With the Honed Development kit being installed, I was speaking to them prior & during the process. Before we started, I raised the point if I should be changing the current springs (F: 14kg RL 10kg) to something stiffer, as a friend from Yez Racing changed theirs to F: 20kg when doing their Honed kit. This was to obviously stiffen up the front, but from collecting photos of my car going into various braking zones I could see the front compressing a lot, the rear looked to almost lift off the ground. Honed recommended to go with 18kg or 20kg for the fronts, and leave the 10kg in the rear. Just Jap are the official BC suppliers in Australia, so I placed an order for the same length springs but in 20kg.

In addition, I decided I'd readjust the coilovers the correct way to set the compression to the max it can be without hitting the body, and setting the height correct via the spring perch. Honed suggested 295mm - 300mm for ride height, measured from the center of the wheel to the fender.

Lets get into this, it'll be quite a detailed post as there was a bit of mucking about to get these setup correctly for my car. Here's the dirty buggas in their current state.

Firstly we need to remove the top hats to get to the spring. Coilovers don't compress the spring like standard shocks do, so you don't require clamps to remove the top hat safety, we can just use a impact gun for quick work of it.

An interesting discovery was on the 2 rear coilovers top hat nut, the collars had a ton of scoring, as you can see from the photo below. It went around the entire circumference of the collar on both. The weird thing is (reference the 2nd photo below), is the bore of the top hat bushing had zero score markings. I feel these were damaged before install by BC Racing, but we'll never know. As they haven't scored the bore I continued to use them, with our tight schedule.

Comparing the 20kg to 14kg springs

Setting the bump travel

I might as well type up how to do this in case I need to refer anyone in the future, or myself haha. A lot of people adjust coilovers incorrectly, including myself up until this date. This starts off assuming the coilover is already removed from the car, and the car is on jackstands.

Remove the top hat nut, top hat, top hat washer, dust boot and the spring. Then refit everything without the spring.

Refit the coilover and wheel to the car. We now want to jack up the lower control arm to compress the shock absorber until the bump stop compresses completely between the shock body and the top hat washer, to immitate full compression.

With this achieved, you want to turn the wheel full lock left to full lock right to check for the wheel hitting any part of the body, as this means it could happen whilst driving and we don't want that. The goal is to set the maximum possible travel of the shock just before the wheel makes contact with the body.

Now depending on the current adjustments of your coilover, you'll need to do one of two things:

• If it makes contact with the body, you need to extend the shock body by winding it out of the lower mount, which in turn moves the wheel down and away from the body.
• If it doesn't make contact but there's a big gap, we can minimise this by winding the shock body into the lower mount, which inturn moves the wheel closer to the body.

(I didn't actually take any photos during this process, but you'll be looking up underneath the car to observe the bump stop at the top of the shock body)

Once this is done, you can lock the shock body length in place by tightening the lower mount locking collar against the lower mount.

Setting the ride height

Next remove the coilover from the car, refit the spring, then refit the coilover to the car. I've purposely wound off the spring perch just to see how low the car would sit with just the shocks

And this is how low she sat. Does look cool, but the spring needs to sit firmly on the spring perch.

Now we can set the height of the car from the spring & spring perch locking collar, so I wound the spring perch up to seat the spring tight against the top hat.

Honed had informed me to aim for 295-300mm ride height, this being measured from the center of the wheel to the guard. If it was currently too low, I could continue to wind the spring perch up and this would raise the car. My issue was, with the spring perch holding the spring tightly against the top hat, the ride height was 315mm or more from memory, and you can see from the photos below how that looked.

The answer to this is installing some helper springs. So the next day I went to Just Jap to get 4, as I didn't have time to wait for shipping. The issue I then faced was with the helper springs installed, the spring perch and it's locking collar pretty much sat against the lower mount locking collar as pictured below, which would give me barely any adjustment. In fact, this kept the same ride height almost. The photo below is the rears, which I adjusted a bit more and it worked with the helper spring, but look how close it was. The front was a lot worse, I didn't get a side by side shot like this though.

I'll do 2 lots of 2 photos below, this is comparing the ride height with the helper spring installed, and the ride height without the helper spring but with the spring perch just holding the spring tight.

Helper spring:

No helper spring:

Relaying this to Honed, they said I either need to buy 20kg springs but in a shorter length, or (and what I guessed) remove the middle collar which is used for locking the spring perch, and instead lock the spring perch collar against the lower mount collar, and this will only allow a set height as you can imagine.

This set it to 285-290mm ride height which for now I'm going to have to accept, in the long run I'll need to order some shorter 20kg springs as I'd like to have the option for ride height adjustability.

Coilovers finalised for the front, for some reason I didn't take them finalised for the rear.

And here is the ride height set for the Civic! I'm liking the look of this height as well. It has made it a bit more work to get a trolley jack under it, I need to jack it from the side onto some wood (before I could jack off the corner of the traction bar), but oh well.

I think with the shorter 20kg springs in the front, I'd raise it 5-10mm to be within the 295-300mm window that Honed suggested, but for now this'll have to do!