At Home Mechanic

I suppose that I should not complain, I bought my hobby car for precisely this reason. I enjoy the time I spend in the garage tinkering with my old car. It would be pretty boring to have a car that was perfect all the time and there was no room for improvement. Actually I think it would be boring to have a hobby car that did not need any attention. I would not know, my car is a constant series of brush fires that seem to crop up.

Maybe I over state the case; my hobby car is a fairly well engineered 1987 Honda CRX . Not exactly at the cutting edge of technology in its day, it is now a fairly dated design by current standards. But the factory sent hundred of thousands of similar Civics and they have held up well over the years. The problem is that I am not content to just repair problems as they crop up; I want to "improve" the car to enhance power and performance. And once the car has been improved, I like to beat it like a rented mule around the local racetrack. Between my homegrown improvements and the stress I put on a car that is nearly 20 years old, it is inevitable that something will break.

This latest crop of problems is directly related to my last day of racing at Willow Springs Raceway . The centrifugal forces generated by high speed cornering forces the oil in the oil pan away from the oil pickup and can potentially starve the engine of oil when I am stressing it the most. So I installed a Moroso racing oil pan that has greater capacity and a set of windage trays in the pan to keep the oil from sloshing around. I installed the new pan exactly as instructed and it seemed to hold just fine. But an oil leak soon appeared so I had to get back under the car to tighten and seal the oil pan better than as specified in the installation instructions.

I blame the next problem on racing, although the real culprit is my own stupidity. I got so excited to be on the track that I failed to keep a close eye on my fuel gauge; on the drive home I nearly ran out of gas. Sucking up the very last drops of gas in the tank, all of the sediment and general gunk that normally sits at the bottom of an old gas tank soon found its way into my fuel injectors. Combine that gunk with the low pressure I run my fuel system on to keep the oversized fuel injectors from drowning the engine in fuel and I was getting a nasty engine hesitation . The cure for this is to pull out the oversized injectors (which I installed hoping that they were the path to power, but turned out to be a waste of time on an engine that remains naturally aspirated) and reinstall the original injectors. Draining the fuel system to clean out the junk in the fuel lines and restoring the fuel pressure to the stock 38psi solved that problem.

What I have not tackled yet is the left rear trailing arm bushing that is circling the drain as we speak. I replaced all of the other bushings on the car, but the rear trailing arm bushings on my Honda are a major pain in the butt to get to. Consequently they never got replaced which was not a problem when the car was only seeing street use. But the stress of racing soon exposed the weakness of the old bushings and there is a definite wiggle in the left rear wheel. I will need plenty of time to remove the entire rear suspension to get at these bushings and time is something that is in short supply right now.

But knowing that a major project awaits me is comforting in a way. I always know what I will be doing with my future free time.