The following material is fictitious. Any resemblance to persons real or otherwise is purely circumstantial. Not trying to hate, just summarizing what I’ve seen.

February 14, 2005 – Got no date, so I rented The Fast and the Furious. Never seen it before, AWESOME MOVIE!!

2/15 – Rented 2Fast2Furious. WOW!! I now see the ’96 Civic DX my mom let’s me drive in a different light!

2/16 – google “Honda civic” find www.honda-acura.net. My first post: “Hi, I’m looking for cheap mods that will give my car lots of power. BTW, I have a Civic DX.”

2/17 – So I need an intake, headerS, and exhaust. Check Ebay. Post: “is this APC intake and OBX muffler any good? How much power?”

2/20 – bidded on intake and I WON!! Got it for $47! Can’t wait till it comes!

3/1 – the intake came!! I’m so excited. Post: “How do I install this?” There’s a search button?

3/16 – I finally got it installed! Now my car sounds like a monster! I killed a Tercel and almost beat a GrandAm today.

3/17 – What’s this Check Engine light mean?

…to be continued…

 

The following material is not ficticious...


DIE IN A FIRE YOU STUPID SLUT

 

:dunno: i got a laugh outta it

 

1/10

 

If you're going to put useless shit, so will I:

About 1.5 years ago, we assembled a project engine based on a B20 shortblock to test some new piston materials and skirt designs. One thing led to another and almost a year passed before the engine was put to the test during some extensive dyno work. The combination used a bore diameter of 84.5mm and a lightly reworked and balanced B20 crankshaft, swinging Eagle stock-length rods and our experimental pistons. We performed all the block mods we do for customers, including posting, boring, honing, decking, reworking the oil galleys and oil filter pad, align honing the mains, aftermarket main cap girdle, one of our modded ITR oil pumps, lightened ITR crank dampener, GSR/ITR windage tray, and last but not least, Moroso pan and pickup.The top end of the engine utilized a GSR head with our oversize flat-backed intake and exhaust valves, Eibach valve springs, Crower titanium retainers, JUN3 camshafts, and our cam gears. The head was a three-day affair for me and it’s pictured as the “Grocery Getter” in the head modification section of “Components” at: http://www.theoldone.com/ The cylinder head package was also complemented by one of our massively reworked Skunk2 intake manifolds and a Russ Collin’s modified ITR throttle body at 64mm.On the other end, the header was one of (Hy-Tech) John’s best efforts, with huge stepped primary tubes finally terminating in an under-the-car collector exitThe engine was installed in a racecar, and with no real time for tuning, run at a track, where the results were best described as dismal. The engine would leave hard, and then fall on its face, never making a clean run.A month of torturous dyno tuning on a Dynojet finally revealed that the fuel pump and pickup in the fuel cell were the culprits. Another month also revealed that the Hondata ECU wasn’t working properly either.These items were finally fixed and some tuning revealed that this engine had an insatiable appetite for fuel, requiring injectors that were generally reserved for use in boosted applications.This engine produced torque that nobody’d previously seen from a B series engine of any displacement with power peaking at 280+ at 9500 rpm….and it wasn’t leveling off either.Just like anyone else, I sometimes become overwhelmed by the moment and the old adage, “if some’s good, more’s better, and too much is best” took hold of my mentality….and that thinking proved costly in the end.

I made the decision to go for more rpm, as this thing would certainly top 300 whp at the rate it was running. I figured that about 10,000 to 10,200 would do it……………and it did. It also blew the engine up.

The quench distance, or piston to head clearance had been set at .032”, to effectively give us “zero” quench clearance at 9500 rpm, due to rod stretch. .032” caused the pistons to hammer the head pretty hard at 10,000+, ultimately work hardening the pistons.

#4 piston was the first to shatter, taking out the cylinder, the cylinder head, and a few more ancillary parts in the process. The debris from #4 was in turn distributed to all the other cylinders, courtesy of the intake plenum chamber, leaving no cylinder exempt from damage.

It was an expensive reminder that one needs to think (hard) before making any hair-brained decisions regarding rpm with any engine. You’d think that I’d have been old enough to know better, but……………...adrenaline can be a terrible thing.

