spoolinNpullin

Hey whats up h-t I have a customer that has a eg hatch and it has apex exhaust, dc header, gutted cat which I keep telling him to get rid of, and I think skunk 2 stage cams. the problem is that when he drives it around it gets extremely hot around the shifter and cupholder area, now I am not sure if this is normal but I checked the shields under neath and there is one above the cat and above the resonator, but not where the bottom of the shifter is. I am not sure if there is supposed to be one there, I can smell the exhaust and it deffinetly smells rich so I dont think it is running lean. when you get on the car you can actually feel it getting hotter and it allmost smells like somthing is burning maybe the undercoat. anyway if somebody can give me some info that would be great, cause I gotta get this problem resolved quick. Thanks.

pdotjones

did he get an auto to manual conversion? if so, there is a big hole where there shifter is that will allow large amounts of heat to go through.... just a thought....

EL Vap133

There is supposed to be a heat shield there.

shailoche

As you may already suspect the heat shield in most Civic's isn't usuallt bolted onto the frame of the car or transmission tunnel. Instead, it is attached to the catalytic converter itself. So, when he gutted the cat he probably had to cut away the shielding to get to the innards of the cat. I know that you stated he had the heat shield on the cat but it is possible it was bigger than what is there now. After all he did "gut" the cat so it is likely he did more than just clear out the inside. Then it is also possible that he chucked the heat shield and now is running without it.

So to fix it, you may need to get a stock cat from a junked car and remove the heat shield and then bolt it to the gutted cat. Or you could just get him to buy the correct cat for the car and it should have some heat shielding on it.

The other possibility is that he swapped the transmission from an auto to a manual and in the process left a big opening where there would have been material from the auto transmission.

In either case you would need to fabricate a heat shield out of 1/16" to 1/8" to 1/4" sheet metal or something similar and fix it to the frame or exhaust hanger on the car. The shielding doesn't usually have to be too thick. But if you are going through the effort to fab something up use as thick a metal as is reasonable as it will provide better heat deflection.

Simply cut a shape out that will cover the most area and then bend it to contour the transmission tunnel. Tack it in with an arc welder or something similar. Or if you want to be able to remove it later weld some nuts onto the car and cut holes into the covering to feed bolts through.

I had an '03 RX8 that had no heat shielding from the factory. The transmission tunnel and exhaust tubing ran directly down the center of the car. Because there was no shielding the car got ridiculously hot inside. I had to fab up some sheet metal like this to cool things down. In the 2005 model year Mazda realized the problem and added shielding to the exhaust, cat, tunnel, and frame of the car. It was only like 1/16" thick but it made all the difference.

spoolinNpullin

hey thanks guys, by the way there is a shield on the cat and the one above the cat that is bolted to the body and there is one above the resonator, but there isnt one above the pipe inbetween the cat and resonator. but I put my civic on the lift and it's the same way, any way thanks guys and I will try to make some kind of shielding for it.