85’ CRX Si-ish Build Thread
This was written about a year and a half after starting the project… again. So I apologize if I get lost in the story, forget things or write them out of order. Hopefully the pictures tell most of the story.
Background on me: My interest in cars started young because my dad owns an auto body shop. I spent alot of my time down there either working on something or making a mess when i was younger. After high school i actually started working there full time and learned alot as my interests grew. At some point i decided to go back to school for mechanical engineering which i did complete. I now work for a company that makes EGR and Flow control valves for Heavy duty truck applications as well as solenoids and other things for military/aerospace. Specifically, I work as a product development/test engineer so i spend a lot of my time running dynos, vibration testing and designing validation test plans among other types of testing and design.
Background on the car:
I got the car back in like 99’ when an elderly women hit something with it or got hit in the drivers door and quarter panel. My dad towed it in and the lady did not want to fix it so we offered her some money and she took it.
1985 Honda CRX HF
Miles: 35k roughly
Color: White
Interior: Blue
Engine: D15A1
The car was damaged enough in the left side that we purchased a donor car from a junk yard that was an 86 HF, red in color, to steal parts off of. At that time i was about 12 years old and had already spent a good amount of time at the shop so i started literally removing everything. By the age of 15 or so i had cut the quarter panel off the donor and had it welded on to the 85, the welds don't look great since it was my first panel graft but its solid. I rebuilt the carb, did some other general mechanic work, did a bunch of body work and then also started to paint the door jams and underside of the hatch and doors. At this time i was busily looking for parts and aftermarket things which were hard to find even back in the early 2000’s which probably led to my lack of interest by the time i graduated high school. Needless to say while my interests changed the car went into long term storage and basically forgotten about for 15 years or so.
Fast forward to about a year and a half ago… I've been spending most of my free time on my 59’ Chevrolet Apache restoration with the help of a close friend. While doing this his interest in cars increased greatly to the point where he bought a 2004 (im guessing on the year) BMW M3 with the intent to autocross it. Well since he had that I also wanted to race ha. I remembered i had the CRX and did some research on the feasibility of auto-crossing it. Turns out its not a bad option. I immediately ran to the long term storage location and starting tearing everything out of the container that was in the way. I drug the car out, put it on a flat bed and away i went to bring it home.
Thankfully i have a good size heated pole barn at my house that i have all my projects, tools and other things my wife calls garbage in. The car was dropped off and i started cleaning it out and taking inventory. A Lot of the stuff i had taken off years ago was still in the car but i spent a good amount of time searching through storage containers and crawlspaces trying to find where i put stuff years ago. In short i found almost everything and supplemented the rest with donor cars that we had around the shop.
Anyways, here is the car as i pulled it out of storage. Time to get to work.
The first thing i wanted to tackle was replacing the original HF engine with the fuel injected version. We had a silver 87’ Si at the shop from years ago that was in really rough shape. Literally you could see the ground through almost anywhere on the floor but it had a good engine as far as i knew. I pulled the donor from the weeds and brought it to my house where i started to take everything i could off of it. Pulling the engine/transmission was easy, basically cut everything i didnt need, sawzall’d the core support out of the way and out it came. I removed the harness, the dash, seat belts, basically anything i could possibly use for later if needed. After i got everything out the car left for the scrap yard. There was literally nothing left of it.
Continued Below