So, where to start.. I had the B18C rebuilt in 2016 when I did the EFI/motorswap. It was built to OEM spec, with ARP headstuds, and a 0.5mm oversized piston of OEM spec due to cylinder wall damage. It was tuned straight away on a strict run in tune, and then tuned on a full tune after 1000km.

Since then it was street & track driven. Carried out the usual servicing you would and that was about it. It's always felt the same, amazing. For a while now theres always been the odd time, usually when I go to start it to take off the trailer after a track day, it'll be really rough, and the last track day it didn't even start on the first few attempts. The next day I tried starting it again and it was really rough. It got me wondering..

My mate Tony was over, his very good with cars and has a CRX. I posed the above scenario which he already knew some of, so we decided to do a compression test. As we started cranking with the plugs out, there was a different noise coming back through the intake on the compression stroke and straight away Tony seemed concerned.

I'll post the 4 cylinders, going from left to right/distributor to timing belt side. They went 205-40-190-195. When we came to the 2nd one being 40, my heart instantly sank thinking yep the motor is gone. New they are around 220-230 from memory.

Whilst testing this troublesome one Tony noted the noise coming back through the intake. He seemed to have something on his mind. He said lets take the rocker cover off and check the valves, as he believed they might actually be too tight and the valve isn't sealing the chamber at all.

Ripped the rocker cover off with a new hope, grabbed the filler gauge and lo and behold it was super tight, we couldn't shove the thinnest filler gauge through! Hard to tell, but the 2 pictures below was us trying to shove the filler gauge in, and it bending cause theres no gap. To clarify, this was for both intake and exhaust side.

With this we set to adjusting the valve clearances to spec across the entire motor. The rest wasn't too bad.

Fingers crossed we tested again, pictures are below (seems like I didn't take one for the first cylinder). The results were 210-215-215-215, no f*cking way! Absolutely couldn't believe it. She fired straight up and you could tell instantly it was already running better, smoother.

Theres a lot of questions running through my head, which has just been on a rollercoaster of emotions and $$$ signs appearing before my eyes. The big question was, how did I do a 1.09.12 at Wakefield on somewhat 3 cylinders? I could never really tell, the car always felt the same, spun 1st & 2nd, chirped 3rd. Maybe with the heat it allowed the valves to get loose enough the compression was ok? Surely not that much though.

For now it's a miracle and I should go buy a lottery ticket! It was a big eye opener though that I need to take motorsport car/engine servicing more seriously, and be checking things like valve clearances maybe once a year? I'll start to record the readings as well so I got some data to compare, and to keep an eye on things. Time to get back to Wakefield with the newly tuned beast!

Thank you so much Tony for this, definitely a life saver!

Few flicks of the Civic & EF9

Few random flicks of the Civic & EF9 out in the sun, along with them all under the pergola during the rain as I switched the Civic's race wheels for the around the house Fat 5 slippers!