That's really good to hear since my long term plans were to upgrade the springs at some point. I don't have intentions of driving this car hard with its current engine, so I just went with the softest springs which were 350/250.

So is this procedure unique to the 5th gen? I found this video yesterday for the 6th gen Civic. It looks like he just loosens the two pinch bolts at the joint and it slides right up.

 

A little more progress on the sedan.... I replaced the bad inner tie rod that came with the steering rack and got the front suspension components prepped for install.

I had some trouble removing the bushing from the front LCA's. I tried to press them out intact, but they didn't seem to want to budge. I ended up cutting out the center with hole saw and then cut ~3/4 of the way through the outer sleeve with a sawzall. They still put up a fight, but this seemed to weaken them enough to break free.



Then I got everything stripped and cleaned for powder. This time I used a zinc primer as a base coat which I believe is supposed to help with corrosion rather than adhesion. I was hoping it would help with adhesion too. I've had good results powder coating steel suspension components in the past, but I wouldn't call it great. The sand blasting effect from road debris still seams to chip away at the finish over time leaving spots of exposed metal. I thought this would be a good time to test out the primer to see if it makes any difference.





For the past week or so, I've been spraying a bit of penetrating oil on the bolts to the rear suspension. I really thought that the drivers side would give me the most trouble. Surprisingly, every bolt came loose without too much effort. The passenger side was far worse. I ended up breaking the bolt that holds the upper control arm to the trailing arm. Two bolts in the lower control arm were also seized as well the two bolts to the toe arm. None of the threads looked bad, so I'm guessing that they were seized inside the bushings.

With a bit of heat, all of the bolts came loose. I was even able to get the toe arm bolt removed without it spinning the captured nut.



To remove the broken bolt, I'm going to try to heat it and then thread on a couple of low profile nuts onto the exposed threads. I think if I can get it loose, I might be able to spin it back through the nut. Worst case, I suppose I can just grind the nut off of the trailing arm and replace it with a standard nut.



Today I have some aftermarket OE style replacement upper control arms and toe arms being delivered as well as new trailing arm bushings. I still need to buy the tool to press out the bushings.

 

So this past week I was able to remove the broken bolt in the trailing arm. I ended up cutting through the bolt with a sawzall and then welded a nut onto the exposed threads.



All 4 wheel wells were cleaned and degreased and they turned out pretty nice. The trailing arms were cleaned and new bushings were pressed in. I then spray painted the arms with VHT epoxy paint in what was supposed to be satin black. I had to order it online since the local stores don't carry it. I've had good luck with the gloss black epoxy paint in the past, but this stuff was disappointing. First, it doesn't look low gloss at all. It looks exactly like the regular gloss black. It also doesn't seem to adhere very well either. The car will be on jack stands for at least another week, so hopefully the paint will cure a bit more during that time. I don't plan on keeping the drum brakes long term, so this was good enough for me.



The torn boot on the front ball joint was replaced with a new Honda boot. Then I cleaned, masked and painted the knuckles with the same black paint.





I finally got around to assembling the coilovers. I had ordered new OEM spring cushions for the front top hats since they're still available through Honda. The OEM rears were hard to find, so I bought the KYB replacement top hats since they come with new spring cushions. Then I finally read the directions for the coilovers and realized that you don't use the OEM spring cushions at all. My OEM rear top hats had flaking paint and were a bit rusty, so I'm glad that I had the aftermarket set to replace them with.



I ordered all new OEM bolts for the rear suspension. It will be ready to go back together once the rear LCA's arrive next week. Since I was ordering some stuff from the dealership, I also threw in a new oil cap. The old one was stained brown and was a bit of an eye sore for an otherwise clean engine bay.



It looks like I'm still on track to get the car drivable before the CHD meet in October as long as the power steering leak doesn't cause too much of an issue. Even though the car has been on jack stands for a few weeks. it's been slowly leaking from the high pressure fitting this whole time. I removed the line from the steering rack and tried to re-seat it. Hopefully that's all it needed. If not, I'll purchase a new OEM feed line next.

