The Traccord - 2003 Honda Accord Coupe

mazdeuce - Seth said:

There were......noises. Enough that the car went back on the lift. I have a bunch to write about, but it appears that I found the source of at least some of them. Mount on the left should look much more like the mount on the right. More all togethery anyway. 

that does seem like it was fully sent... 

The harder I've driven the Accord over the last year the worse the motor mounts have gotten. I really should have replaced them right away, but......how bad could they be? And which ones were the bad ones? So I put it off. I knew I needed to replace them before One Lap so I finally broke down and bought the whole set. 

I already showed you the passenger side mount, that was bad. This is the front mount, feels good. I'll save it. 

Rear mount, pretty used up. 

Drivers side top mount on the transmission, seen better days. 

And both of the lower transmission mounts were good. In fact the forward of the two new ones was off just enough in bolt spacing that I was going to have to adjust it to get it to fit so I just put the old one back in. Tips for those who are going to do this. Should be fairly easy to do on jack stands with a jack to lift the motor. You want to remove the radiator fans so you can get the front mount out, you need to pull the air box to get the upper transmission mount out, and you want to use all the extensions and a universal joint. Doing that you can get at everything other than the lower transmission mounts from the top side. You do have to spend some time camping out on top of the motor, but it's a big roomy engine bay. 

Locally saw a 2012 v6 MT

58k miles

asking $10k 

any diff in the years? 

In reply to mr2s2000elise :

Starting in 2008 the cars got bigger. I think, but I'm not certain, they became more related to the larger TL. As far as I know, the basics of the suspension stay the same, but the body in the middle got wider and longer. Not sure what that means for weight. 

Thank you!

Finished putting the Power Stop pads on the front and dropped it off the lift for a quick run around the test loop. I got the brakes hot enough to smell, so I'll call them bedded for now. They feel good, a little less initial bite than the ST43's but still very easy to get into ABS. A bit more modulation. They squeak just a bit for the final couple miles an hour, but they're one million times better noise wise. Just need to see how they handle heat and how they wear. 

The motor mounts are the big news. The car feels like a Honda again. Buttery smooth. Just perfect. Wheel hop seems to be gone. All of the clunking is gone. Some of the stuff that I had attributed to suspension is gone. Apparently having a motor slamming around every time you change direction puts some weird feelings into the car. Getting better. Lots more to do. 

I tried the powerstop trackday pads on a c5 and they were pretty good, decent modulation and I couldn't get them to fade the pedal to the floor ever. Still the pedal did get a bit longer as they got warm but the amount of brake you've got I'd think they'll do really well for OLOA.

mr2s2000elise said:

Locally saw a 2012 v6 MT

58k miles

asking $10k 

 

any diff in the years? 

That's a pretty good deal.  During my search, most 8th gens V6-6MT had more miles for the same price.

mazdeuce - Seth said:

The harder I've driven the Accord over the last year the worse the motor mounts have gotten. I really should have replaced them right away, but......how bad could they be? And which ones were the bad ones? So I put it off. I knew I needed to replace them before One Lap so I finally broke down and bought the whole set. 

I'm slowly replacing the ones on my Accord now.  Just did the passenger side and its a lot less shaky now.  I hear the rear mounts on V6 is a pain to access, how was it on the K24?  Which mounts did you use?

In reply to BLRB :

There is enough room that you can pull the old mount out from the top and snake the new one in that way as well. I'm not sure how you'll do it on a V6. I don't think there is any way to make it work without pulling the exhaust at a minimum. I'm very curious to see how you do with the job. The K24 in the Accord is weak, but it does have its advantages. I used a generic 6pc set from Amazon. The thought is that I want to do a 6spd TL swap so spending a bunch of money on "good" mounts didn't make sense. We'll see how that goes. 

Kids have a half day, one is home sick, inlaws are here. I still need to grab a few hours to get this car "ready to leave tomorrow" just in case time slips away as the event gets closer. 

I popped the rear wheel studs in. You can do this with the hubs on the car which is nice. I bought this nifty ball bearing stud installer after using the stack of washers method for years. Totally worth it. 

