GP02A0083's 89' black hatchback

[gp02a0083]

Well hatchback #4 arrived today from Delaware back to its original home state ( ill explain later) . Time to get #3 fixed up.
This ones a Carb'd 88 with 150K with a bad 4th band , its got some new tires and dizzy, mainly picked it up for the sheet metal and some other parts.



Neat fact I discovered after taking a better look at the original owners manual and from the added dealership badge on the hatch lid. The car came from a Honda dealership in Marlton NJ called Burnes honda. The previous owner of my black 89 hatchback mentioned about this dealership as well when i purchased my 89 a few years back. So after looking for my 89's original manual they both were sold from the same dealership to owners here in south NJ. I'm going to keep the hatch badge to go with the dealership's key chain tag.

[VeroZ]

Love the build and the South Jersey pictures. I grew up in Tabernacle and my Aunt/Uncle are in Hightstown.


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[gp02a0083]

Love the build and the South Jersey pictures. I grew up in Tabernacle and my Aunt/Uncle are in Hightstown.

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Thanks! Keeping it simple/clean/ functional is the goal. Hightstown isnt that far from the howell/freehold area. Should really set up a nj meet seeing there are a few more nj members.

[gp02a0083]

got to work today on ripping apart my donor hatch for good interior parts

[gp02a0083]

Reason for my black hatch needing repair, deer hit.





After fighting with the progressive insurance adjuster about the repair quote, (they were hellbent on totaling it) they deemed the value of the car to be about 4500 after taxes, not including the upgrades done to the car, and was issued a check for the repairs. Always question the estimates guys, I learned a lot in the body shops and seen some shady stuff happen more often than not. When all was done and unrelated repairs were removed they reduced the estimate, car was not totaled, avoided a salvage title. ill get to work on getting the radiator support repaired, bodywork done, and painted soon. hopefully in a few more weeks I can more forward with this DD project,lower the car on koni reds, and try making it to honda day at Englishtown NJ. I'll have a bunch of parts from the car listed in the for sale section later.

[Dr_Snooz]

Cool stuff! Nice work giving Progressive hell. I hope you slapped Flo while you were at it.

[gp02a0083]

Cool stuff! Nice work giving Progressive hell. I hope you slapped Flo while you were at it.

that bitch never showed up to reassure me that my claim would be handled properly lol. This is a minor setback but with the money from the insurance company I can now get the body and paint work done very soon instead of waiting until the spring. If all goes well and I planned this correctly the original body-shop that I was trained at will do the work and will let me spray the car with dupont BC/CC when its ready for the booth. It would end up costing me less than $500 when said and done with the whole car.

[MessyHonda]

Insurance companies are a rip off. One day il own one. Only company that fights to keep its money. My customer has a 89 teg with 63k and a lil fender bender and they wanted to total her car. I told her to fight it. Hope you can fix your car. I've had some close calls when I would go riding in the hills. I'm just glad once I was able to avoid a deer because they can do a lot of damage. Seen an ford explorer hit a deer on the freeway and it didn't look nice at all.

[gp02a0083]

Insurance companies are a rip off. One day il own one. Only company that fights to keep its money. My customer has a 89 teg with 63k and a lil fender bender and they wanted to total her car. I told her to fight it. Hope you can fix your car. I've had some close calls when I would go riding in the hills. I'm just glad once I was able to avoid a deer because they can do a lot of damage. Seen an ford explorer hit a deer on the freeway and it didn't look nice at all.

Its sad that they will outright try to total a car due to its age, not its overall condition. I bet that customers car is in decent condition other than the fender bender. Yah freeway hits with deer are usually pretty nasty, non freeway speed hits however typically look worse from all the repair jobs I have done in the shops. It all comes down to how fast, what car, where it hit and all that.. you really cant argue physics.

[gp02a0083]

Lately I have been really busy ripping apart #4 for parts, however with the weather not cooperating i decided to fix my dash clock that finally stopped displaying the time a few weeks ago. It seems that the intermittent display is caused by the poor wave soldering that the manufacturer had done. The problem with this is some pins can have excessive solder while other pins have very little. I decided to check out the pins under a microscope and found many cracked cold solder joints so i decided to re-flow every single pin. FYI for those re-soldering the pins, because of the wave soldering technique as soon as you apply heat to the pin and the existing solder is molten it will bubble and pop that can leave a hole or crack in the re-flow.


Finished re-flowing more solder, removed excess solder, and cleaned up all the flux residue


Re-installed and works fine!

[Dr_Snooz]

Dang. It shines like new!

[gp02a0083]

little teaser picts. Now she is 100% cancer/rust free. New arches installed, hatch dent fixed, ect.

[Oldblueaccord]

Looking great!

[gp02a0083]

Ready for paint , sticking with the nh503-p code for now

[MessyHonda]

Seen some pics of facebook. Cant wait to see full size pics on here once its all done.