 

nice build thread! are those the Progress CS3s? I actually have them going into my car as well.
What spring rates did you decide to go with?

 

Thanks, these are the CS3's. I just went with the softest spring rates since the short term plan is to have this as a side project until the hatch is put back together. For now it's just something different that I can drive back and forth to work while getting close to 40 mpg on regular octane. I've never had a K series, and I thought this would be a good candidate for a future swap. I'll increase the spring rates when the car is making more power.

 

NICE!!!

But please retire that jackstand...Not worth the chance .

 

Haha, it's been retired. It's only holding up the trailing arm. I wouldn't trust it to support a car.

There's actually two of them that are bent like that, which is a funny story. My neighbored barrowed a couple of jack stands to change the front pads and rotors on his Subaru Outback. Before putting the wheels on, he got into the car, started it and put it in drive. I guess to see if the brakes made any noise or vibration. He forgot the car was all wheel drive, so it lurched forward crushing the jack stands and left two disk brake sized gouges in his concrete driveway. I sort of wish I was there to have seen it... or at least see how he jacked it back up after the front of the car was flat on the ground.

 

Good Eye !!!

 

So I got all of the suspension bolted up. The rear suspension and the front drivers side were no problem, but I found that the compliance arm on the front passenger side was bent and it took me a few nights to figure out what was wrong. The (3) 14 mm bolts that hold compliance arm bushing to the body and subframe weren't lining up. I pried it into position and threaded the bolts in, but I could tell that it was twisting the lower control arm back towards the rear of the fender. You could stand next to the car and visually tell that the wheel wouldn't have been centered in the wheel well. It was about a full inch closer to the rear of the fender than the front bumper. I thought maybe the car was tweaked in an accident, but all of the welds, seam sealer and paint lines appeared to be factory. Then I thought I might have somehow bent the lower control arm when pressing out the old bushings.

Yesterday I stopped at the Honda salvage yard to pick up a replacement LCA, which also comes with the compliance arm. They had several in inventory, but they only had one passenger side available which had the hole for the sway bar, and it was as aftermarket part. I almost told them to give me one of the OEM arms without the sway bar hole since I wasn't expecting to use the compliance arm anyways. It's a good thing I didn't have them exchange it. I got home and bolted the new control arm to the car and it fit perfectly. Then I thought I would swap my original compliance arm onto the new LCA since it was at least OEM. I tried to bolt it up to the car and again the bracket for the bushing wouldn't line up with the holes in the subframe. That's when I realized that my OEM compliance arm was the culprit. This was really good news since I can still use my old LCA with the new bushings that were already pressed in.

That's a lot to say about nothing, but it really left me scratching my head for a few days and I was afraid that the car was tweaked in some major accident... and somehow I missed the signs. It still seems odd that the compliance arm was bent and not the control arm. You would think if the car had hit a curb or something, the LCA would be the part that's more likely to bend. Nonetheless, the suspension is finally on all four corners along with some new brakes.



The rear got new toe arms, UCA's and LCA's, and all new hardware.







The carpet and seats were scrubbed and steam vac'd. The area around the cup holders doesn't look stained or dirty, but I worked on that area for about an hour and the steam vac never stopped sucking up a brown, coffee colored liquid. The carpet will need to come out at some point, but that's a project for another time.

The Walmart floor mats were replaced with only slightly better mats from Amazon. At least the Amazon mats are cut specifically for this car.



I wanted a matching set of center caps for the wheels and picked up 4 new one's. I was ready to pay almost $150 for the EM1 center caps, but the parts guy told me that the 7th gen center caps were 1/3 the price and nearly the same, so I went with those instead.



There's only a few more things that I'd like to do to the sedan before I take a break from that project. Focus needs to shift back to the hatch and I started looking for trim pieces again. The door sash arrived yesterday.

