Ginger EF build

ginger

Hey everyone,

So I figured I would make a build thread as it usually keeps me motivated to work on my car and its fun to share my work with others.

Ill start with my background, my name is Kevan and Im going to school for mechanical engineering at UBC so funds on my build are quite tight at the moment and it forces me to make a lot of stuff myself. Ive been building my car for about 2 years now and autocrossing it for about a year of that. Its also my daily driver and has been holding up pretty well for the most part!

History on the car:

Picked it up for $250 from abbotsford with the engine in the back seat. Spent the first few weeks putting the engine back into the car and getting it drivable. Some early pictures:







sandblasted the valvecover, otherwise its a little messey


The worst part was the green interior! so I changed that out pretty quickly.
before:

after:


If you are wondering about the shift knob, I started turning it on my lathe but my motor burnt out so I was waiting on a new motor for quite a while. Its normal size now though, will grab a pic when I have a chance.

Also made myself a new horn button in the sandblaster

As I was poking around the body I checked the usual rust spots on ef’s and low and behold my finger went through


I cut back quite a ways and welded a new piece in and painted it back up. Its not perfect but hard to see from a ways back.

Always good to have someone to help you as well!


small accent to the valve cover


One of the things I really didnt like about the ef exhaust was the two 90’s in the back to run the muffler under the bumper. I decided to use a short muffler that came in the car when I bought it and move over the cutout piece in the bumper to the passenger side. I had never done body work before this but Id done quite a bit of drywalling so I picked up some plastic epoxy and special filler and gave it a shot. It doesnt look bad from a ways away but its noticeable up close. again a learning experience for me!



I soon got the car through aircare and started driving it around a lot. A while went by so I grabbed some pictures while it was clean.











I wanted to play with the ecu a bit so I converted to obd1 and picked up one of these


its a constantly going process tuning on the street to make me happy but I enjoy the work.

I managed to find a beat up integra for $250 to take the engine and swap components from, its now waiting for a rebuild and the it will go in.


Also fixed up my ripped and torn drivers seat with some passenger side upholstery


This is about when I started racing autocross and got hooked instantly.

Had to pick up some new tires as the ones that came on the momo’s are very cheap tires. Grabbed some of Sheridan’s old slicks and they make a world of difference


Test fit is a bit wide :P


Finally I tried throwing on some ITB’s I had laying around just for fun. got it to idle but couldnt tune properly as I dont have the full version of crome and freelog doesnt allow me to log tps. These will come back in the future though, promised

before


comparison


installed, mostly...


More updates to come as they happen!

thenorm

neat.
those EF's are fast and easy to drive. I set FTD in one once.

crazycanadian

Awsome Kevin.. Keep at it.. I would love to hear that thing roar with itb's..

ginger

Found some more torque for sale. Hopefully pick it up this weekend and start the rebuild soon!

ginger

Finally got some stock lights for my car. It came with some aftermarket ones that I ran for 2 years but one of the hid ballasts failed so I decided to put the stock ones back on.

Before:


After:

Probie

Nice work Kevan! Stoked to see a build thread section on the forums

ginger

Probie wrote:

Nice work Kevan! Stoked to see a build thread section on the forums

Thanks! yah Im hoping to get more peoples car builds on here so we all have something extra to waste time reading

washed my girls this weekend


Sorry for the blurry pic, it was getting a bit dark


Also picked this up, B20Z, 2L CRV motor. Should get me around the track a bit quicker once I rebuild it

crazycanadian

That 2L will be nice... I have driven a CRX with a CRV 2L in it before.. It really wakes the car up..

Sead

What size offset are your Momo Quasars?

ginger

Sead wrote:

What size offset are your Momo Quasars?

They are 15x7 et 27. Quite like the fitment without spacers or anything.

ginger

No update for the civic but took the e30 for a nice road trip up to green lake just outside 70 mile house. Went well until the way back when I stepped on it coming out of a pee break and the auto trans started slipping on me. Limped it to yale at my top speed of about 50km/h where I had free towing to poco. Luckily last year I bought a 5 speed swap so now I have an excuse to make the time to put that in!

Probie

That sucks that it happened so far away but you won't regret the 5 speed once its done

ginger

Yah it was all good though, I had towing on bcaa to take me home

So made a new toy tonight, now I can fine tune my maps a bit more

Grasshopper

You know this means i now have to bribe you with a hottub to come help me on my car...

ginger

It was a fairly busy weekend for me. Started off trying to find out why my car was having a bit of trouble starting after it got quite warm, compression was good across then check the plugs and saw this

definitely makes it harder to start. cleaned up the plugs and gapped them all and starts up and runs much better now, still think I may have a small headgasket leak though... New motor is going to have to be worked on a bit faster!

while I was at home I decided to test fit some flairs I bought a while back, would be nice to have a fender over my 13x8's for racing so I can lower my car a bit and I dont risk digging in my fenders under hard braking. Not sure about them but Ill cut them to fit a bit better and see then


Finally picked up some wheels as they came with pretty much brand new direzza z1's. rims dont look bad and they are quite light at 13lbs a rim but they are 4x114.3 so Id need an adapter, well see. For the mean time tires are going on my momo's for the slush series. Anyone have a good tire shop that can help me swap the tires over?

crazycanadian

I can do the tire swap for you Kevin, but my shops out in coquitlum.. I am liking the flairs.. Surprised that plug was only causing hot no start conditions.. I am surprised it wasn't miss firing under load..

solorex

You should only be running low enough with the 13x8's so that your stock fenders barely touch on very hard/bumpy corners. I have been running this size on my CRX for years without flairs with no issues. The smaller diameter of the 13's lowers the car 1" already. If you feel you have to do flairs, try and do them nice. There are too many hack-jobs I have seen on EF's over the years!

ginger

Sent you a message adam! Good to know about the 13" ride height. I was going to use the ride height to adjust camber as I dont have adjustable plates. If I do end up putting on the flairs then they will be installed as cleanly as possible

ginger

Few updates, got my new tires mounted thanks to Adam! went out saturday event to set up the course for the enduro and while chris was testing the course in my car blew my coolant hose... so late saturday night I was fixing the hose, set up a quick alignment before the enduro on sunday. Very fun event and hope that the people who came out had a good time as well!

