Good news for those still waiting on the FM4 results: after losing the replay data followed by several hellish months of work grind, baby grind etc. I’m just a week or so away from turning in my final hurdles and having a baby that kind of actually does sleep (mostly) at night and therefore finally will be in a position to get it done. I hate not leaving things done but my career hurdle stuff has been haunting me for about three years and my boss put the firecracker under my ass with funding for the permanent position I’ve always planned on filling so I had to go for it before anyone else did and all that.
Okay so when that’s done, I promise, FM4 updates will follow. Meanwhile, in the last 3 months the car tinkering appreciably slowed down but I did do a few more things…
the All in the Details update
Wrapping the airbox
The inlet pipe is one thing but the radiant heat from the downpipe and the block itself can also heat up the airbox. So I wrapped that too. This probably makes a grand total of 2C net difference in the IATs at best but it does look pretty lol
Ceramic coating the downpipe
Downpipes get really hot. They get even hotter if you blanket the turbo, which I will be doing. In stock form, the downpipe is covered by a couple of heat shields to reduce bathing the turbo inlet pipe in heat but when you increase the size of the pipes there’s no room for the top one. Wrapping a downpipe is asking to destroy it as the wrap can trap moisture and cause the metal to become brittle with repeated heat cycling. So the best thing to do is to Cerakote it, as this will trap all the heat in the pipe itself: it can’t radiate or “convect” (too tired to word this properly) out, but this does increase the conduction of the heat.
This thing was a PITA to remove. Good thing I do my homework first because downpipe bolts are notorious for stripping, snapping etc. because it goes through so many heat cycles, which has brought many a mechanic and DIYer to despair. As for me, throughout the whole removal and reinstallation process I only mildly stripped one stud, hooray!
This photo burnt my fingertips
This was when I discovered that the join arms for my heat shield had shattered so I had to get them spot welded. After the welding, not all the bolts actually fit the heat shield so right now the last join is held together with a blob of high temp silicon adhesive 
You don’t need to see that. Nobody does.
Of course, since I’m still waiting to install the turbo and the blanket, right now the hot side of the turbo is uncovered so all the heat from that is roasting my inlet pipe anyways. You can track the IATs in the Log R app and the moment I get on the boost they skyrocket haha.
Countering the Oil Cooker
One of the other major design weaknesses of the Civic is that the oil pan is directly above the front pipe, which is in turn all covered by the skidplate. This is hardly good for the oil temps especially on track. So I thought, while I’m under the car fiddling with the downpipe, why not heat shield the pan with some spare silver/fiberglass sheets I had?
gearbox side top, oil pan side bottom. You can see the oil filter bottom left
I have no idea how much this will help but the guy who sells me my Spoon gear who spends a lot of time in the company of the Spoon FK8 race Civic (the one that won a 25hr endurance race) tells me that’s exactly what these sheets were for so here’s hoping!
Replacing a cosmetically but annoyingly defective dial
Turns out the glue sticking the plastic cover of my adaptive cruise and lane-keep assist controls was going bad, probably due to repeated exposure to cleaning fluids as I wasn’t super careful when cleaning my steering wheel. So I bought a spare one but accidentally ordered the wrong version lol. Not like I ever use the “speed limiter” function anyways.
who needs a “breaker bar” when you have a 10mm Allen key, the footlong extension for a half inch drive torque wrench and a lot of brute force???
The best part was that I accidentally knocked the wheel alignment off so the first time I drove the car after reinstalling the wheel it was completely skewiff. I thought I was totally screwed as it would be very difficult to guess where straight was again, but I somehow managed to guess the position perfectly right next go around.
old, left, versus new, right
The other doohickey is actually the Adaptive Damper System module… from the LE Type R. The rates for the dampers are higher in all 3 modes which, incidentally, much better matches the Swift R spring rates that I mentioned in a previous post. I’d get too much bounce and jiggle otherwise. But this is a surprisingly good match apparently. I’m not going to install this until I do the suspension otherwise I’ll wreck the current ride though.