 

The car is back on the ground and I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. On Sunday, I put about 100 miles on it just to make sure that everything was tight. It really rides well with the new suspension. There's no more clunking noises or bounciness when hitting bumps on the highway. So far, there's also no leak from the power steering. I think re-seating the line was all it needed. I have a 4 wheel alignment scheduled for Thursday morning. Once that's taken care of, I'll start to put some miles on it.

 

Hell yeah!

Looks great!

 

I see that you replaced the LCA bushings, but did not read what brand nor where you source the bushings from. Could you let me know what bushings you bought for the LCA?

I have been paying attention to buy the Hardrace kit for a while (for a 00 thou..) but has been out of stock for quite some time. Looking for alternatives.

 

Amazing work, love to see this amount of effort put in!

 

For the front LCA's, I just bought cheap OEM style rubber bushings from Rock Auto. The inners are Moog and the outers are Mevotech. I don't have experience with the Hardrace bushings, but the ones that I bought probably aren't comparable to the kit from Hardrace.

Thanks, it was a good bit of work to just to get the car in a state that I thought it was going to be in back in early July. The head gasket really threw it off track. I sort of rolled the dice on a $1000 non-running Civic and got burned.

 

We had a successful trip to CHD9 and the car made it without too much of an issue.

I took off work on Friday to do a little work on the car before leaving that night. The underbody was pressure washed and scrubbed.



The trunk carpet was scrubbed and the spare tire area was thoroughly cleaned.



Then I needed to finally do something about the floor cover since we needed the trunk space to store our luggage. The OEM floor cover was still intact but badly warped.



I ran out to Lowes and bought a 4' x 8' sheet of 1/4" plywood to make a temporary replacement by tracing the OEM floor cover. Pine probably isn't the best choice for this, but it was relatively cheap and somewhat sturdy.





We weren't originally planning to stay the weekend so we had to make some last minute reservations for a cabin. Our normal spot in Bryson City was already booked, so we found a place in Tallassee, TN instead. Google Maps didn't have street view inside neighborhood otherwise we probably would have looked elsewhere. It was an extremely rough road made of a mix of dirt and gravel and littered with pot holes. At one point there was a treacherous downhill portion that was washed out. I thought there was no way that we'd get back out of there the following day. Luckily, the following morning we saw a couple of really nice 4th gen sedans leaving the neighborhood and followed them. It turns out there was a second entrance to the neighborhood that was much less tore up and it didn't include a massive hill climb.



The Saturday event had a great turnout. I took this photo at 10:30 in the morning. By noon the entire parking lot was full. JDi had their tent there again this year, so I picked up a Ghost Box to replace the 15 year old Kenwood headunit that came with the car.



I made one pass through the dragon during the afternoon and spent most of the time sitting on the side watching cars go by. Here's one photo from 129photos.com of the sedan absolutely shredding. Actually, at one point a Honda Beat had caught me so I pulled over to let him by.



One of the highlights of the day was watching this early 90's Buick LeSabre fully sending it. He came around the corner, tires squealing while he was sawing at the wheel to keep it straight. It was hilarious.



Overall, the Civic ran great with only a couple of minor issues. The tach started reading high on Saturday night. It's showing ~1,500 RPM when the engine is warmed up and idling. It also flutters and bounces between the 3 and 4 thousand RPM when revving the engine. I think this might be the ignitor or coil after searching the forums. The spark plugs and wires are new, but I haven't touched the inside of the distributor yet.

I also hit a big bump on one of the bridges on the Tennessee side of the dragon which sent the upper control arms into the shock tower. It looks like I'll be welding in extensions sometime in the near future.

 

Dang that's crazy about the upper control arm hit. You would think the shock would bottom out before the control arm hit.