During the past couple years, we’ve built a lot of normally aspirated Honda engines here. Each and every one has caused me to want to feel the “thrill” of one of these NA monsters in one of my own cars. Naturally, building a duplicate of the blown-up engine became the order of the day…when I wasn’t working on customer parts.

Picking a car to install it in was the next decision. My thinking was that the Civic offered the quickest ET potential, but I feared that “CARMA” would prevail and the Civic would kill me if I messed with it’s D series combination that runs so dependably well, leaving me with the two ITR’s I purchased in 1997 as the next options.

One was ruled out, since was my “collectable ITR”, having been put into storage the day it arrived here with 27 miles on the odometer The only choice remaining was my “other” ITR with 5500 on the clock and a blower under the hood.

That decision made, it was time to start the engine project.

In this business time never stands still. We continue to develop better products every day, as do most of the vendors we deal with. Many of you probably think that I’ll be using the absolute latest and greatest, but our customers always have priority for the “good stuff”, and I’m on a budget and the many of the parts we’ll use are machine shop “disasters” and “leftovers” from earlier development programs.

Next decision is on the engine’s displacement. This shouldn’t be an issue, since the previous engine had been built using a 84.5mm bore and a 89mm stroke, but since it’s going in my street car, should I go for more displacement and torque?

Throwing a 95mm stroke Eagle crank into the mix is as simple as grabbing one from stock and fitting it with some .137” (longer-than-stock) Eagle rods and a set of our pistons with the pin raised .250”. It’s terribly tempting, but we’ve yet to see a B series engine make as much power as one of our two liters. Granted, they will handily belt out 180+ ftlbs of torque…..and at reasonably low rpm too, but the LR ratio is close to awful at 1.47-1 and I figure that the combination will wear itself out just as quickly as spinning a two liter two thousand RPM higher for grunt. But damn, that torque is tempting.

The combination that we’re going with is pretty well set now. The block is the poorest of five used CRV blocks that we have left here. Frankly, this one’s a mess. It was originally bored and honed by a local machine shop here in Ft. Worth that “specializes” in import engine machining. Their machine work was an abomination, with the cylinder bores as much as .0016” out of round, with lots of taper to the cylinders from top to bottom. Clearances for the experimental strutted pistons the block was originally sized for range from .0012” to .0029”, which is simply unacceptable by any standards in this day and time. This block also suffered the ill effects of an acid bath (busted battery) in the CRV’s wreck that liberated the engine. I spent about three hours six or seven months ago with all sorts of solutions to neutralize the acid and finally cartridge rolls and a grinder in an attempt to stop the acid’s attack of the block’s exterior.

Now it’s just got a strange look to it, as it’s fairly shiny in places, but it’s heavily pitted everywhere. Even with all the block’s problems, I’m looking to turn this turd into a rose by the time all’s finished

In inspecting the block for structural integrity, the first thing I look for on a B20 is the quality if the aluminum casting that surrounds the 4-in-1 cylinder sleeves. Viewing the block’s deck, there should be no areas where the aluminum wasn’t absolutely flush with the bore casting, especially in the fillets between the adjoining cylinders. All B20 blocks are not created equally in this important area, and if the block isn’t “perfect”, broken cylinders are a certainty.

The cylinder casting that Honda uses in these B20’s is extremely brittle when compared to more resilient “round” individual bore liners. This is simply the nature of a casting such as this where sectional thickness varies so significantly. These cylinders are easily cracked if there’s just a hint of detonation and all it takes to break one of the blocks with the small casting flaws is about 220 HP, so they can certainly be a liability.

The second thing I look for in a block are main bores that are straight and true. I always spin the crank in the blocks when I disassemble a shortblock. If the crank isn’t “free”, the block’s got a problem.

Inspect the main bearings that come from the block as well. Abnormal bearing wear is also a clue that the mains aren’t as straight as we’d like to see.

This particular block has excellent casting integrity around the cylinder casting and the mains are in good shape, so we’ll set it aside for the time being.

