You Know the Old Saying...

With FF Battle 9 days away the crunch is on to get Hasport 88 CRX ready. The Plan? Jam a J35 from a 2004 Honda Odyssey in and make the necessary suspension adjustments make it handle. The J35 and trans weighs an extra 215 lbs and that's all mounted over the front wheels. In some weird way, will that mean better front end downforce? Or will it just create problems.

Here's the engine, a J35A4; it came stock with 240 hp at the flywheel. It will be interesting to see if what gains can be made in horsepower tuning with an AEM EMS. If I can get a header for it, that may help too.

The first preparations for the CRX involve some mods to the engine bay, this is Honda's biggest engine and it touches in a couple of different places. Some of the rear crossmember is trimmed away, as well as some of the headlamp bucket. BTW if you click on the pictures you can see larger images for better detail.

The K-series engine bracket had to be removed as well and the J-series bracket installed. That involved a lot of grinding and some blood letting to get the old one out.

I have gloves, I really should wear them.

One thing I noticed after removing the weld-in K-series bracket, rust had formed under it on the framerail. So this time the framerail was painted with weld-thru primer and then the edges were sealed with body seam sealer. I also just welded the edges of the bracket instead of in the holes. That way if I ever get the itch to mount some new Honda engine hotness it will be easier to remove the J-bracket.

One other thing I should mention in the engine bay prep is moving the brake proportioning valve from the shock tower to the firewall. It had already been done on my car because of the K-series engine. If people want I can put up a step by step on how to do it. Just let me know.

Next the engine install.

Electric Power Steering Pump Install

One of the unique features of Hasport's 88 CRX is the wide front end and 255 wide front tires. When we pioneered the idea of using the much wider front tires we knew there would be a trade off in steering effort. Originally we were going use the K-series PS pump with the 88-91 Civic PS rack, but because of the supercharger the PS pump and pulley were going to stick out of the hood a little too much and ruin the look. I know what you're thinking, "There's already a supercharger sticking out of the hood, ruin what look?!?" Well, it just didn't look right.


So after some discussion we decided EPS (electric power steering) would be the cleaner option. This was a couple of years ago and after numerous lame reasons for postponing, I am finally getting around to doing the install. I wish now I had of done it earlier. About the time we had originally planned to do the install Karcepts came out with an installation kit for the second gen Toyota MR2 EPS pump and an article appeared in Honda Tuning. After that prices for the MR2 EPS pump jumped from $50-75 to $200. I'm partially to blame, I suggested the article to Tim Kelly who wrote it for Honda Tuning, but talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Crap, I hate unintended consequences.


So here's the nitty-gritty tech on how the PS pump was done. 


The first thing was finding a reasonably priced PS pump. Setting up alerts on Ebay resulted in finding a $90 "Buy It Now" PS pump from a US salvage yard. It was immediately purchased and then followed up with a quick phone call to the salvage yard to make sure no one snaked it away with a phone call of their own. After the pump was secured a quick trip was made to Hasport's salvage yard to grab some other parts.
Here's what I had after the pump arrived. Steering rack and crossmember from a 1990 Civic Wagovan. BTW all 88-91 PS racks and crossmembers are the same, so there is no one unit that is more desirable. The MR2 PS pump and a Civic manual to see where the return lines need to go. Also in the pic are some heavy duty plugs from a 2000 Prelude SH wiring harness to connect the PS pump, but I decided not to use those.

Mounting the Pump


Having done this conversion once before on Tage Evanson's Time Attack EG I already had a bracket design I kinda liked. I made a couple of alterations to ease installation then cut and bent the bracket.

Two were made, just in case of I needed to make some bending changes, and good thing too. After a two small changes the second bracket fit perfectly.

The engine bay of the CRX is cramped, so I decided to mount the pump on the frame rail just in front of the right front tire.

Originally I had planned to bolt the bracket directly to the frame rail, but the frame rail isn't very flat. So I trimmed the spare bracket and welded it to the frame rail to provide a flat surface to bolt the PS pump and bracket to. I will probably make a lighter weight version of this in the near future once I decide if this is where the PS pump will stay. It seems a little overkill.

Plumbing the System


Before mounting the rack some modifications were made to the PS lines. The PS lines were heading off towards the driver's side of the car and the new pump was going to be on the passenger's side. First the high-pressure line was re bent using a tubing bender so the line came across the back of the cross member and forward making sure it cleared the K-series rear bracket. Next the rubber part of the hose was chopped off.

Next the return lines were shortened. This makes the routing easier since flexible rubber hoses can be used.

The subframe was installed so the hose lengths could be measured.  We found a fitting on a Prelude rack that worked with the MR2 pump and used a piece of fuel hose to mock-up the high-pressure PS hose and figure out the length and how everything is clocked. Next the mock-up was dropped off at the local hose builder. The next day we picked up the new high-pressure hose and some lengths of hydraulic safe rubber hoses. Oh, and a stopped by the salvage yard to grab a PS reservoir and bracket from an EG.

The PS reservoir bracket was modified,

the reservoir installed,

and plumbing was plumbed.

Next, the Electrical part of EPS (to be continued)

How many engines has your car had? Part 2

This is part 2 of the engine saga of Hasport's 1988 CRX, the K-series engines.


