1st March 2009
After leaving oily bits to drain overnight, I spent the morning cleaning them up and preparing them to go back onto the car. I also decided it would probably be sane to replace one of the other obscure service items on this car - so all the jubilee clips on all the oil system pipes were replaced, as fortunately I just about had enough spare new ones. I can't refit most of the big bits because I want to take the opportunity to have a good clean up around the engine bay whilst it is out of the way. It sounds lame when I write it now, but that took all morning.
With the oil system about as far as I can for now, the next job was to remove the coolant. This has been in the car since it was built, so it is probably time for a change. Forunately, the place where I bought the oil from had some special offer on which included 1 litre of decent looking antifreeze for free with my order, so I just got some de-ionised water to mix with it. The coolant actually came out slightly grubby looking, eventually, as it took a bit of fiddling to crack the joints. I then flushed the system through a few times with clean water, which was also quite a messy task - an interesting mixture of spilt oil and spilt coolant now awaits me on the garage floor.
A final couple of things to be thinking about for this week: I removed the spark plugs, they look ok, but should probably be replaced, except they are iridium and therefore expensive; and I think I should replace the dry sump belt also as a service item, but I'm not sure how this is removed...
     

8th March 2009
Not alot of garage time available this weekend, due to other things, but I spent a couple of hours getting further carried away with removing bits from the car to enable a thorough clean up to occur. I whipped out the air horns and battery and started the task of cleaning around all the tubes, getting the accumulated grot out of the all the corners and edges of the chassis, the engine itself, etc.
The keen eyed reader may notice that I managed to remove the dry sump scavenge pump belt fairly easily in the end - there is a hex key in the end of the crank shaft drive adapter which allows you to turn the engine over by hand (with the plugs out). Getting the new one on looks like slightly more of a challenge, presumably as the old one has stretched / softened up a bit more.
I also did get hold of some replacement plugs, at an acceptable sort of price off eBay. And have also worked out what the original fuel filter is from, and ordered one of those, and will try to get around to ordering some dust retention spray to allow me to clean and re-treat the ITG foam air filter.

11th March 2009
I decided that the only way to get through the unenjoyable job of cleaning up, is to do it bit by bit, so popped out to the garage for an hour this evening. Although maybe I shouldn't have. I started off by discovering that my garage door is broken - one of the springs has failed in a semi-explosive manner, though luckily with minimal damage, but it turns out springs aren't all that cheap to replace.
Then I removed the coil packs to allow me to shorten one of the ignition leads which has always been slightly too long which causes it to just catch the bonnet as it goes on and off. I did the shortening without too much bother, but then managed to break the screw cap which holds it in place - I bet you can't buy these individually from Mr Honda, so I need try to find someone with a failed coil pack or something, as I don't really want to buy and entire coil pack just for one small plastic part.

15th March 2009
Another distinct lack of garage time this weekend, due to other activities. One of those activites was going to collect a replacement garage door spring, which I had managed to locate an apparently lightly used one. It took all of about ten minutes to fit and all is well with the garage door again (without too much expense fortunately). Another activity was going up to Snetterton to watch the first RGB race of the season - this was not wholly successful for those who were partaking, which you will no doubt be able to read about here, here, here, and here, before too long (if you need more reading matter!).
Anyways, I had a couple of hours in garage only, which I spent fitting the new fuel filter which had arrived, tidying up that area on the bulkhead, applying some reflective tape to the tube which the ignition leads run in, and did the first coat of some bits of touching up paint on a couple of areas which were in need (i.e. the paint on the steering rack seemed to disappear when I cleaned it with solvent).
Thinking positively, I will try this week to get some more done on it as I think I have collected all the bits I need to get now, next weekend is currently fairly clear, and the weekend after could be a marathon effort. We had some good weather this weekend, which is always good motivation to get it working!
       

22nd March 2009
OK, so the best laid plans and all that... but I did spend some time in the garage over the weekend, despite the weather being a bit too nice to do so. Progress, however, seems to be pretty glacial. Certainly nothing much write about or take photos. I wanted to be putting it back together and getting oil back in it, but there is a chain of things which are best done before I do that. So I was on with yet more tidying in the engine bay.
One tedious part of which was cleaning out and painting up the engine mounts where the cradles bolt to the chassis, as they are essentially little buckets which fill up with crap and gently rust. So I removed them in turn, cleaned them out, and painted them up - a squirt of WD40 in them seems to help slow the decay, but helps catch detritius.
Just when I thought I was ready to start putting things back into the engine bay, I figured it would probably be a good idea to thread the front anti-roll bar in first. Of course, before I can do this, it was sensible to clean up the front suspension, so I spent an afternoon removing the front shocks and de-gunging them, and cleaning up the wishbones etc.
Getting there. Very slowly. But the engine bay is looking much cleaner now - I think I need to feed the breather on the oil catch tank into the airbox to help prevent the oily film getting everywhere and trapping dirt again.
           