The Bad Ideas that do Nothing to improve performance but I Couldn’t Resist because they were Really Cool and I got them for a Bargain
HKS SSQV IV BOV
The first one is this:
This is a HKS SSQV IV BOV (super sequential blow-off valve). HKS came up with this fancy sounding blurb about how it makes your car better. In reality the translation is: “we made it sound cool by making it do a technically worse job at what a BOV is supposed to do” which is to say, as it lets the built up pressure in the pipes out in stages when off the boost, it actually allows for rapidly intermittent off-throttle compressor surge. Which is to say, where most modern BOVs simply “sneeze”, this one does the classic old-school “sutututututu”.
As hinted by the pipe and the mounting bracket, whereas the OEM BOV is basically tacked onto the bottom of the engine block, this one is mounted high and prominently in the engine bay, on top of the replacement intercooler pipe:
It is designed to be ornamental. It’s a bling whistle. I definitely wasn’t going to get it at full price, but someone decided they were sick of theirs after running it for only 3 months and sold it for a ludicrously low sum. I honestly thought I was gonna get scammed but I couldn’t not take a punt and to my very pleasant surprise the seller was completely legit. All the hoses (which were mostly torture to install), were even in good condition with no cracks.
front of block, after redirecting the vacuum hose
behind the block, redirecting the hoses that run into the solenoid purge valve that controls the flow of air to the BOV
Most people make the mistake of running theirs vent to atmo. This is the main intention for the most sound and HKS know it. However as I mentioned previously, I’m all about making sure everything works. Debate rages on about whether venting to atmo in a modern turbo Honda actually harms the car because the ECU recalibrates well, but since in this car all the recirculation happens well after the MAF, I have to assume the possibility that venting to atmo will cause the ECU to overestimate how much air is running through and therefore might run the car rich off throttle, which would foul up my downpipe and cause the cat to burn out prematurely, not to mention dirty my O2 sensors which I went to the trouble of cleaning while I had the DP off! So I went and looked into how to recirculate, as HKS also deliberately allowed. However the HKS recirculation kit was designed for either the stock inlet pipes, or their own intake system (which is stock diameter). Not the PRL HVI system that I was running.
So I had to make my own. Fortunately I was not the first person to have to figure this out, but it certainly is a departure from any official manual. And in this day and age, finding the correct sized hose take-off adapter was actually really difficult and the only available stock literally shipped from Silverstone Circuit.
Had to cut a hole in the silicon intake pipe, which made me very nervous because I don’t have any spares and therefore no extra chances unless I want to put myself out of pocket several hundred dollars and have the car off the road for several weeks while I wait for PRL to ship another one from Pennsylvania lol. But again, I’m very careful so got it right.
My wife was watching me do this at the kitchen table in the middle of the night with great amusement but also at a total loss as to wtf I was trying to achieve
Then get some 19mm heater hose from the local hardware store, thread it through the radiator pipes, seal, tape and clamp and hope for the best.
This was when I discovered just how borderline incompatible the HKS gear was with the PRL gear lol. But it fits… just. HKS has a small print warning of complete incompatibility with the Eventuri intake airbox, which is even larger.
Just on the downlow, here’s how it sounds on a road with no apparent speed limit:
I haven’t bothered pulling the fuel trim data from the Flashpro (and I don’t think I will for now), but I can say that based on fuel consumption it’s made near as no difference whatsoever. In fact, replacing the airbox made more difference, not because the increased airflow means more fuel (that requires tuning), but because I over oiled my drop in filter, causing the car to run lean 
SPOON Motion Control Beam
The other “this is a really cool ornament” is even better, because it’s also not even visible unless you either jack the car or take the rear bumper off:
That’s right, it’s a Spoon branded Motion Control Beam. wtf is a MCB and what does it hope to achieve being put on the ends of the chassis? I hear literally everybody ask. I’m going to turn to a marketing video from, uh, Toyota to explain the concept:
Spoon figured that the greatest points of torsion in the subframe were the ends, so instead of advocating for a mid body brace bar like behind the seat, which is a fairly common mod, they argued that this might actually make the whole body too rigid and cause unsettled handling over bumps. Hence the internal dampers in the MCB. But the 99% of people who aren’t allergic to money counter argue that there’s no actual leverage in those positions so all you’re doing is adding a kilo to each end.
