I bought my very 1st HGM ej1 (95 civic ex) way back in Dec. 1998 and had it up until '03 when I ended up having to sell it to a friend to get myself out of a financial jam. This is the ej1 that made me fall in love with them though!
here she is back in 98 stock and in 2000-2001ish in her prime, this was actually a hot look way back then lol.

took this one right after her 1st set of wheels and a drop, summer 99' I think?...crazy how much has changed since then.


I regretted it the very next day and vowed to buy another one one day when the funds became available again. In comes the red ej1 I bought back in sep of '08 to finally scratch that itch I had for 5+ years. (build thread for that one is in members rides section here http://www.carolinahondas.com/member...csyndrome.html ) and below in my sig. link

Everything was going great with it after I finally fixed the insane amount of problems with it directly related to the previous owner and just after 2 years of ownership (10-29-10), a stupid 17 year kid ran right though a stop sign and plowed into my pass side door and rear 1/4 panel thus, totaling that civic out.


Somehow the red ej1 was hit so perfect that even though it did indeed get totaled through ins, the damage completely missed the rear wheel therefor the alignment wasn't even touched, the pass window even rolled down still. I got my CR-X painted with the ins. money since I was still able to drive the car daily and decided to look for yet another ej1 replacement while I saved up more money. it took all the way until June of this year until I found a clean enough ej1 to purchase again, it's so sad how many I cam across that have just been completely beat to hell, hooked up or not.- - - - - - - - - -



**Moving forward to my current EJ1, Here's pics of "whitey" the day I bought her and drove her, completely BONE STOCK....SCORE!!...of course it won't be that way for long, it's just always been better in my experience to start with a car that hasn't been wrenched on by tuner wanna-be ricers who have practically zero mechanical knowledge but still try their best to modify their car anyway ...thus was the case with my previous red one when I bought it. never knew just how many issues it had until I started tearing it down myself..it was sad, sad sad.

The body is in rougher shape than I would have liked but since that is something I can easily have fixed when I get it painted and because the price was so good for how clean it is, I just couldn't resist. I was also tired of searching I hate to admit =p






Don't find these unmolested that often anymore these days.



I'm going to add more tonight hopefully since I already finished swapping all my parts over from my red one to the white one. I took the white one out for her 1st photo shoot today actually so I Hope to get those up too but I want to try and document the build in the order I did it and took pics.
I'm going to do a few write-ups as well since I swapped in a EK Si cluster and Sparco steering wheel with cruise and horn retained, it turns out there's no info on this that I could find online so I plan to post it here.

 

My 1st order of business with my new white ej1 was to sort out all the maintenance issues and the few other things needing some attention.
The driver side master window switch was not working for the pass window so as I figured, it needed to be taken apart, and cleaned up in order to work just like new again.
(I just love free repairs!)

Those 4 metal points shown are the areas that build up grime and carbon that need to be scraped off, a pocket flathead screwdriver works great.

This is the metal toggle flange that also needs to be scraped/brushed clean.

and here it is all ready to be reinstalled

Here is how the flange sits when it's reinstalled, tedious but not to hard.

Got the switch working like new again within 10 minutes! gotta love it

Next up is my remote start alarm, I just don't roll w/o one of these ever since my 1st car was broken into back in '96, I got an alarm the very next day and never had a car w/o one since! and luckily had no more break-ins or thefts since

Starting the alarm install

Had this ooold school viper alarm installed already so I had to remove this before proceeding with my new alarm install


Neatly installed and tucked away

Stealth mounted 2 leds so only the light shows, not the actually led



Next on the list was my fart pipe sounding muffler that was actually stock. had to replace that asap!

And wouldn't you know it, the wrong muffler was sent! this is for a HB so no way of making this mistake work out. ended up getting the correct one eventually


Bought some new oem rubber pedal covers for brake and clutch pedal

Old covers removed

Nice and clean after installed (I cleaned the gas pedal, just not b4 this pic unfortunately)


I have to say almost every single oil seal was leaking but I only found this out a week or so after driving it, the previous owner had cleaned up the bay pretty nicely and the interior was so clean already it was easy to over look other things. I'm still happy with purchase though
oil pan removed to cleanup and install new honda oil pan gasket.


New gasket and cleaned up oil pan ready for re-install

Cleaned up all parts removed for oil pan gasket job, everything was soaked and covered pretty bad before

You can really see the oil buildup over the cat. convertor


Finally I got to install something non maintenance related! My oem smoked amber stanley sidemarkers

Made a template and then measured and traced onto fender before cutting with my dremel tool and makita drill


No turning back now!