I’ve made up my mind that the stroke I’ll use is 89.0mm, so a B18 / B20 crankshaft will be the pick. Once again, I have several cranks here to choose from, but I’ll pick one based on it’s main journal diameters, so overall main bearing thickness will be in the middle of the color chart after the block’s fully machined and ready to assemble.

Since as noted above, these blocks are a bit on the fragile side, I’ll use the old NASCAR trick of “posting” to improve its survival rate. BTW, as a point of interest, there are all sorts of clowns in the import industry claiming to have invented “posting”, but if they weren’t old enough to be building engines in the late 60’s, they’re liars because “posting” had it origins with attempts to strengthen Ford blocks and heads back then. Hell, after looking at some of the hand-built race blocks from the first half of the 20th century, “posting” probably began much earlier than that.

The posting process involves machining and tapping holes in the thrust sides of the block and torquing in threaded aluminum “posts” that physically “connect” the outer part of the cylinder with the outside (peripheral) walls of the block. With these “posts” installed, if the cylinder walls are going to move, they have to move the outside walls of the block too, so they add a tremendous amount of strength, making the block capable of withstanding a lot of abuse. This modification also has no ill effect on cylinder cooling, which is something I’m big on these days.

Since the block is going to run some old 84.5mm development pistons that are unfit for anything except conversation pieces, the next step is to size the cylinders.

The boring and honing process is one that should be accomplished by someone who does little other than cylinder wall preparation. Good boring and honing is an art form / science, and while good equipment is essential, a machinist who has a lifetime of experience (and who charges by the hour rather than having a set price for the operation) is the only way to go, as the right clearances and a good ring seal are all-important to making power. If the rings don’t seal, all the other modifications in the world won’t do you any good, as the power will go right past them.

We bore and hone the block to the same specs we provide our piston customers. All boring and honing operations are referenced from then main bearing bores of the block, so the cylinders will be absolutely perpendicular to the crankshaft. We don’t ever use the engine’s deck surface as a reference point.

The honing process must be performed using Sunnen equipment, such as a CK-10 (or newer) automatic honing machine. BTW, the “automatic” part is a joke, as it still takes a machinist with lots of experience to do it “right”. Right in this case would normally be a clearance of exactly .0028” (to the tenth), with no more than .0001” taper, or out-of-roundness. Our honing expert (who does cylinder wall preparation of winning domestic Pro Stock engines) is also giving the cylinder walls “teeth”, for an even greater effective ring seal. These “teeth” cause the bores to be smooth when you run a finger down the bore, but extremely “rough” when you pull the finger “up” the bore. This texturing is just one of the many “tricks” necessary when competing in a class where all 16 qualifiers are within .02 second on elapsed time! Loose effective ring seal on one of these 500 cubic inch normally aspirated gas-burning engines and you’ll lose a hundred horsepower!

It takes 3 hours of “finesse” time to hone our awful cylinders and before we’re able to get the bores straight and true, we’re looking at .0039” piston to wall clearance….which is “real loose”. We will shrink that clearance to the more desired dimension, however, with some very creative work on the pistons, as you’ll see later on.

This block exhibited some tightness on the #5 main bearings, so while we’re at it, we’re dragging a Sunnen align-hone through the main bores, to insure that all is perfectly straight. With the mains torqued in place (including the block girdle from Z10), there is minimal material removal involved, in fact no material had to be removed from the main caps to affect the cure.

As mentioned above, I’m going to use a crankshaft that has bearing codes that when combined with the block’s codes, will reference bearing thickness that are right in the “middle” of Honda’s bearing chart, so we won’t be using bearings that are too “thick, or thin”. There’s probably no good reason for doing this, but I feel best doing it this way, and when you have as many good Honda (and aftermarket) cranks as we have in inventory, selecting one for bearing fitment is simply the way we do it.

This crank is a B20 unit that has excellent journal finishes from the factory. We will not polish the journals, as this could remove enough material to throw our bearing thickness rational completely out the window…..or worse yet, make the use of Honda bearings impossible.

