Jeremy Clarkson voice: "On tonights episode of fixing things on the race car.."

• Steering rack
• Data plug
• Intermediate shaft bearing
• PCI rails
• Drive shaft rebuild
• Misc..

Steering rack

A few days after being back home I decided to pull out my spare EF9 steering rack and take a look as to whats inside the untouched rack. It came out of my spare EF9 shell as I was going to swap it into my white EF9 before deciding to just rebuild that steering rack instead.

As soon as I removed the valve body I instantly saw what was missing, the larger circlip which sits below the pinion and holds it in place. As I've never removed this, it must have fallen out/snapped at some point in it's life, and as the old thick plate never sat flat 100% it's probably fallen out. The 2nd photo below shows the other side of the valve body which would usually be there.

With the circlip removed, I was able to reproduce what would have happened on mine by pushing the pinion through.

With my rack on the bench, you can see how far it could push through, and to be honest it popped out against just from me moving it around the backyard to jack it up for this occasion.

I'm just going to use the circlip from the EF9 rack. Cleaned up inside this part of the rack, then reapplied some grease and inserted the circlip.

Now to make a new blocking plate. I'll use some 3mm sheet I have lying around. Loving the look of the new plate, looks quite solid. I did speak to a friend about welding a nut onto the side of the rack so I could have a tab coming off of the plate to bolt down from but he felt it wouldn't be so easy. For now the 2 bolts will have to do.

Wiped the whole thing down, ready to go back in the car!

Data plug

With the plan of starting to indulge in data logging, the Hondata S300 has a small memory capacity to store logs on the device. I captured some data at Honda Nationals '23 on the few sessions I did go out for and it appears to have filled up a good chunk of the memory. I'll have to test this further when returning to the track, but I'm starting to think I'll need to pull the logs every session.

As I'll need to be plugging in the cable to the ECU, it'll be best to have a data access plug located on the dash so I can sit the laptop on the roof, plug in and away we go, instead of going upside down underneath the dash to get to the ECU itself. There are many different plugs on the market, but after seeing the "Bulgin Limited PX0842/B" in a fellow club members car I was sold. Looks cool, red is my favourite colour, sold!

I've been analysing race cars for a while now down to their fine detail for ideas on my own car, it seems most people put this type of data access plug on the passenger side, which I'm guessing is because the ECU is that side. Also possibly because at a race meet in the pits, the passenger side of the car is against the pit garage, maybe a safety perspective as well. I removed the passenger air vent to see how it would look in the typical position, but just wasn't feeling it.

I've decided to put it on the drivers side, this is because in the event of debugging a error code, I'd want to turn the ignition on/start the car, so only makes sense to have it there. I only need a 2 metre cable from the ECU to plug, but even up to a 3 metre cable won't have data loss.

With the layout of my dash and not wanting to put it in the air vent, I went with the factory dimmer switch location on the cluster hood. Long story short, the car is a 88-89 which used a different cluster/cluster hood, and when switching to the EF9 SiR cluster it uses a 90-91 cluster hood. The dimmer switch is different, the 88-89 had a circuit board/resistors inside of it and required to use that specific switch, so I hid it in the coin pouch on the dash and left the 90-91 one in the cluster hood to fill the hole.

I removed the switch and it's surrounding panel and fitted up the plug as you can see there would be this gap around it. I decided to cut back most of that surrounding panels back casting so I could fit the locking ring onto the back of the plug. Actually turned out quite well I think! Once at the track I'll take some photos of it in use

Intermediate shaft bearing

The next item to replace on the list to try resolve the loud rotational noise was the intermediate shaft bearing, after it was suggested by Grant from Honed when chatting about the issue at Winton a few months back. I had the bearing ordered a week after getting back at the start of October and it took 1.5 months to come from Japan, which kinda put the car on hold.

First up you remove a dust boot and circlip, then press the shaft out.

A lot of dried up grease from the bearing.

Bearing then pressed out. With this loud rotational noise, I was hoping this bearing would be the culprit and fall apart as I removed it, however this wasn't the case. The bearing seemed to move ok, removing the red rubber casing you could see all the grease was gone but nothing was really damaged to be honest. Safe to say this isn't the issue, but we will go ahead with the new bearing anyways.

Pressing in the new bearing + shaft

Good as new!

PCI rails

Two posts ago when prepping for Honda Nationals, I swapped out my Bride rails for some DIY EF9 rails which came in my EF9. They were ok but as you can see from the photo, bent pretty easily. Enough is enough, time to fix this.

For now I've decided to run the PCI fixed rails supplied by BYP Racing Developments. Proven product in all of their cars, can't go wrong. You can see with them temporarily rigged up in the car that they sit much lower.

One issue I faced was my RaceTech seat is actually quite wide at the base, which meant I had to flip the side mounts. This was annoying as I can no longer easily adjust the seat position, as you can undo the bolts on the side and slide it back and forth. The photo below shows how far down I could push the seat before it hit the bolts holding the side brackets to the base.