All cut out, did a pretty good job in my own opinion

And came out looking pretty oem as well

All wired up and ready to install

had to mix some touch up paint to cover up the small blem from over cutting just a smidge, this will be fixed right once it gets a complete paint job hopefully next year

All installed looking damn clean to me

All lit up at night



Also had to replace the lower heater hose that attaches to head under dizzy

Had to replace valve cover gasket also

Even had to replace the valve cover tube seals, both axle seals aannnd the trans output shaft seal. like i said, this bitch needed some damn maintenance looove!


And after all those seal where replaced, wouldn't you just know it......The only seal left to replace was the rear main and sure enough, it was freakin puking as well
I would have waited until I did my swap to do the seal but I was taking the car to the beach and didn't want it leaking that bad before a long road trip and week vacation. as it turned out, I ended up replacing the rear main the last sunday night i was here before leaving for the beach the following monday. I just couldn't avoid it from working out that way, got it done though!


you can see how bad it is here in these pics, just sad.



That wraps up most of the maintenance I had to do on her before getting ready for the swap.
I did get her tinted at Speed styles in indian trail after all this so I'll post that next and the full grey to black interior swap I did which took about 9-10 solid hours since I had to swap the grey interior back into my red (wrecked) ej1.

stay tuned....

 

That's clean leave it stock. Some 15's and quality suspension is all that is needed.

Damn, image *****! Lol. Still loading.

 

Yes, Yes I AM an image *****!! lol, it's the photographer in me

I guess I need to edit a "lots of pics" notice 1st, huh?

 

And for my next post of a "crap load of images"......

My next phase of upgrades was focused on swapping out all of the light grey interior to full charcoal black like my red ej1 has. That I know of, you could never get a white ej1 coupe with black interior from honda. Either way white w/ black interior does make it a little more rare now, so I like that little fact


In prepping for the interior swap I managed to score one of the last remaining carpets honda had for the ej1, I don't have this option for my CRX anymore so I wanted to jump all over this while I could before it was too late.



Sooooo fresh and clean!



brand new door sills while I was at it




starting to pull it all apart inside. unreal how many things actually need to be changed over to properly & fully swap to black interior







all stripped out




Most donor parts came from ej1, except for the things I bought new from Honda



New carpet finally in, this was quite the pain in the *** to get in and it right!



CTR shift boot new from Honda


All back together (minus the sparco steering wheel, which is now on)










A few weeks later I found a guy parting out his itr matched ej1 interior, what better door panels and armrest to put in the car than these?







Thats all for now. I have a crap load more pics I took while swapping the rest of the parts over from the red one to the white one.......stay tuned

 

Yeah put up a warning sign next time around. I thought my cable ISP and laptop is running sub-par or some sort of down communication.

 

Black/dark interior is so much better. So much richer. What a difference. The grey is just plain.

 

Done and done! lol, after a restart my mac is running much quicker now. My image count was not helping a damn thing. I have damn near 400 taken, I'm just posting them in the order I built the car in, since it's pretty much built now



....And please don't comment on the ugly shift ****, lol. I already have my skunk2 **** and shifter in place, I just have to post a pic when I get to that point. should be this week....

 

Needs black interior

edit: DAMN pics of guess what...BLACK INTERIOR loaded asfter I replied. LOL.


I fail to see how anyone could want anything other than black. This one guy had the white on tan and wanted to keep it for "rarity". Nasty.

 

That hideous shift **** is the best attribute! Muahah!

 

haha, if only everybody else "knew", right? lol.

 

Keep hitting the refresh button.

 

I didn't see it until you mentioned it. Chiite. What's the plan for LSV?

 

oh yea, forgot to mention.....waaaay to late for that lol.



just follow the link in my sig, the LS/vtec is already built (was over 2 years ago now) and documented pretty well in that thread. I'm pretty much picking up with the white one where I had to leave off with the red one ever since it got t-boned last oct-29th.

 

Good job on the interior conversion. What's this about LSV?

 

You're link has too much reading to do. I just want pictures and build specs. Jeez. How much for the J4D? I need you to fix my C1.

 

Click on the bottom link on his sig. The second one.

 

This is the post where all my parts started comin in and coming together for ol' whitey.

I had all kinds of issues this time around dealing with parts, which usually isn't a big issue for me, sans this build.

Black housing headlights, packaged like **** and came broken out of the box
this took about 6 damn weeks to resolve, ended up having to go through another company and file a claim through paypal. all was good in the end


My VIS carbon fiber trunk took over 8 weeks to get to me even though i was NEVER told it was on backorder like it was. in the end, it too came out great because it showed up flawless!


Had to drill out the holes for the inner tails and also for the license plate frame it does not come with. I found this out when it finally arrived. I found a black frame online for $15 so it was a quick easy fix.






Tails in, ready to install trunk. note, you do have to pull the factory lighting wire harness out of the factory trunk and relocate it to this one. incase anybody was curious and didn't know.



