AH: Like an acid dip?
SP: It's not, it's some kind of chemical dip. They don't do any kind of acid dips in California. With an acid dip, it makes the metal thinner, but that's not what this does.
AH: Yeah, I don't think it's legal in Honda Challenge to remove metal from the unibody like that.
SP: No, all it does is take off paint and rust, and stuff like that. The place is called Strip Clean. There's no acid or metal thinning.
AH: So you end up with a chassis that's nothing. There's a lot of work to go through after that.
SP: Not really. Once you've pulled a couple of cars apart and put them back together, there aren't that many parts. The CRX had to be torn down to nothing anyway, because every single bushing needed to be replaced. The steering rack needed to be replaced, the interior had to come out for the roll cage, the dash had to come out to get to the heater and everything else back there. At some point, every part needs to come off. It's just that they're all pulled off at one time. You end up with a couple boxes of CRX and a unibody that's been stripped. Before we put it back together, I stitch-welded the whole car. It's an old car and it's just spot welds that hold it together and I wasn't sure what else I wanted to do with the car later. You can't really seam-weld a car unless it's in that state anyway. So I figured, since I had the opportunity, I'd just do it. It took a couple of extra days and we have a welder, so it didn't cost any money, just some time.
AH: And that was on the rotisserie when you seam-welded it?
SP: Yeah. Then we bolted the suspension back up to get it rolling and brought it to the cage guy to get the seat mount, the roll cage and all that stuff built. Then the suspension came off again and it went back on the rotisserie so the painter could paint it. You bring them the whole unibody with the cage and whatever fabrication you were planning on already done. That way you can paint everything. He painted the fenders and the doors and all that stuff while they were off the car, then we bolted them on when we got back to the shop. It's just reassembly at that point.
AH: Then you start picking out which parts are going back on?
SP: It's all happening in parallel. I had a big list. We had our Progress suspension and spherical bearings on order. The engine was out of the car. I rebuilt that. I ordered brake pads and rotors. Then you start putting the car back together with clean parts-put the cross members back on, new steering rack. A couple of ball joints were bad, so we replaced those. It ends up being a nice, clean car when everything is back together. I don't think it's much more expensive, you just have to have the space to do it. I don't own that rotisserie we used. It was borrowed from Rhys Millen. If I had to do it again, I'd probably do it the same, because the car was filthy and old. But I don't think it made the car much faster. Although we took 40 pounds off the unibody, most of that weight is down low underneath. And now we have 150 pounds of ballast anyway.
AH: Fair enough. The motor, what's the story with that?
SP: The engine had about 130K on it. The thing about Honda engines is that they last a long time. One hundred-something thousand miles is not that much on a Honda engine. We pulled it apart, Safety makes these cast replacement pistons that are legal. They're 1mm oversized and the whole set comes with rings for $100 or so for a set of four, with rings and pins.
It has stock rods, stock crank, stock bearings. I made sure the bearings were good and reassembled the motor with all the old bearings back in their same spot.
By Andy Hope
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