26th March 2009
I've got some holiday from work that I have to burn before the end of the month, so that's me done for this month then. This gives me an extra long weekend to do not alot, but I do intend to make some useful progress with the car. I was originally thinking I might get it all done and back on the road, but I'm not so sure now, we'll see.
So today, I was able to finally start putting things back together in the engine bay. First thing was the thread the front anti-roll bar back in, after fitting the droplink mounts to it, and I have left it loosely fitted in its mounting blocks for now. With this done, I could then: refit the battery and clamp it down, refit the air horns, and fit the new dry sump scavenge belt.
In the afternoon, I remembered that I had intended to remove the clutch to check it over. Since the dry sump tank sits right in front of the clutch cover, removing the clutch requires the tank to be removed, and therefore the oil to be drained. So, while it is already out, it makes alot of sense to take it out for inspection.
This is pretty simple to do, but the results were not so simple. It looked fairly normal until I came to the last steel plate. This has some quite weird blueing on it. The blueing occurs when the clutch slips to the point where it gets hot, which normally shows up as blue/black markings around the steel plate. However the one steel has, as you can see in the picture, small heat marks, which suggests some odd behaviour... It sort of looks as if the clutch has been unable to slip properly, but has created some hot spots by slipping just a little bit? Perhaps it has not been oiling properly? Or something?
     

27th March 2009
So I took the above pictured sample of clutch plates to the pub, so show my BEC owning friends. There was a mixed conclusion about whether I should replace them or not. They don't appear to be warped, and I'd not noticed any slip or other clutch problems.

The first half of today was wasted by me remembering that my vernier calipers had run out of battery (yes, that will teach me to have new fangled electronic ones), and that I really needed them to check the thickness of the clutch frictions. So I had to make another trip out to get a new battery. Whilst I was passing I figured I would call into the local bike shop, to get their opinion on the clutch plates - they agreed that it looked odd, but as the plates don't seem to be warped (they checked), and the clutch was working ok, that I should just put it back together again (or "happy days" as they said!).

I managed to have a more productive afternoon though, a few hours in the garage saw: oil tank refitted, oil cooler refitted, oil catch tank refitted, front ARB droplinks refitted, remainder of engine bay tidying finished off. Additionally, having checked the thickness of the frictions, I refitted the clutch, and just swapped the positions of the two blued steel plates with their nearest neighbours. I guess I'll find out if there is a problem eventually - hopefully there isn't one!
       

28th March 2009
So, after the reasonable progress of yesterday afternoon, I was today in a position to get the engine restarted. I spent the morning doing this, firstly after double-checking all the connections, I filled the oil tank with oil and to help prime things, I directly filled the oil cooler too. With that done, I then mixed the antifreeze I got with distilled water, and water wetter. I then spent some time feeding that into the elevated expansion tank, squeezing various pipes to try to expel any trapped air.
Once that was all done, I reconnected the battery and was ready to go. I turned the engine over on the starter a bit first, until it was showing pressure on the gauge. Then topped up the oil tank, as a couple of litres had now been pumped into the system. I primed the fuel pump a few times to push the air introduced by changing the fuel filter into the tank, and fired it up.
It's always good for the motivation to hear it running. And fortunately, there don't seem to be any leaks. I let it run up until the fan kicked in, to try to ensure any air was out of the cooling system, as it would then be reasonably under pressure, and left it to cool down again to recheck the levels.
In the afternoon, I checked and topped up the levels once it had cooled down. Everything seems to be ok so far, but a test drive is the only real test. After that, I tidied things up in the garage a bit, and then spent some time cleaning up the tops of the throttle bodies which were a bit oily dirty. Then I spent a while cleaning up the airbox, removing all the residue from the gaffa tape which I use to make it airtight (who heard of a non-airtight airbox?).

30th March 2009
I didn't do anything to the car yesterday, just because I couldn't quite be bothered! I did spend a couple of hours helping Richard extract the engine from his Dax however, so that was my car fill for the day.
Today I decided to face up to the next tedious task of cleaning up the rear end of the car. Nothing much to say about this really, I removed the bootbox and spent a few hours cutting my hands to shreds doing all the fiddly cleaning around the rear suspension/diff/fuel tank.
I also repeated the trick I did at the front of the car, and removed the dampers to give them a proper clean up on the bench. At this point, I'd had enough for today, so left the re-assembly as a simple task for tomorrow.
        

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