[gp02a0083]

its been a while since my last update. Lots of shenanigans and BS with progressive and the shop. The end result was me not having to pay for anything... long story.

While i was waiting for the work to be finished i started reconditioning the moldings, Honda had a somewhat decent idea for the rubber parts on the moldings but they eventually flake and fail. Took a while to remove all the rubberized coating.

Side 1/4 hatch trim

rear upper hatch trim

weather beaten wiper arms




Finished work


Had to reglue the outer molding parts

[gp02a0083]

Next i started working on the Koni's and got all my suspension stuff ready







I used vogland springs being they are the only other drop around 1"
The koni's were originally set to 1.5 turns from soft in front and 1 turn fron soft in the rear

"upgraded" the brakes as well, went with EBC brakes ordered from summit at the time. Be careful ordering, first set of fronts i had were for the smaller front disc setup. Rotor never fit over the hub at all, the correct set installed no problem. I was skeptical about my akebono pads i used in the front and the generics that came with the loaded rear calipers, swapped everything out for decent hawk pads.

[gp02a0083]

Did some more research and found out our hatches have a unique molding clip that was only used on the accords from 86-89. Took some measurements and looked into this 3d prototyping stuff through 3dhubs.com and autodesk123d.

Thanks to one of our Vet members, Johnny O, for supplying a few clips with the mounting studs ( sadly they all break )

old busted clips:


Rendering:


First Test run of prints:

really neat stuff and my printing guy was very helpful after several printing attempts failed. Glad i went with a cheap material to evaluate if this is ever worth it. Happy with the first run but still improvements need to be made but they fit the molding well but i need to adjust the rest of the clip to pull the molding closer to the body

[gp02a0083]

Now that the hatch was "done" I had some work to do cleaning up the hack job shops work in the rear fender wells, didnt like the idea of shredding my brand new tires





more suspension stuff to work on, need to rebuild the prelude arms and measure for the spacer needed.


New shoes, Compe's 15x7 with 205/55/15 kuhmo extesa II's

got these from tire rack, always check your stuff when you get it shipped, two of my wheels had bad scuffs and tirerack would not honor enkei's warrenty even if it is cosmetic. They tried to chuck it up to shipping , but kinda hard to damage the rim lip when the rim is 7" wide and the tire is 8.1" wide. Not to mention they like to stick 13 1/4oz weights and can't properly balance a tire correctly with the fancy hunter road force balancing crap. Their solution was to offer me 2 wheels at 50% off. To hell with that. I played hard ball and they quickly shipped me two replacements free of charge. Took the other two wheels to my uncles and pop the beads off them and remounted the tires, only had to use 3 1/4 oz weights. will never buy anything from that shitty company again with that kinda return policy.

moved onto other stuff and got other things installed:




both rear wheel houses are seamed sealed and lined with por-15 so never rusting again!

[2oodoor]

Looking good

[Tdurr]

yes!!!! im loving all this restoration going on. keep it up man!

[gp02a0083]

After about a month's worth of work , got it back rolling again


Brought it to my friend to have it aligned


The rears are set to dead "0" for toe and camber, everything is good there. However, the prelude control arms cause a slight issue. I took the time to do a little homework on the control arm builds here, the overall spacing required is just about 0.355" - 0.360", allows the control arm to bolt right up using the accord pin and prelude mounts. According to the how-to the spacers should be toward the firewall, this may not be entirely correct but may as well be used as a starting point. My friend and I aligned the front both with the stock accord arms and with the prelude arms, curious how off the alignment would have been without camber correction. With the accord arms the castor was within spec, however the prelude arms do play a bit with the castor as you increase / decrease the camber. I took frame and wheel house measurements and all were in spec before my friend and I even thought about moving the tq rods. Seems like the prelude arms require a little bit of fine tuning to get the thrust angle and castor better. I'll have to mess with that when he gets back from vacation in a week.

[gp02a0083]

So after the alignment was ok to drive besides the castor issue, Next step was to resolve the now horrible / harsh bouncy ride, was soo bad i thought i was going to make a new sunroof!

Suspension setup:
Koni Reds
Fronts P/N: 80-2581L & 80-2581R
Rears P/N : 80-2582
Both upgraded with Energy suspension poly bushings
Springs: Vogland 1.2" drop sport springs P/N: 957015

Originally I had set the koni's rebound dampening to 1.5 turns from soft and the rears at 1-1.25 turns from full soft, Overall the ride was horrible and bouncy. Made the car feel very uncontrolled over bumps. I then removed the whole set and set the fronts to 2.25 turns from full soft and the rears I maxed out. The ride improved slightly as far as bouncing , but still was super harsh over very minor imperfections on the road surface.

