Degreasing.

I was dreading this step, and I was debating calling it "good enough" without cleaning the bay.  With the number of people telling me I should shoot paint in the engine room, I figured I'd at least clean it up a little.

Step 1: Take pictures of stays (ie brackets) and bolts so you remember where the hardware goes.

Step 2: Take some good "before" shots.  Like every good jenny craig or proactiv commercial, having a good "before" picture is half the battle.

Step 3: Buy Simple Green (you don't even need the "industrial" or "automotive" stuff... the regular bottle works great).  As the bottle tells you, spray it on, scrub a little, and then follow it up with a damp cloth... a microfiber one helps prevent scratching the pristine paintwork.

Here's what it looks like after the damp cloth:

And here's some good Before and After shots:

Front:

Rear

And the engine room... from Halfway done, to Done.  It's a pain in the butt getting behind some of those hard lines without taking them off though:

And finally the denouement, the jenny craig Before and After shots:

Definitely worth it.

As a side benefit, your garage smells like one of those smelly, yet delightful, green Mr Sketch markers you had as a kid.

please enjoy.

-J

HVAC. Part I

All along, it was my plan to remove the AC, because I just didn't want to deal with it, and this car is never going to be a daily driver.

I had planned to keep the heater because, in my head, if I got stuck in the rain on the way back from a track day or what-have-you, I could blow some warm air on the window to keep it from fogging up too badly.

I did plan on removing the heater valve, however.  Modern Hondas don't have heater valves, so surely my 1998 doesn't need one either.

I went to take off the hose from the heater core.  When you're working with steel joints, you can put a pair of pliers over the hose and twist it until it un-bonds itself from the joint.  Then it pulls off pretty easily.

In a pretty epic brain-fart, I forgot the heater core has aluminum joints.  For the non-metallurgist types following along, aluminum joints are weak.

Pic 1 shows the heater valve that I had planned to remove:

Pic 2 shows my handiwork on the heater core joint.

I tried to re-round the joint, but it will never seal again... and honestly, it's just the reason I was looking for to take the heater core out.

More on that later.

-J

Interior... Part I

I've ignored it long enough, so time to take a break from engine room stuff and move on to the interior... ie unnecessary weight.

Take out the center consoles, take some pictures of stuff, and bam, the carpet is out.  Like magic.

The carpet has a mildewy smell.  Partially the fault of a leaky trunk, and partially my fault, when I forgot a bag of ice in the passenger's side during a summer day.  The carpet was destined for the trash heap from then.

Here's what you're left with.  From what I was able to gather from the Carfax back in 2009 (god i've had this car forever), the car spent time in NY, NJ, and OH... all states that have snow and road salt.  I'm very pleased that, besides dirt and some grime, it's pretty immaculate under the carpet, rust-wise.  I'm going to leave the melt-sheet in place, mostly because spending time to remove it will probably amount in very little.

Engine Room Cleanup

If you've gone this far, you might as well take some time to clean out the engine room.  This is a process, and whether you're painting or just cleaning up, you're going to need to remove a lot of stuff.  Take pictures!  This way, you can (a) show your friends how nasty your engine room is, and (b) show yourself where to put things back later.  In this series of slides, I am taking pictures of the harnesses and AC pipes, since those are coming out...

The AC isn't going back in.  AC compressors are heavy, and with the K-series, I don't want to mess with hooking up all new lines and stuff.  Plus, this is a toy car, that will ideally only come out on beautiful days.

Obviously, most of the harnesses will still go back in (except the AC sub-harness and the washer tank harness).

Pics:

Beween the pic above and the one below, the AC lines were removed.  They won't work for a K-swapped Civic as far as I know.  They will come out in one piece, but it's like one of those impossible puzzles you get from a museum.

At this point, I'm ready to pull the cabin harness out of the car, when I realize that the hood pull cable is routed through the harness.  While thusfar, HCM has done an impeccable job assembling this car, I feel like this wasn't entirely intentional.

Before deciding to remove the harness the right way, I was debating just cutting it out of there.  But no short-cuts... mark the position of the hood lock, pull it out, detach the cable from the hood lock, and pull the hood release cable back through the harness.  Then put the cable right back where you pulled it from.

this website is almost up to date.
-J

Extraction

we're not going to call it a heart transplant just yet, because even to this day (Beg-August 2012), my new engine isn't in yet.  It's ordered, but it's not in.  More on that later.

Anyways, I have a lovely Harbor Freight engine crane that I bought from my old roommate (thanks Gskoff, who's blog is linked at the bottom of this page).

Hook it all up with chains and high-tension eyelets (go to WalMart... in the Automotive section, there's a 5000 lb tow chain.  Buy that and cut out the center link, and now you have enough chain and two high-tension eyelets with which to extract the engine).

Go to Harbor Freight again and buy a load leveler.  Can you take an engine out of an engine bay without a load leveler?  Can you put an engine back in without a load leveler?  Yes.  But you'll save yourself more than 20 bucks worth of headaches.  Plus, it's my opinion that you should be building an arsenal of tools as you can afford them, and the Harbor Freight model shown here is reasonably good quality for the price.

Now, she's airborne.

In certain parts of the country, Ohio included, you have license to use the Redneck Engine Stand.  Tire shops will most likely dismount an old tire for free (tip the dudes at least).

...and you're left with this mess of an engine room.

My plan is to clean the engine bay without shooting new paint.  Honestly, there's nothing too bad beyond a little surface rust in here, and I'm sure if I painted, I'd just make it worse.  There's a lot of great examples of concourse-quality engine bays out there, and while I admire the work put into those, that's not what I'm going for with this little guy.

One thing I cannot stress enough is to buy and read the service manual.  Especially if you're doing this for the first time, that could be the difference between properly removing heavy things and breaking crap... or worse, hurting yourself.

and thanks for reading this build "thread".  As always, I'm skipping a majority of the steps taken, so feel free to ask technical questions in the comments or by email.

k thanks bye

-kwan

Prep for Engine Extraction

Got home from work, worked on the hatchback, watched olympics, and checked my blogger site.  And lo and behold, I got an bunch of views today (by my standards).  Thank you, and here's more updates.

The task at hand is obviously to take the engine out of the car.  You can start ripping crap out, or you can meticulously label things so you know what they were, in the case that you need them again.

Start at the front (front oxygen sensor) and work your way back.  It's a little easier to label the masking tape before you take it off the roll and put it around the couplers.

Let the pictures do the talking:

Also, take plenty of pictures.  In this day and age, when photographs don't need to be developed in a darkroom and are instead just a bunch of 1s and 0s, it's better to have more pictures than you need.

Notice also how extremely filthy my engine bay is.  That's getting fixed.

It's starting to look like progress.

Tell your friends.

the chef