I drive an 89' Honda CRX Si in the SCCA's ITA class. This past season, my dad totaled his 91' CRX Si ITA car. It was equipped with a transmission that had an aftermarket final drive and LSD. My car had neither of these, so we decided to take the trans out of his wrecked car and put it in mine. The problem was that it had a fist sized hole in the clutch housing side of the case. So, rather than get the case welded, we decided to swap the gearstacks and LSD into a spare case we had.

We knew that shimming needed to be done, but when we took the measurements the manual specified, then subtracted a decimal like the manual said (I don't have it with me right now so i don't have specifics), we came up with a negative distance.

So, we decided to just put it back together with the same shims it had when it was in my dad's car and working fine (as if we had never even switched cases). This turned out to be a mistake...

After properly installing our rebuilt trans, I hopped in the car and shifted through the gears (car not started) and everything seemed fine. I then started the car and tried to put it into gear, it wouldnt go into any gear. Eventually, I forced it into first, upon accelerating down the driveway, I went to shift into second, and it wouldnt go into second or back into first. I forced it back into first again and drove back to the house. When I tried to go in reverse into the garage, it made a horrible grinding noise and wouldn't go into reverse gear. However, when we shut the car off, it shifted through all the gears again.

I have been having trans problems since I started racing (all self inflicted), and am growing very tired of changing the transmission in my car. Any help would be much appreciated because I would like to have an aftermarket final drive and LSD in my race car.

Thanks,

Jesse

 

pics of what you did and what you shimmed.

You now need a 1-2 shifter fork, which Honda might no longer stock.

You issues sound more clutch related though.

I have several happy ITA customers.......

 

I don't have the camera with the pictures on it right now (we really only took pics so we knew what everything looked like before we tore it down).

We actually did not shim anything, just put everything in the new case. But we measured "the distance between the end of the transmission housing and the thrust washer", and "the distance between the surfaces of the clutch housing and bearing inner race". The manual then said to add those two values and subtract 1.06 and 1.13 to find the maximum and minimum shim thicknesses. When we did this, we got a negative value, which makes no sense.

We originally thought that it seemed like a clutch issue too, but once you get the car into gear, the clutch works properly.

Why do i need a 1-2 shifter fork?