The bumper is on the car, but none of the rest of the front plastics or fender liners. Probably don't neeeeed them for a track car, but they're useful for a road car. The big issue is that you need to take them off to work on different things. You can either take your time, wiggle each plastic clip trying not to break it, or just hulk smash them and replace every time. Frankly, neither option is good. Enter 1/4 turn fasteners, or dzus. 

Where I have a tab or plastic to plastic I'm using these backing plates that are used in the motorcycle world for fairings. In their standard form they require narrow shaft fasteners that are expensive. More expensive than roundy round stuff anyway. My preference is to order 5/16 shank aluminum fasteners from a circle track supplier, hog out the inside of the plate with a dremel, and unnaturally mate motorcycle parts with circle track parts. 

Bit of modifying the existing fastener locations to take the plates. 

And it all snaps together. These three replace two 10mm bolts and one plastic clip. 

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

Good tip

Awesome!  Looks pretty trick! 

Any word on the composites front? Im a big fan of DIY composite parts. The most functional part I ever made was a MAF adapter for universal cone filters from regular fiberglass weave and used a yogurt container as a mold...fun times, but it worked and lasted years. Im following this part of the project with added interest

Another found-on-MotoIq tip - in project Miatabusa, when they were making carbon air horns, they used condoms stretched over the parts to mimic vacuum bagging, Probably could follow a similar route for the brake ducts. I know once upon a time, Soller Composites website had large diameter shrink tubing (like over 6" large) that was used to achieve a similar result. Was supposed to work over irregular, non-linear (curved) shapes well. I havent gone to look, but might be an option if still available...

In reply to 4cylndrfury :

I'm being a lazy bastard about the composites. I'm going to do it, but maybe not on any reasonable time frame. Maybe. We'll see. 

I did get ordered to get the car off the lift so that I can look over another car on it, so I went ahead and mounted the battery more or less. This little guy on the subframe used to hold a suspended mass damper. Since I clearly don't care about NVH but I do care about weight, that's been gone for a while. I did leave me two threaded holes in a convenient location. I chopped and drilled some aluminum angle so that I could use J hooks. 

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And I need to work on the tray for the battery, but things are good for now. The point of using the J hooks is that if the battery dies on One Lap I can find a lawnmower or motorcycle battery that will fit between them and regardless of height I can make it work. Problems you can solve in a WalMart parking lot are easier to deal with than those you can't. 

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

SWEET

So modest broken-record-action here: the tiny baby battery is still going strong for you?  I'm guessing so, since otherwise you probably wouldn't be making permanent mounts for it.

In reply to TVR Scott :

Yup. It was out of the car for the last two weeks, but during the time it was just sitting on the shelf, no charger or anything and it had 13.2v when I put it back in and fired right up. Now that I have fender liners again the car is going back into fleet rotation so it should get 3-5 days a week of driving. 

mazdeuce - Seth said:

Problems you can solve in a WalMart parking lot are easier to deal with than those you can't. 

 

Say What?

Mazdeuce - Seth said:

Problems you can solve in a WalMart parking lot are easier to deal with than those you can't. 

 

So important with how many road miles thi car will see. 

Following this thread with great interest, as I'm looking for a new project that I can track/auto-x, and also drive to the events without sweating enough to loose weight, etc.

In reply to MoCounselor :

There is nothing so great in this world as turning the knob to MAX AC on your race car. 

I'm actually a bit torn about whether going down the rabbit hole of modifying the suspension was worth it. In a lot of ways the world would have been easier by just throwing a set of shocks and a sway bar on and staying in HS. The car is certainly faster now, no doubt about that, but it was fun out of the box too. 

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

Yeah, I'm thinking that may be the selling point for me on this platform.  I'm really wanting to get into some HPDE events, and eventually some Time Trials, but with where I live (southwest Missouri,) the nearest road course (Hallet,) is over 2.5 hours away.  With my daily not being a tow vehicle (2011 Tdi Sportwagen,) having a racecar/toy that I can also put on the a/c and that won't beat me up horribly on the long road-trips to get to a track seems like a really good idea..

If I end up pulling the trigger on one Seth, I'd love to correspond with you a little bit on development of it.  Cool?

-Ben

In reply to MoCounselor :

Absolutely. If we could somehow end up in the same place and the same time I'd 100% let you take it out for a spin.