Got my ghost box in on friday and it sounds absolutely terrible...Took awhile to find some speakers that would fit the front panels but I got some kenwood kfc-1666s. Not the greatest, but it doesnt matter what settings I use on the EQ. Any rock music..new or old sounds like treble is maxed out and so much distortion like it is at max volume but I barely have it half way, like the gain is set way too high. I do have to triple check I have +/- correct though.

 

Yeah, I didn't think the car was low enough to require extended shock towers. It was a pretty sharp bump that I hit at roughly 50 mph. The Skunk2 arms look to be a little longer and wider than OEM. Maybe the original arms wouldn't have touched.

Do you think the bad sound is from the Ghost Box? I installed mine a few days ago. It doesn't sound great, but neither did the old Kenwood headunit. I just attributed it the speakers. One of the previous owners put Kenwood speakers in the font doors, but the rear deck speakers appear to be OEM. There's a whole lot of treble with little mids. I've played with the equalizer a bit on my music apps and didn't hear a big change either.

 

Did you get the tuner upper control arms or the pro series? (the pic above will not load for some reason). I feel like even at full bump it still should have room. Maybe find somehow to limit up travel.

I don't think it is fully to blame. I have some alpine 5.25 type s I may plug in and see if it sounds a little better. But I dont know of any higher quality speakers that would fit. Cant find much on the interwebs of people installing speakers and actually listing a model# etc

 

I think these would be the Pro or Pro Plus control arms. The bolts for the ball joint are accessible from the bottom and they have the polyurethane bushings. I didn't buy them myself. They were on the hatchback when it was towed home, so I swapped them over to the sedan. I noticed the dents Sunday morning before the Bryson City car meet. After that, I started paying attention to the shock towers on the cars that had their hood open. There were several other EG's with dents. One in particular had cracks in the metal that I assume is from repeated hard impacts.

I've been browsing speakers for the rear deck to hopefully get some better sound. I've never been an audiophile, so I don't know what brands or specs to look for. Probably anything is better than the tired old Honda speakers. After a few days of using the hidden headunit, I've realized that I miss having a physical volume ****.

Now that the Ghost Box is in, I was able to move the gauges off of the steering column and down to the radio location. I bought the GlowShift single din triple gauge pod and added a volt meter to fill the extra spot. So far, I'm not really happy with the fitment. I thought the "stair step" design would have angled the gauges more towards the drivers seat, which is important for these EVO gauges since the contrast is poor when viewed at anything other then directly on center. I may end up trying to build my own.



I also pulled the distributor and replaced the ignitor, coil, cap and rotor. That didn't fix the inaccurate and bouncing tach problem, so I guess I'll remove the instrument cluster next and take a good look at the circuitry.

 

How do you like the Ghost Box? Just connect to bluetooth and play your audio right? Everything sound good on that thing?

Been thinking about moving away from having a double din in favor of the Ghost Box.

 

I'm happy with the Ghost Box so far. It's really easy to set up and automatically connects to my phone every time. It has RCA outputs if you ever wanted to add a subwoofer.

 

Wonder if it is how low the car is. I have had some pretty hard mid corner compressions and not hitting. But I have the tuner series with bolts on top.

You want to find some speakers that are around 50 watts rms. a little less is "better". crutchfield will forever be my go to for car audio. And I agree on the ****, I put my phone in the door pocket with the volume buttons facing upwards so i can just reach down when needed. But i am currently printing up a mount that mounts in the small "clock" space to the right of the radio. So it will be harder to push the buttons so we will see.

 

It works great. And yes it connects automatically, and has a ON chime and a second CONNECTED chime. It is only 50 watts per channel so if you are looking for some loud sound, it has rca outputs and a remote wire to connect to a bigger amp.

 

I am trying to make sense of this - great information!
Do you have pics of the offending compliance arm?
Or better yet, a side-by-side of the good arm next to the tweaked one?

 

The capacitors go bad in the tachs
There is a thread about what caps to source for replacement.