This is when I was deciding on going with another spring set or go back to my bilstiens. So i decided to dig up some information and call some of these vendors. As far as im aware, Eibach is the only other company to offer a drop spring within the 1" to 1.5" range. With this I contacted Eibach ( 1-800-507-2338) regarding the sport kit (P/N: 4005.140), I spoke with Trevor regarding this spring set from them. He indicated that they are no longer producing these springs , most likely why the main source for them is ebay. He was able to provide the spring rates for the 4005.140 kit. Note these springs are progressive, not linear like the oem ones so height and coil size will appear different. Fronts are 308 lb/in to 742 lb/in and the rears are 97lb/in to 200lb/in. I did read up that some of the members running the eibach kit complain about the rear handling of the car, at 97lb/in it does not surprise me, that appears to be too soft compared to the oem 117 lb/in springs. Hell OEM style cargo coils can be used at 145 lb/in and 175 lb/in.

With this new information , I called Vogtland about the spring rates for the 957015 kit being i was only able to obtain a tech sheet written in German ( tried translator apps but didnt work). I contacted Layla ( 9951-694-6981 ext 101 ) at Vogtland, she was unable to give me any info at the time and needed to contact the German division of the company the following working day. When I received a call back from Layla she indicated / given me spring rates that appeared linear with the fronts at 350 lb/in and the rears at 320 lb/in. Even she said those values seemed a bit high and requested that the german division re dyno the springs for the exact values. Still waiting on the actual test results. in the meantime Layla suggested a contact at koni to help with this ride quality issue.

Next Step was getting a hold of someone at Koni, that was a bit rough trying to get a human to speak to over the phone lol. I ended up speaking with Lee Grimes, he is a fellow tech associate that works with Gordon that has helps other members in the past. Lee is very knowledgeable ( been tracking a CRX for nearly 20 years) and is very familiar with the prelude type suspension we have on our accords. He took the time to educate me a bit on the possible issues that I could be having with the dampeners. First and foremost he mentioned that it is very very easy to over-dampen or under dampen with the system so its important to understand how that is translated through the car to the driver. He explained these conditions using a sine wave as a model in relation to the spring force and dampening force. ideally an oscillation or full cycle ( compression and rebound) would be somewhat symmetrical for both situations, resulting in smoother transitions at the extremes. Basically if your savvy with data handling depending on the condition, the sine wave would become more of a square wave. Lee had also mentioned the importance of the bump stop and how it is supposedly used by engineers. Older suspension styles like ours mainly use the bump stop to help prevent bottoming out and damaging further components, late model stuff the bump stop is incorporated into the overall travel / strength of the spring. Sounds legit, but my concern is on the older stuff.

With my education lesson done, I re adjusted the koni's to 3/4's of a turn from full soft for both the front and rear. Bump stops were trimmed to a height of about 1" / 1.25". Now the car has a good balance between comfort and performance. I need to speak with Lee again to discuss my results so he has application notes and i wasted to discuss with him if it was possible to provide a coil over system being most guys use the civic fronts and legend rears. Don't think it will go anywhere being they get less than 1 call a year regarding our trusty CA chassis, but its worth putting the word out there for good aftermarket upgrades.

[Oldblueaccord]

After about a month's worth of work , got it back rolling again


Brought it to my friend to have it aligned


The rears are set to dead "0" for toe and camber, everything is good there. However, the prelude control arms cause a slight issue. I took the time to do a little homework on the control arm builds here, the overall spacing required is just about 0.355" - 0.360", allows the control arm to bolt right up using the accord pin and prelude mounts. According to the how-to the spacers should be toward the firewall, this may not be entirely correct but may as well be used as a starting point. My friend and I aligned the front both with the stock accord arms and with the prelude arms, curious how off the alignment would have been without camber correction. With the accord arms the castor was within spec, however the prelude arms do play a bit with the castor as you increase / decrease the camber. I took frame and wheel house measurements and all were in spec before my friend and I even thought about moving the tq rods. Seems like the prelude arms require a little bit of fine tuning to get the thrust angle and castor better. I'll have to mess with that when he gets back from vacation in a week.

See thats what I suspected with the prelude arm but never could find anyone to dig into that very deep. Good work on the arms.

[gp02a0083]

See thats what I suspected with the prelude arm but never could find anyone to dig into that very deep. Good work on the arms.

Thanks Blue. Just want to make sure things are correct.

yes there is little information on the subject and the how-too should be updated. As said before , putting the spacers on the back side toward the firewall is most likely a good starting point. I guess its also how comfortable you are with adjusting the bottom tq rods to the extremes to correct this. I've checked everything from wheel house to frame measurements and everything is good there. I guess as a general statement that you should fine tune the shims so that you need minimal amount of adjustment on the bottom to get it in spec at the range of camber you want to set it at. However , i do see many people grind/drill out the holes for the ball joint because they don't have enough correction. I'm in the middle of the adjustment range for the camber and im near -2* , my friend didn't want to make the camber any more positive or else it would have rolled the castor back further. However , i think i have enough adjustment because i'm not lowered that much.

I also noticed that many use multiple little washers for the arm spacing, i ordered 3 different thickness Stainless steel washer packs. I wanted as few washers as possible