I love stickers but rarely find a good place for them so I've built up a decent collection over the last 15+ years. I decided to finally put some on my new CF hood, to add some sentimental value and some uniqueness since some of them are 10+ years old Note the "SS tour 2002" sticker and the "battle of the imports" are both originals and been sitting in my sticker box since early 2000s. The red "R" is more of a personal reference to a best friend I lost to cancer in '05, makes me think of him every time I see it. So maybe not to everyones taste, but I absolutely love how it came out. The other blank side is reserved for future events and stickers, god willing that this car and hood make that long =o



These are the wheels I had on my ej1, 15x7.5 et32 Konig "AIR". basically a wider version of the rotas/spoons and witha deeper lip. I personally love them and the way they fit, especially with the needed added traction for ls/vtec launches, lol
I've played with this idea for years now and finally decided to give it a try. So I layed down some 1/4in wide red vinyl pinstripe all the way around all 4 lips. on my red car, this may have been too much but on whitey here, it looks great! (pics soon to come )



here's before and after comparison (looks better when tires have shine on them)



Officially started tearing down my wrecked, red ej1 to supply me the rest of the performance parts i needed for the white one


spindles off


Parts coming off pretty fast




motor/trans ready to roll out from under car. just gotta start tearing white one down 1st.


actually coming out of car




Returning my red one back to stock Ex form, with a big ol' dent in the side.




only left to remove is manual steering rack so I can install power steering back on here, and have the manual steering on my white car. I just prefer no p.s. on a built ej1, just my preference


I managed to keep the entire power steering system together AND sealed which made for a less messy, more straight forward swap




Before I swapped over the motor/trans and spindles. I swapped the suspension and wheels just to get an idea how it felt like that before just swapping it all over. makes for easier diagnostics (when building in stages) when something goes wrong to




Speaking of stages, I'm going to stop here for the same reason. makes editing easier when the threads are somewhat broken up and smaller.

 

haha, yea not exactly a short read. The basic specs are b18b block bored to 82mm with itr cast pistons on stock ls rods AND BOLTS!! (for all the haters out their claiming stock ls rod bolts won't hold up )
along with the all the visual bolt-ons you see and Skunk2 stage 3 tuner cams with matching valve springs & titanium retainers. Tuned on chrome by Howard of RLZ in concord back in may of '09
heres the original dyno sheet to. was a mild tune since it had been running 87 octane prior to the build and swap. I need to back for a fresh re-tune and I'm hoping to hit 200 next time around


This was the day after my swap into the 1st ej1 (may '09). I was damn happy with the driveway paint job I pulled off on the engine bay in the middle of spring/summer with all that damn pollen falling! p.i.t.a, but worth it

 

Help me fix mines! It only has about 100 miles. There's oil on my piston domes. :wah:

 

nice build!

 

my guess is piston rings not sealing or head gasket possibly is leaking. wish I had a better idea for you.

thankx bro!

 

You think I need a new PCV? Too much blow by. Shouldn't the rings be seated by now? At the dyno?

 

Of all the experience I do have wrenching, build a bottom end I did once, and really it was friend doing the building while I helped and learned. The cylinder head is a diff story, I've rebuilt idk how many of those by now.

As far the rings go, I wish I could remember exactly what he said it was exactly but even my buddy messed up on his on motor and ended up with rings not seating properly so this could be your problem too. sucks though because it requires the bottom end to be pulled apart and rebuilt again

AS far as the stock pcv system goes, it sucks pretty bad on a built motor so u pretty much need a catch can or you'll have quite a bit of black smoke coming out of your exhaust that would have other wise been processed through the catch can (before getting spit out your exhaust). I still haven't gotten a catch can for my set-up, something I was lazy about at 1st and now just keep forgetting to buy one since I've been driving w/ my setup for 2-1/2 years now. I do know that I will have a catch can on my CRX when it goes LS/vtec simply because I've learned from my 1st time around with my civic.


on with more progress. finally got some finished motor pics
..........pulled the white Ej1 in to start yanking out the stock D16z6 and everything else I wanted to replace. including front and rear cross drilled rotors with Hawk hps pads, goodridge SS brake lines, manual steering rack. and exterior mods, CF hood, trunk and spoon style lip.











Rear disc swap on




LS/Vtec ready to install


2 cars, both w/o a motor. I know quite a few people that would freak out seeing their own cars like this, lol


Finally bolted up, all down hill from here.




Ready to fire up finally.




Installed, and running during 1st photo shoot since completion





I have some nice pics I took during my photo shoot that I'll post next. After that I'm going to put together my 2 write-ups on my EK/Em1 cluster install and my steering wheel install.

 

So what you think I should do? The motor is out and I didn't have a chance to do a leak down and compression test. Open it up? Put the swap back in and...? It's a stock B18C1 rebuild with Type R cams/pistons. Nothing spectacular.

Edit: clean engine bay..haha maybe it's photo shopped?