I think in the future I'll look to change the seat as I'd like it lower, but for now it's already a huge difference.

Here's a photo of the height of the seat with the Bride rails.

And here's a photo with the PCI rails

One thing I found when trying to adjust the seat to the desired position was in order to get it as far forward as I wanted (whilst keeping the seat centered), the front left of the seat kept hitting the exhaust tunnel because this blood seat is so wide.

The only way I saw this to pan out was to take to it with the ol persauder. A few tabs and we were looking good! This might need more adjusting once I drive it on the track and get a feel for everything.

Drive shaft rebuild

Whilst at BYP picking up my PCI seat rails, I asked what CV grease they use as I recall some discussion with them on the topic between other club members at our Morgan Park day (we're all in the same club). They said the REd Line CV-2 is what they've found to be best from their testing. I went and picked some up as my passenger drive shaft boot tore. Also trialing a newly stocked Japanese CV boot my mate brought in from Japan recently, supposedly stronger material so hopefully we see them tear less.

This will be my first time doing drive shaft boots, mainly because I want to remove the down time of taking it somewhere else and maybe having to wait a day or two to get it back, and the cost. I ordered a kit with the tools (for both styled clamps). Got Eric the car guy on YouTube, lets get this done. As it's my first time, I'll provide a few steps, for the blogs sake.

I really need to bolt down this vice.. Cut the metal clamps off, then place the drive shaft in the vice. Working on the inner first, you'll want to pull back the boot. This side will slide off by pulling, and you'll see 3 bearings on a tripod spider piece. Best to hold those bearings when taking the CV off, then place them on the bench. Give them a clean and check for any damage.

Note, this 3rd one seemed to have a lot of surface rust around it, all I did for now is clean it the best I could.

Now to remove the tripod spider, take off the top circlip and the spider will slide off. No need to remove the bottom clip. The boot can now come off.

Put the new boot on, spider back on and the circlip.

Grease the CV up! Then place the 3 bearings back on the spider, positioning them in the correct way to slide into the CV. Whilst holding the 3 bearings with 1 hand so they don't slide off, reinstall the CV, pull the boot up and done!

For the outer, same process with removing the metal clamp and boot, when to remove this CV you need to angle it downwards to the floor, and with the shaft angled in the vice, use a hammer to hit against the inner race. You'll need a copy of smacks to get it to pop off, hold the spline end so it doesn't go flying.

Clean it out and regrease. To reinstall, the clip on the shaft has an opening, face it towards you and plonk the CV back on the shafts spline. Use a small flat head to hold the clip down whilst pushing the CV end onto the shaft more, eventually you'll pop it on. Suppose you could tap the end with a hammer if you need some persuasion.

With both ends done, you just need to fit some new metal clamps. I decided to actually try the 'newer' style of clamp (tool not pictured) and both they were very easy! Happy this was a easy process to be honest, just a bit of time taken to make sure I did everything correctly.

A few weeks later, sneak peak but I remove the gearbox for a rebuild. With the drivers drive shaft out of the car, I found the outer CV clamp was loose (lovely).. So I did a quick rebuild on this one too as I'm now a professional.. I did reuse the original boots as they wern't damaged + I didn't want to wait, but used the Red Line CV-2 grease and new styled clamps.

Keen to see how these last!

Misc

When fitting all the Honed stuff earlier in the year, I found I couldn't fit the rear sway bar as it was hitting the coilover external reservoirs which I assumed was due to me lowering the car too much, even though I thought this would be fine with the Honed rear geometry bracket installed as we compared this between my car and the old Yez Racing ED civic.

I decided to look at it again to see if I could figure out why. Lying underneath the car with the swaybar, I quickly realised the issue... If you recall, I swapped out the lower control arms to the ones from the EF9 shell. I forgot I had to redrill the swaybar bolt hole on the control arm on the previous arms for clearance. Some quick measurements and this looked like it'll solve the issue.

Holes drilled and it fits! The endlink rubber sits over that lip on the bottom of the arm, preventing the endlink sitting flush against the control arm. I found the spacers I must have used last time for this. I had drilled this hole lower, so I ground a flat side on the washers to fit over the lip of the control arm.

Decided to remove the washer bottle as it's not really needed, and I might choose to route the oil cooler lines through this path. I don't think I've ever required them when on the track, and I could just go into the pits and clean windscreen if needed. I could maaaybe see a need for it in an enduro? I'll leave the wiring taped back and the bottle in storage if that becomes a case.

I also managed to miss the lower part of the knuckle with the hammer when trying to pop the ball joint and collided with the rotor. The result of this was 2 parts on the edge of the rotor were burred in & upwards. Silly..

Luckily Kevin was able to machine them. As it's the track car I gave him the order to send it. Good thing is they are still within the min 20.4mm spec. The bigger burred section did chip off as seen in the last photo, but she'll be right! The first day or two back at the track are most likely going to be shakedown sessions, and tbh I only drove it twice last year so probably getting familiar to the car again.