We’re also going to lighten the crank. On the subject of lightened cranks, let me begin with this….the more power you make, the more mass you have to have in the crankshaft, or harmonics will eat the bottom end up. It’s possible to run cranks that have counterweights you can shave with in lower power engines, such as road racing applications, but this is going to be a near 300Hp combination for my street car, and I’m not planning to be replacing the bearings frequently. We will remove approximately 2 pounds from the crank and then neutral balance it. During the balancing process, we’re also radiusing all the hard edges to reduce drag a bit as the crank is slicing through all the oil raining-down in the crankcase. To reduce rotating mass, I’ll be using one of our Clutch Masters aluminum flywheels to decrease rotating inertia at the largest possible diameter for maximum effectiveness and quick acceleration. The crank pulley I’m using is a new ITR unit that we’ve neutral balanced. This balancer will be replaced shortly with one of the new Fluidamper units that we’re helping them design and test, so the bottom end of this engine should be as vibration-free as we can make it.

Now that the block has been bored, honed, and align-honed, it’s time to make the pistons fit the bores with the .0028” clearance I’m looking for. Since saving the block’s cylinders required additional honing that netted a .0039” clearance, we’re going to build up the diameters of the piston skirts with a unique ceramic coating that also affords extreme lubricity…or lower friction. This process is similar to dry-film lubricants most of you are accustomed to seeing, but the material we’re using is much more wear resistant and can withstand extreme pressures. Its application requires a reasonably complex component preparation process and a lengthy heat curing cycle.

Once applied and cured, we are able to block-sand the skirts (with 800 grit wet cloth) until the correct diameter .120” above the bottom of the skirt tang is obtained to achieve my .0028” clearance objective.

As I stated earlier, the pistons I’m using are some early development strutted pieces and their domes aren’t the latest or greatest, but the pistons are “free” and I’ll make do. The valve reliefs on this set were moved outboard for use with an experimental head, which was milled more than .040”.

After massaging the domes, rounding all the corners and edges, we’re also carefully radiusing the edges of the valve reliefs and the edges of the Roller-Wave reflector slot on the exhaust side of the pistons.

I have individual “dummy” cylinders, which have inside diameters machined to the exact bore sizes of all the pistons we sell. These cylinders are used to duplicate the engines bores when flowing heads on our flow bench and they also serve as tool for CCing pistons. We seal the edges of the piston with red grease and insert it into the cylinder, achieving a leak-tight seal where the ring pack meets the ID of the cylinder. The piston is then pushed down to a depth that will allow the highest part of the dome to be just below the edge of the cylinder. This distance is measured with a depth micrometer for future calculations. A light grease seal is used to seal the Plexiglas plate to the top of the cylinder and fluid from a burette is metered into the area between the piston dome and the Plexiglas plate. If we calculate the volume of the cylinder down to the depth the piston is placed, and then subtract the volume of the fluid we used to fill the space above the piston top, we have the CC displacement of the piston dome. These pistons net 6.59CC’s, which is lower than we’d like, but remember that those relocated valve reliefs I talked about are really costing us valuable positive volume.

Next, we’re going to put the crankshaft in the block, suspended by the two end main caps (using some old bearings). We’ll take one of the rods we plan to use (in this case some standard issue Eagle units which are .137” longer than stock and assemble a piston on it. No piston pin clips are necessary for this “operation”.
The piston/rod combination is placed in #1 cylinder with the crank at exact top dead center. A depth micrometer is then used to measure the distance from the block’s deck surface to the quench pad on the intake side of the piston. This operation is repeated in #4 cylinder and each measurement is recorded.

This engine has -.019” piston to deck clearance, so we’ll mill .017” off the top of the block to yield a final deck clearance of -.002”, meaning that the pistons are .002” “in the hole”.

We deck the blocks parallel to the main bores, making absolutely sure the deck is perfectly perpendicular to the cylinder bores in every axis.

The top of the block is then carefully de-burred to remove sharp edges and any possible “tits” of aluminum that could become unwanted debris in the cylinders or water jacket. Removing all the edges also prevents cut fingers during block handling.