Picture from my alignment

ginger

Suppose its time for a quick update,

Car has had a leaking head gasket for a while and I havent had the time to take my head off as I needed the car for commuting daily, now Im back in school and I have no time to work on the car so I did the cheap thing that may blow my engine and put some liquid aluminum stuff in the coolent to stop the leak. It was working pretty well for a while, even through some auto-x events until another executive...... forgot some cars have a switch to control the cooling fan and overheated it, blew a rad hose and in the end looks like the gasket is leaking again. At least I only drive it to, from and at events now so hopefully holds until january when the new engine will go in!

Behnam

ginger wrote:

gasket is leaking again.

ginger wrote:

new engine will go in!

New engine = 13b? Who needs a gasket when you can vroom without

ginger

Just the shoe poking out of her winter blanket. January will bring a new heart and possibly more power after driving adams 323 and finding out how much fun much more power is

Grasshopper

New and much faster engine! Silly exec member... I head he also blew up an engine in iRacing. For those of you out there who use iRacing, this is indeed possible.

ginger

Grabbed some new sticky tires tonight! Once the new engine is in these should help me put down that power in the wet



Also grabbed a momo steering wheel, wink mirror and test pipe for a new exhaust, its so hard to say no to parts...

Thanks Jay!

ginger

So Im on a coop term now which means I can get back into the build! Picked up a solvent tank to clean up the new motor and parts.



Should be able to fit the whole head into there

Also pulled the b18 out from under the porch to get off the stand and start stealing parts from. Coming in the mail are new bearings for the bottom end, rings, arp rod bolts, some cheapo motor mounts to take dimensions from so I can machine some billet parts and an exedy stage 1 clutch

ginger

Yesterday I was able to head to poco after work and finally get started on the engine! New parts came in over the last week which have gotten me very excited


The mounts are the cheapo yonaka mounts from ebay but if they put the motor where it is suppose to be in my engine bay I will copy the dimensions and machine some billet mounts for the future.

Oil pan off, main caps off


Rod caps off, the crank looks really nice, no scoring or scratching I can see of. Also passes the fingernail test.


Pushed out the pistons and they look pretty decent, discolouration but otherwise came out clean, no hangups. You can also see my ziplocks in the background, everything is labelled to go back in the right place


Bare crank, the pain of taking off the auto flywheel started here, one of the bolts was super stuck and with little head it took some work to get it off but a bloody knuckle later I got it off


WOO! Bare block, this was my goal for the night and its always nice to hit your goals Next up is to clean everything off in my solvent tank and mic everything out before putting in the new bearings, rings, and rod bolts.


and finally the pistons and crank


I hope this will go fairly quickly and hopefully this weekend I can get a good chunk of the work done

crazycanadian

Looks great Kevin... I would invest in the money to have your parts hot tanked and properly cleaned up... Solvent tanks are nice, but they don't clean out all the shit in the oil passages and places where you can't get a brush well...

ginger

I have thought about getting them tanked, who does it around the poco area? Also what do you usually hot tank? Block, pistons, rods, crank, head?

solorex

I realize you are trying to save $$ with the Yonaka mounts; but seriously, it is not worth you time and effort to CAD design/CNC your own mounts and source the urethane bushings when HASport has already done this. Just save up for the HASports, you should be able to find them in the used marketplace pretty easily. Just speaking from experience, I have seen cheaper mounts in EF's before and engine placement/axle geometry has not been good.

Another thing to mention is that don't be too quick to hack off the front mount on your factory front cross-member, a friend of mine is having issues with the engine torquing and cracking the rear cross-member. A front mount will fix this. I am planning on designing up a front mount option this spring (if I can find the time).

ginger

solorex wrote:

I realize you are trying to save $$ with the Yonaka mounts; but seriously, it is not worth you time and effort to CAD design/CNC your own mounts and source the urethane bushings when HASport has already done this. Just save up for the HASports, you should be able to find them in the used marketplace pretty easily. Just speaking from experience, I have seen cheaper mounts in EF's before and engine placement/axle geometry has not been good.

Another thing to mention is that don't be too quick to hack off the front mount on your factory front cross-member, a friend of mine is having issues with the engine torquing and cracking the rear cross-member. A front mount will fix this. I am planning on designing up a front mount option this spring (if I can find the time).

I hear what you mean but for me its less about the time and money and more about the experience of doing it myself and learning, also I got the aluminum and machines available to me for free The placement however I am worried about, I have heard of peoples axles wearing out fast because of poor alignment and thats really something Im hoping to avoid.

Thanks for the advice on the front mount, Ill refrain from cutting it off. If your interested Im always happy to help design stuff

solorex

ginger wrote:

Thanks for the advice on the front mount, Ill refrain from cutting it off. If your interested Im always happy to help design stuff

Do a test fit, it will be close and with the Yonaka mounts the tranny may touch the front. Thanks for the offer, may take you up on that and we could make a handful of them.