Although we were well on the way to building a 1.9 liter B-series engine for the CRX, the car magazines were starting to pay increasing attention to the K-series swaps. Hasport already had three successful K-series swaps kits on the market for EG Civics, EK Civics and DC2 Integras plus there was a lot of talk on the interwebs about doing a K-swapped EF. Earlier in the year when we were prototyping the H22 mounts in the red CRX I quickly tried the K20 in the engine bay, so I knew it could fit.

So the B19 was shelved and a K20 was wheeled in for prototyping the engine mounts. Although I knew it would fit, it wasn't really a good fit. K-series engines are tall. The K20 is taller than an H22 by almost 1.75 inches, and a K24 is even taller by another .75 inches. To keep the oil pan from smacking into the ground we designed the mount kit for the shorter K20. Of course when we did our swap, there was no way I was going to settle for the 2.0, not after driving the supercharged K24 powered EP3 for the last year.


Back in the 70's when I was first getting into cars, an engine sticking out of a hood was a regular thing. If you saw a set of dual quad carbs on a high-rise manifold sticking out of the hood, you knew the car meant business. So as far as I was concerned the added impact of a K-series with supercharger sticking out of the hood of the CRX was the right message. Even to this day, you gotta admit it's pretty damn cool looking.

This was the first K-series engine to find it's way into the CRX. It was a K24A1 with K20A2 head. It pumped out about 280 HP. The first event this car went to was the Super Street Eurotuner Time Attack in November of 2004 where it finished first in the Limited FWD class with Rich Hayes driving.

After that first K24 went in several others followed. Next was an AEBS sleeved monster motor with Pauter Rods, JE Pistons, Eibach valve springs, IPS cams, the JR supercharger, custom SC pulley, DC sports header, MagnaFlow exhaust and two huge bottles of Nitrous courtesy of Nitrous Express. On the Supercharger alone the car made about 350 HP and with nitrous 450 HP. The engine was detuned slightly for the Sport Compact Car's Ultimate Street Car Challenge because on street tires anything over 400 HP was flat out undrivable. 

Later in the year at the third Super Street Time Attack, this engine met an unfortunate and early demise as the bottom end decided it had had enough of racing. The postmortem wasn't conclusive, but one of the rods decided it didn't want to push the piston up and down anymore and mowed through the block. The moment of destruction was caught on tape by Joe Flores of K20 engine swaped Fit fame. The video is below, expletives have been beeped out to protect delicate ears.

The pictures still make me want to cry. *sniff sniff* This all happened a couple of days before the American Touge 3 filming so a quick replacement was needed. This time we opted to go cheap and bought a CRV engine. We took a bit of a hit on horsepower with that swap, from 350 down to 278 HP. That was OK though, the Touge test driver was complaining about too much horsepower. Imagine that, too much horsepower.

That's basically how the car sits now. The only other improvements were some Skunk2 K20A3/K24 Stage 2 cams. That brought the horsepower back up to 300, thank you very much. But now it's time to make some improvements. This time we are going to address the two biggest complaints of the Jackson Racing Superchargers – belt slippage and intake air temps. I got a hold of some super trick parts to test on the supercharger, a cog belt drive kit and adapter for intercooling the supercharger. Heh, heh, heh, stay tuned.

How many engines has your car had? Part 1

Of all the cars Hasport has built over the years my favorite is the Yellow 1988 Honda CRX. And it's not just my favorite it seems, I get more questions about this car than all our other projects combined. Hasport originally bought the car and I used it as a daily driver. It replaced the red 1990 CRX I was driving, which eventually got an H22 transplant and turned into a drag car. BTW that red CRX went on to star in a one hour special of the show Pinks on Speed TV, but that's another story.


It's gone through many iterations: D16, B16, Supercharged B16, and three different Supercharged K-series engines. It started with the Craig Short, he owned the car before we did. He swapped a B16A1 into the car. It was featured in Sport Compact Car in around 2001. Here's a link to an archive of the article. I don't have a picture of the engine at the time, two hard drive crashes in the span of two days erased almost every picture I took before 2002. John Thawley took the original photos for the article, I'll see if he might have an engine photo he didn't use.


Even though Craig said he'd never sell the CRX, Hasport bought it from him a short while later. I don't remember the circumstances but we were very glad to give the car a good home. Almost immediately I got the itch for more horsepower. Since I wanted to road race the car rather than drag race I decided against a turbo. After some discussions with Oscar Jackson I decided to use a modified version of the 99-00 Civic Si Supercharger kit.

The car was tuned using a Zdyne (remember them?) programmable ECU and put out a healthy 250 HP and almost 200 ft/lbs of torque. The car was stomping fast too, mid 12s in the quarter (yeah I dragged it) and very fast down the straights on the road course. It took a precise foot not to break the front tires loose rolling on the throttle coming out of corners. 

Armed with the supercharged B16, this is how the car went to the Super 2NR TV Honda vs Nissan Challenge (No Links). The car was pretty fast at the event, unfortunately I was not. After the race the engine wasn't quite the same. I think I had hurt a rod bolt with an missed shift. It was time to build another engine. This time I decided to build a bored and stroked B16, actually a B19. Along with the built engine, Oscar Jackson gave me some cog belt drives for the supercharger to try out. I started to source the parts, get the block sleeved but before I could finish, another engine swap trend started to take off. Time to change directions.

Next time Part 2 – The K-swaps.