rear window louvers would have sold me by themselves. nice ride!
rear window louvers would have sold me by themselves. nice ride!
My 85 CRX HF was one of the worst-handling things ive ever owned. It's one of the few vehicles ive ever scared myself in due to OVERestimating what it was capable of.
I started autoXing in a 1993 dodge dynasty. If i had started in an 1985 CRX HF, im not sure i would have even liked it.
Granted, the Si is probably worlds better, and anything is fixable, and nobody said go-carty feeling meant good handling. But i am disabused of the notion that CRX=good handling by default. 
My 85 CRX HF was one of the worst-handling things ive ever owned.
Yeeeeeeeaaaaah. Something was berkeleying broken then. Seriously. My guesses are panhard rod or nut behind the wheel. HF, Si, shouldn't matter. If a 1st gen crx handles like E36 M3, something's wrong.
Well, looks like I might have to park it until the new shocks show up. One of the front shocks (which is leaky anyway) has up & down play in the strut mount.
Thanks to Tire Rack, I should have a set of new shocks delivered by Friday - one of the advantages of them having a warehouse in Reno. And thanks to that well-known car parts supplier, Amazon, I should have two new front strut mounts by Saturday.
Top tip - search Amazon by part number, searching for KYB front strut mount for the CRX didn't produce any results, searching by KYB part number did.
Berk it, this seems to be turning into another build thread as I also have the suspicion that the engine mounts have seen better days (you can feel the engine move about if you get off the gas).
Hmm, bad engine mounts? Might as well just go ahead and find a 86-87 Integra and swap the whole engine/trans in.
Seriously, though, that had to be one of the easiest engine swaps I've done, and we even had to use the Integra's wiring harness, since we were starting with a carb'd DX.
Only around here would an engine swap be considered the best remedy for worn engine mounts 
.
In reply to BoxheadTim:
That is kind of funny.
Yeeeeeeeaaaaah. Something was berkeleying broken then. Seriously. My guesses are panhard rod or nut behind the wheel. HF, Si, shouldn't matter. If a 1st gen crx handles like E36 M3, something's wrong.
I can tell you exactly what was wrong with it.. Spring rates and sway bars, or lack thereof. I could roll that thing pretty much onto the bumpstop on 13" E36 M3 tires just by sawing the wheel hard enough. Too damn soft, simple, the end.
It's really, really hard to take that seriously when you're comparing it to a 1993 Dynasty. There was something wrong with it or you're warped into some other dimension!
You have to keep in mind the Dynasty could get out of it's own way. The same was not true for the HF. We're talking a 3 second 1/4 mile difference there. Most people will say 70 is the fastest you will go in autox, right? Well, the HF's top speed was roughly 85 and it probably took about a mile to hit it. That, plus roughly similar handling limits (215s on 3000 lb dynasty, 175s on 1800lb CRX) means the dynasty was much more fun to drive. Im sure if you bolted sticky 215s to the CRX HF it would violently roll onto its bumpstops and then turn pretty hard, but that doesnt exactly make it sporty.
Dont get me wrong, i liked that 1g crx, and even bought another one and am scheming up some fun plans for it, but in my specific cited situation of an autocross car, an 85 CRX HF is a terrible option. I dare anyone to argue this. You would have to replace a bunch of major components before it even became fun to race.
I have a set of Eibach lowering springs for the rear of a first gen CRX that need to leave my garage...
Looks great!!
Well, given that all my attempts at selling the car so far have failed to produce an interested buyer, I've instead bought an OEM shop manual and finally started on the brake job today.
Fronts went on OK, although I have a suspicion that I may need yet another driver's side caliper - the reman one seems to have the banjo bolt not quite fitting as well as it should, but at least it seems to be fluid tight. So far.
So I went from this:
To this:
Sorry about the crappy pictures, the shop area of the garage is pretty badly lit and my phone likes to massively oversharpen low light photos.
Trying to fit the stainless lines at the rear was another matter, though - while the fronts went on OK and actually fit really well, the rear ones are considerably too short. Like, close to an inch too short... Let's see what the vendor has to say about that.
Oh, and the alternator has thrown the towel as well. Everything pointed at the voltage regulator being bad but once I pulled the alternator off the car, it was also evident that the rear bearing was very noisy. Local NAPA reckons the reman one should be here by Tuesday. Ah well. Cost wasn't too bad actually, but still twice as much as the cost of the brushes and regulator I had budgeted for.
Any plans to fix the plastic panels before they become unfixable? Dont be like me!
If I keep it, yes.
You're the one who makes it sound like you're keeping it. What have you had it priced at?
Well, I'm going back and forth about selling vs keeping. Realistically I have too many cars right now and there may be a job related move that requires me to fairly severely downsize the fleet.
From a GRMer, I'd take somewhere around $3.5k for it.
More progress, yay!
Fitted the new/reman NAPA Premium Plus alternator one Saturday and "while I was in there", chucked in a new thermostat as well and dropped in some fresh coolant. Now the alternator doesn't seem to want to kill of the battery anymore and thanks to the new thermostat and possibly a little bit of Water Wetter, the engine warms up more quickly and the coolant temperature is much more stable.
Also finally got a chance to drive it with the new front brakes. Unsurprisingly, it stops subtly better with expensive pads on new Brembo rotors. Who would've thunk? The change is subtle, but noticeable.
While I was under the car I also dumped out the transmission fluid and replaced it with the Redline MTL that I have had on the shelf for the car for months. Even though I have come to expect it by now, the changeover from normal fluid to MTL always surprises me a bit. The gearchange wasn't bad before, but now it's smoooooth.
I like RedLine for transmissions. I'm not usually a believer in magic bullet type stuff, but it can do amazing things to older manual transmissions.
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