. Once I got everything cut out and secured down the pins were done. Next up were the tow straps. The rules require tow hooks or straps in the front and rear of the car and must be able to be pulled out of gravel traps. This means that bolting the SafeQuip tow straps that Howard provided to the front bumpers. I tackled the front tow strap first. After looking and looking all over the place where I am used to bumpers being bolted to I decided to look at the at the internet and found that I needed to simply remove the turn signal housing and the bolts would be right in front of me. I did this and the bumper with cover came out. I looked at a few places that I could mount the tow strap. I decided that the best place would be close to the center and have the strap route through the grill. This would keep the strap as level as possible when in use. To do this right I needed to drill a hold in the bumper and make some room for a nut on the other end. I did this quite easily. I needed a bolt after this so I went down the road half a mile to Tractor Supply and picked up a grade 8 3/8" bolt and nut along with a lock washer and a couple of flat washers. installed everything and put the bumper back on. While doing this I also cleaned up the mounting of all of the underbody shields. Front done:

Now came time for the rear. However, before I moved on I spent a few minutes to clean up all the dirt and crud that came out of the car when I took the front bumper off. Once everything was cleaned up I moved the car around in its stall and proceeded to remove the rear bumper. Again I spent some time looking where I look for on Toyota's but didn't find anything. Looking closer I found how it mounts and took the bumper off. Figuring out where to mount the rear tow strap was quite easy and there was an opening right in the middle of the bumper. Again I had to drill a hole and make an opening for a nut. I installed a the same kind of bolt and nut as I did the front. Put the rear bumper back on and was done with another small detail but a needed detail.

When I was installing the tow straps I had the car up in the air and the wheels off and noticed that Howard's son had installed some go fast parts already. It looks like there is a set of Koni reds on it along with some Neuspeed Sport Springs. Doing some research on the springs it looks like the springs are supposed to be 275 lb/in in the front and 225 lb/in in the rear for spring rate. I think that we will take them off at some point and check exactly what the spring rate is. We may also do some tuning on the shocks by putting them on our shock dyno. I also noticed there is an after market rear sway bar on it. I haven't measured it yet or know what brand it is but it is nice to know this for when it comes time for setup. I also noticed some rust on the suspension parts. More than likely from all the road salt. To be on the safe side I think that at some point we will take off the suspension parts and clean them up and add a coat of paint to them.

We should have the brackets for the seat mount in the next few days. Once we get that in we can mount the seat and start getting the rest of the required safety items installed into the car.

The Start

The technical services department here at SCCA was given an opportunity to take a 1991 Honda Civic Si from autox trim to road racing trim. The car was mildly setup for SCCA Solo ST class. Howard Duncan (VP Rally/Solo) gave us this opportunity so the tech department can get a better idea of building a vehicle for club racing  for better relation/understanding of our members. Once this car is ready to race and given a logbook we will get the chance to take it to drivers school and get our competition license.

Howards son (Geoff) was the owner of the car and decided he would like to build it into a fun track day car and started stripping the interior. Shortly after doing this an ITC CRX was found and the Civic was put aside. The decision was made that is was no longer needed but probably wouldn't sell in its current trim of no interior and pretty much stock everything else. However, if the proper safety equipment were to be installed it could be turned into an SCCA Club Racing ITA car and would be worth something to sell. So a Kirk Racing bolt in roll cage, Recaro pole position seat, tow hooks, and the other required safety equipment were ordered.

 Above is the car we are working on. All work is being done in the SCCA storage building.

As you can tell in the picture we had already put the cage into the vehicle. At this point the cage is just in the car. No holes have been drilled yet as we are waiting on the seat to be mounted before we proceed with cage install. Here are a few inside pictures of the cage in the vehicle.

                                                                 

Last night (Nov. 22) Ryan Miles (SCCA Technical Services Assistant) and myself (Brian Harmer, SCCA Solo Technical Specialist) went over to do a little bit of work on the Civic. First task was to install the hood pins. We ran into a few problems and were not able to finish installing the pins. First problem which we over came was the headlight housing. The back of the housing was preventing the nut to hold the pin in to be straight. The end result was bending the metal slightly to allow the nut in properly for the pin to be straight. Next problem was with the hood itself. Where the pin is going through has part of the skeleton on it which makes it very difficult to install the hood hold down. What we have decided to do but were without the proper tool is to cut out the slightest part of the skeleton to help with installation. However, we need to read up on the rules to make sure that is compliant or not. One thing that we did prevail on last night was removing the stickers on the passenger side and hood of the car. Using a hair drier and a steady hand with a razor blade the stickers came right off. Of them all only one left some sticky residue on the vehicle but nothing a little heat, patience and goo gone wont fix.

With Thanksgiving in a couple of days there probably wont be much work on the car the rest of this week but I expect to get back to working on the car next week. The goal next week will be to finish the hood pins and get the stickers off of the drivers side of the car.