Recently I decided to finally get rid of my daily driver Civic since it cost a little too much money constantly fixing it. My 07 S2000 has now become my daily driver, which I have been basically driving daily anyway. Warranty just finished ~800 miles ago and now I don't have a car to carry things in.

....until now....

I did some searching on hitch solutions for the S2000 and decided on the Chase Race system. You can check out http://www.chaserace.com for more details. The system was ~$450 or so. I also purchased the wiring harness. With shipping and everything, it came out to just about $550. It's more expensive than some other hitches, and definitely more than the home-made ones, but that's okay.

It came by UPS about a week later fresh from Doug Chase's powdercoater guy. The parts box was a bit beat up, but nothing was missing. Doug also stuck on a sticker, which I left on there because I thought it was pretty neato looking. :D It also came packaged REALLY nice. It took me quite a few minutes to remove all that stuck on cardboard.





You first have to remove the rear bumper. There are 3 clips on top that are visible when you open the trunk. The come out pretty easily with a flathead screwdriver. Pop the middle up, and the entire clip pops out.



There are also 2 screws in each rear wheel well (towards the top and rear) that need to be removed. It was a bit of a pain to remove since the tire was in the way. I would recommend removing the rear tires. In my case, it wasn't feasible since I drove up on ramps. Since there was only a wooden block holding the front wheels, I didn't want the car rolling back on me.

Put a bit of painters tape on the bottom of the fender where the bumper meets. As you pull the sides of the bumper outward, you don't want to accidentally hit the metal. After that, just pull the entire bumper toward the rear. Remember to remove the wire harness that connects to the license plate light. It was so dirty that I could hardly see what to grab on the clip.

Oh yeah, there are also two more clips underneath the bumper on the black plastic portion. The clips there did me in, as I was not successful in removing them nicely. I eventually snapped them off. They are still off after I finished, but I will zip tie it back another time.

Here's what it should look like once off.





Look how loaded with pebbles it is under there.



I also accidentally clipped the left taillight a bit. Grr!! You can see the yellow circled portion.



I know my 255 rears aren't as meaty as some of yours, but it looks it from here. I'm used to tiny little Civic/Integra 195-205mm tires from back in the day. For suspension, I only have those Espelir ASD springs. Yep, need new tires soon.



The problem I had was that I had a Buddy Club Pro Spec dual exhaust system. The portion where the exhaust pipes split was too far back compared to the OEM system. Thus, I was not able to use my Buddy Club with this hitch. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as I thought my Buddy Club was waaaay too loud. I was happy to go back to OEM. If anyone's interested, it's for sale. Here, I finally removed the pipes to the Buddy Club.



The Chase Race hitch comes with two plates that attach to the rear of the bumper support. The entire support is easily removed with only 5 bolts. 2 on the passenger side, and 3 on the driver's side. 12mm bolts that aren't that tight at all. Install the plates as shown but do not tighten them down yet. I learned this the hard way because I had to loosen them so many times to get things to line up.





You can see here where the plate sandwiches between.



Unfortunately, because of this, the entire bumper support now mounts a few millimeters more back. You will see in a later picture that the little bumper plug for the tow hook now hits the metal inside. It doesn't pop off, but it does stick out a bit. I will have to figure out what to do with that later.

Now you will want to work on the rear mount of the hitch. It comes with a plate that you must attach to the lower differential bracket/mount thing. Remove the two 14mm bolts (which were surprisingly not that tight), mount the plate, and reattach with the supplied longer bolts. Here you can also see that the OEM exhaust gives you plenty of room to put this in. With the Buddy Club, this entire area is taken up by the pipe split.



Now, I didn't take much more pictures here because I started getting frustrated with the alignment. Like I said previously, make sure the metal plates on each side of the exhaust are loose, because otherwise you won't be able to slide the hitch joints into them. You are able to adjust the height of the entire hitch by quite a bit. It can mount quite lower (so the bar is closer to the ground), but why would you want to do that with a lowered car? I mounted it as close to the top as I could. In this picture, it's at it's maximum height. While the car was jacked up and on the ramps, it looked a bit funny having the hitch so low, but when the car is finally lowered, it looked perfect. I took a few pictures from different angles so you can see how it looks and how far it sticks out. Overall, I'm happy with the final product.

You can also see where the stupid little bumper/tow hook cover sticks out.











Okay....so I wasn't done yet. The day was still young, and I still need to transport my bikes somehow, right?

Went to my local bike shop and purchased the T2 Thule bike carrier. It's the model 917 with the 1.25 inch receiver.



I wasn't prepared for how much it actually cost. $370something plus tax or whatever. But it came out to $420. Whoops! Heehee.



So I opened it up... I think if Optimus Prime blew up, I would have better luck putting him together than working with these metal parts. I started looking through the instructions, which did me absolutely no good. I eventually figured it out without the manual and went at it.



Stuck it all in, and started testing it out with my bikes. Eventually tightened everything down and voila!









The entire hitch also folds up against the car pretty easily too. There's a little lever there that you hold and it moves up. I tested driving the car (without the bikes) and everything was solid. Tomorrow I'm going to Diablo Freeride Park for the first time with my S2000. Let's see how it goes!

Hope you enjoyed...




Modified by shamoo at 8:51 PM 9/20/2008

 

there's a Chase Race hitch selling on S2Ki for $250 and it's less than a year old.
it's a very nice hitch.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by rice4life &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">there's a Chase Race hitch selling on S2Ki for $250 and it's less than a year old.
it's a very nice hitch. </TD></TR></TABLE>

Yep, there are actually a few of them on sale on S2KI. I spoke to many of them, but most of the deals fell through or the hitch is for an AP1 (doesn't work).

 

haha thats pretty cool. nothing i would get for my s2k, but definitely a good thing to have for people who need to carry extra stuff with their s2000

 

Ellsworth

 

Thanks for the write up! I will add a copy of this to the DIY thread

 

espelir asd's FTW

 

Tires going blad

 

how much weight can that hitch pull? and how much tongue weight can it handle? i'd love to pull my bike/small trailer behind my s

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by AMF Racing &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">how much weight can that hitch pull? and how much tongue weight can it handle? i'd love to pull my bike/small trailer behind my s </TD></TR></TABLE>

a lot of racer use that hitch to tow a tire trailer. a loaded tire trailer could weigh from 300-400 lbs. i load my trailer so that there's only about 30-40 lbs of weight on the tongue

 

My bike weighs in around 25lbs, plus the entire rack weights probably another 20-25lbs. If I put another bike on it, let's say another 25lbs. That's a max of ~70-75lbs? Sounds like a lot...hmm.

 

I have this Bike Rack from "Swagman" it was cheap ($180.00 + Free Shipping) + it the bottom of the rack curves upwards so that the rack won't hit the floor for low cars or lower cars.


http://www.etrailer.com/pc-wmc~S6467...utm_medium=ppc




Modified by jmk2888 at 4:33 PM 9/26/2008

 

Bummer that jmk2888's photos don't display.

 

well, that kinda happens after 6 years dude