I’m also using a minimal chamfer at the tops of the cylinders to ease the ring’s insertion into the cylinders during assembly, but I stress that it’s “minimal” and a good ring compressor will be necessary to install the piston/ring/rod assemblies without damaging the rings. Excessive chamfers at the top of the cylinder make assembly easy, but since they under-hang the head, they represent crevice-space that unburned hydrocarbons love to hide in, contributing to combustion inefficiency.

Next up for the block is enlargening the oil gallery that connects the oil pump to the oil filter pad on the firewall side of the block. We also polish the entire length of the galley and do considerable grinding inside the oil filter pad as well…all in an effort to reduce pumping losses in the oil system. The individual oil ports inside the maim bearing saddles are also smoothed and thoroughly de-burred.

With every screw-in plug removed, the block is then scrubbed with hot soapy water several times and the cylinder bores are carefully wiped with Bounty paper towels and lots of WD40. After the block has been blown thoroughly dry, it’s bagged and rolled into the assembly room.

The rest of the engine has been in work simultaneously.

The cylinder head is a GSR piece that we got in a trade. Its original owner had “ported” on it and we declined to touch it once it arrived here a couple years ago. We traded him a GSR head, which once ported, made a much more suitable combination for his usage.

This “reject” head was to become a flow bench-only piece, but I figured that, assuming it doesn’t leak water, or oil into the ports, I could possibly make it work well enough for a street head on my 2-liter combination.

The first operation in preparing the head was to mil the deck of the head so that it’s absolutely flat and parallel to the camshaft bores of the head. We have a special fixture for doing this on our Peterson milling machine, so setting it up is quick and easy.

The valve guides in this head were in excellent condition, so the next step is to machine the valve seats and the adjacent chamber radii for the 84.5mm bore we’re using. This is accomplished on a Serdi machine and all intake and exhaust seats are referenced to a tolerance of +/_ .0005” relative to each other and the head’s deck. This is extremely important, as we want all the valve heights to be the same in each chamber, yielding accurate chamber volumes and piston to valve clearances. All the porting and asymmetric seat radiusing will now take place. After a couple day’s effort, all the porting / chamber work is complete and the seats are machined again and dropped .001” referenced from their original pre-ported locations. The head’s now ready for nit picking on the flow bench.

I’ve discussed what we do to the heads on our old BBS enough that I’m not going there in this article, but I am including the flow rates with our highly modified intake manifold and 64mm throttle body attached. The exhaust flow was also measured with 10” long primary tubes attached, which are the exact diameter of their counterparts on the real Hy-Tech header.

The flow numbers are corrected and rated at a pressure drop of 28” H20, which has become an industry standard in the racing community over the last 30 years. Just as a point of interest, much of the intake port and manifold development in NASCAR and Pro Stock these days is done using test pressures of 100” H2O (or more) for greater validity in the real world.

In our development on these pieces we’ve used a low pressure of 14”H20 and a high of 68” H2O for testing. The lower end of the scale is meaningful for low rpm operation, while the higher test pressures show a lot more about what the air and fuel mixture will be doing in the higher rpm ranges.

We’re using .5mm oversize intake and exhaust valves in this head, with the seats machined to relative heights that will cause the intake and exhaust valves to just “miss” each other during overlap with the camshafts we plan to use. These valves have flat combustion chamber sides and are the same pieces we sell customers.

The combustion chambers volumes after rework are 42.4CC, which is small for a head with this sort of chamber rework, but the head had been milled about .010” by it’s previous owner. I want to see a chamber volume of 41.0CC to achieve the compression ratio I’m after, so we’ll mill the head to obtain this chamber volume. Final static compression calculates to 13.44-1 for this combination.

While we’re working with the head, it’s time to check the clearance between the underside of the spring retainers and the top of the valve seals. If we run camshafts with more than .515” lift at the valve, there’s not sufficient space for the seal atop the guide, so we’re the using Serdi and tool we made that machines the top of the guide (and the seal’s step) to a reduced height by .045”. This will insure that the combination is safe with any of the cams we may run, and it still maintains enough guide length for good valve stability, heat transfer, and excellent wear-ability.

The springs I’m using are some of our new pieces that use an exceptionally clean Japanese wire. These springs can live at over 11,000 rpm with camshafts that have lift in the .550” range and brutal acceleration ramps. These springs also require a set-up height of 1.410” to achieve the seat and open pressure we’re after.