Once again I got a sale price on them and I was reeeeeeally curious. The problem is that if you drop four figures on clout you’re probably going to be tempted to think it wasn’t completely useless, right? So I have to be biased. But I am going to claim that I wasn’t expecting a huge difference but what did stand out to me is that the ride over bumpy corners is definitely more… numb than before. The Civic already started out as a relatively clinical car compared to the shifty bouncy slidey character of the i30N, and with my current tyres it just has stupid amounts of grip. But it’s lost even the sideways jitter over bumps I used to get. This increases grip but it’s also taking some getting used to as the behaviour shifts further from “steer in accordance with how the car behaves” which a lot of enthusiasts would refer to as “feedback”, and even more towards “steer in the direction you want to travel”.
I shudder to think that I will likely render these somewhat redundant when I inevitably half-cage the car
Even Stiffer Shifter
As mentioned in a previous post, I decided not to go for a full Acuity short shifter kit, opting instead for the OEM+ style Seeker Super-Shift modifications. This doesn’t mean that there’s no room for Acuity upgrades of course, just to keep up with the Yanks. After all there’s still the matter of the shifter cable bushings.
These things:
So off I went again, removing the airbox, the battery, the battery frame, the intercooler cool side pipe (with the HKS BOV attached), and the engine wiring harness. It was kind of a pain in the ass actually, as was prying out the C-clips that held the shifter cables in place. But I eventually got there:
Gear selector, bottom. Gate selector, top
Pry out the OEM rubber bushings which are really soft:
And whack in the new bushings which are polyurethane and some fancy anodized metal because it looks pretty, but also because it’s much firmer and takes out like 1-2mm of slop in the shifting action.
And a quick demo of the action:
I immediately got roasted by several people for trying to improve my shifting times by 0.00047s or something, which I agree, these are really small details. But once I started shifting hard and fast I realised the main difference is not the speed of the shift, but the accuracy. This obviously doesn’t solve the need to use certain techniques to avoid 1st and 4th lockouts (that’s a gate geometry thing), but under hard driving it provides further confidence to slam through the gears. Would be kinda useless if I hadn’t changed the mounts and the shifter assembly bushings too, but with those in, this adds to that precision that I need to nail the 2-3 under hard acceleration while turning, as the most common example.
Rally Fogs on the Cheap
After spending eye-watering amounts on the motion control beam, I could have spent another 600 bucks on OEM yellow fog lights.
Or I could just slap 20 dollar covers on them and protect them from even more rock chips. Seemed like a no-brainer, except that I should have done this a lot sooner.
On that note WD40 is fantastic for when you forget what material your fog covers were made from and accidentally smoke them up while attempting to polish them
While I was cursing at the '21 vent garnish (it has an extra locking tab for the fog light harness that nobody bothers to tell you about so I spent close to an hour trying to figure out why it refused to pop out like in all the install videos), I found why the vent on the left side is sealed and has the text DO NOT PAINT embossed into it: the LKAS module sits directly behind.
As I’ve mentioned I have no idea where I’m going to put the HKS oil cooler, which is L side mounted. This module is very conveniently placed right where the duct for the cooler should go. I also can’t mount it on the other side as there are other sensors there and the extra piping would be a nightmare. I’m not swapping it for a front mounted cooler as that would literally block over a third of the radiator area. The only other thing I can think to do is to modify the duct and remove the fog lamp but that would also kinda suck or maybe it’ll look badass idk, I barely use the fogs anyway. And the Australian law only states that a vehicle can have up to two fog lights, and says nothing about removing one…
It had to happen eventually
This is just the beginning.
