Themi's 1979 Honda Civic

[Themi]

I guess this is just a placeholder first post for this car. It has been sitting under my dads house since maybe 2015, and last had a WOF in 2014. First pic is when it was first "parked". This is the only picture I can find from back then, when it actually looked like a car.

It is a 1979 Honda Civic 1200, made in Nelson and originally purchased from Percy Motors Auckland on the 28th of March 1979, approximately 18 years before I was born. It has 8X,000km's on the clock, and service history for the majority of its life indicating it did not roll over. The original documentation said it was in "Signal Red" but I believe the actual colour (from the sales brochure) was Sofia Red, with the brown interior not black. This could have been swapped in, but the head lining matches brown so I'm not so sure.

I purchased it with a half-complete City Turbo 2 engine swapped in, which was seized from sitting for too long so I gave up on it and pulled it out. I sold that with all of the (many!) city turbo bits that came with the car.  The exterior of the car is now in pretty poor shape, with quite a bit of surface rust coming through under the paint, and some areas (like below the A-pillars) with really quite bad rust holes. I'm not sure what it is like under the car, but it was fine when I got it!

The interior was pretty much immaculate, except for some minor damage to the wood veneer on the dashboard and the carpet had been stripped.

I managed to acquire a DOHC ZC engine (d16a8/9) from a CRX, with forged pistons and H-beam rods. The details of the me purchasing this engine in ~2018/2019 are fuzzy, but I believe it was built for a turbo in a track car. Here you can see the new rods compared to the stock ones.

The plan is to have the engine swapped in as soon as I get the car moved, with basically a hack-job of motor mounts just to get it in roughly the right place. Then I will worry about axles, suspension and chassis.

I intend on using a GTX2860r Gen2 on a log-style manifold to suit the space restrictions, and modify either a 2zz-ge intake manifold or K24 RBB intake manifold to mate up to the ZC head. The intake manifold is about 1/2 the length of the engine bay in its stock form. While people have made this engine fit with a small-ish turbo, I don't want to modify the firewall at all just for an intake manifold.

This will not be a fast project, I don't even have the car yet! But hopefully the end result will be a fast project.

 

Link to discussion here:

 

 

[Themi]

This might not be worthy of the second post here but we knew it was going to be slow, so it'll just be a small update. Anyone who's seen my Mazda knows that chopping intake manifolds seems to be my favorite pastime but I PROMISE that is not the case!

Today I purchased a K24 RAA intake manifold, which has a very nice 2-piece design.

I also cut my ZC intake manifold in half, shortening the runners but attempting to line them up with the RAA's plenum section. I intend on cutting a flange and welding it to what's left of the ZC manifold allowing me to bolt that to the RAA manifold.

Space-wise, this has saved me maybe 10cm at the back of the engine bay which is a huge amount. In the bottom picture you can see just how much space saving this really is. The picture is only the start as I have already trimmed a further 4cm from the Honda intake manifold (up to the fuel rail mounts), saving additional space again!