We’re using some of Crower’s +.060” retainers on this head to gain the additional set-up height, but we’re still .025” short of what we need. To remedy this situation, we’ve machined .027” from the under-side of the stock Honda spring seats before treating their head-contact sides to the same ceramic coating that we used on the piston skirts for better lubricity.

Once assembled, the spring height is exactly 1.410” on each valve.

The +.060 retainers present an interference problem with the rocker arms, as their raised edges contact the bottom side of the engine’s rockers, potentially leading to a catastrophic valve train failure (and a ruined engine). To eliminate this situation, each rocker arm is carefully ground and polished beneath the VTEC piston bore to achieve a clearance with the retainer of .040”. The rework of this high-stress area is accomplished so that all grinding and polishing marks run with the length of the rocker arm, rather than across it, which could lead to stress-fracturing.

We’re also installing the camshafts I plan to use in the head prior to final assembly to check their clearances in the cam bores and caps. It’s essential that the caps be torqued for this operation. The cams should spin freely with only some light oil between them and their bores. If the cams are hard to rotate, we locate the offending areas with some machinist’s bluing and massage, or align-hone the bores until the cams are absolutely free.

Now, for all of you who think that we’ve assembled and torn all the parts down “excessively”, let me remind you that we’ve never experiences a seized cam, broken cam, broken retainer, valve, or any other related failure in a Honda head we’ve assembled. You either check all the places where problems could occur, or break parts on down the road, take your pick. While most of the parts we’re using can be easily “bolted-on”, they’re a long way from being “plug-and-play”, just remember that the next time your local shop does a two-hour cam swap. If you don’t check all of these things carefully, you’re setting yourself up for a disaster. Haste makes waste…..and so does inexperience.

With the head’s machining out of the way, we’re going to assemble the number one chamber with valves and a set of our flow bench springs for checking piston to valve clearance once the short block’s assembled.

Prior to assembling the short block, we’ve assembled the rods to the crank for a final check of bearing clearances using Plastigage for verification. It’s essential that all the parts (crankshaft, rods, and bearings) be at room temperature (72-75 degrees), or this type measurement can be severely flawed in its results. We’re using a crude wooden fixture to hold the crank while doing this operation, as it’s a hell of a lot easier than doing it with the crank in the block. The Plastigage verifies that the clearances are exactly .0015”, which was what we’d calculated by measuring the crank journals, and bearings. We typically split bearing colors on both the rods and the mains to obtain the clearances we’re after. This is acceptable and preferred practice, unless you “skip” a color, which can lead to problems.

The rods and bearings are numbered for their respective cylinders. Next the pistons’ wrist pins are fitted to the small ends of the rods. All of these rods require some bushing honing to obtain the .0005” that I’m after. After pin fitting is complete the rods are disassembled and thoroughly cleaned along with the pins and bearings.

The crank is bearing fitted to the block in a similar manner with clearances of .0015”. We’re using a modified Z10 girdle, so it’s installed during the bearing fitment process. We’re using new main bolts for final assembly of the bottom end. At the same time we’re checking the fore-and-aft crank travel…..which oddly enough brings up the subject of clutches. Since this will be a high rpm engine and at this point nobody knows whether the clutch used will finally end up being a ClutchMasters low-pressure twin-disk carbon unit, or a CM high-pressure double diaphragm single disk (Kevlar / Ceramic) piece, I’m looking to make the life on the thrust bearings as easy as possible.

The clutch operation is going to take some time to grow accustomed to with its short pedal travel. It’s pedal pressure feels lighter than the CM Stage 3, or the stocker for that matter, but it really bites hard. All in all, I think it’ll be the hot ticket.

I’ll update the article with driving impressions, dyno numbers, and performance data as the miles permit.

 

write a book, jebus.

 

I actually read like 60% of that. then I had to go pee.

after that i went for a walk for about 15mins with my gf.

we chatted about life and work and my possible next car.

then i came back and read the other 40%

 

im hungry.

 

People who leave cellphones off should be shot. It defeats the point of a cellphone.