Add some Life to your spice

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Tue Mar 05, 2013 3:59 pm

Thanks for the info 79cord! I had no idea they changed so much between models. That makes sense though because there's a surprising amount of room inside the cabin. I'll have to have a rethink on how to get enough power out of the little guy to be a viable car in the states.

First though, I gotta make it run. One of the reasons I didn't get my thermostat housing back on yesterday was because I didn't have any good hose clamps. So, I made sure that that was no longer a problem!

Now that I had enough hose clamps to replace every clamp on the car, I could install the thermostat housing.

My next goal was to try to get the carbs clean and running tip top.

First things first, I had to split them apart from each other.

And then I had to figure out how to put all of the gaskets and O-Rings in these into the carbs.

Bowl off and I ran into my biggest problem. These carbs have been apart countless times and aside from the fact that all the o-rings were shot, the bowls were held on with a variety of different screws, none very tight.

Still I soldiered on!

After a lot of work and stabbing my fingers, I finally got one of them back together. I'm not so keen on the mismatch of screws holding the bowl on, but, well, we'll see how that panned out later.

If you read this post again from the top that's pretty much exactly what happened for the second carb too. I got them both back together and popped them on the car. I also made a new stud for the air cleaner out of a piece of all thread.

I hooked up everything, filled it with water, drained the bad gas and put some new gas in, hooked the battery up and crossed my fingers.

It fired up! The new fuel pump works a charm, my timing belt was installed correctly, the alternator worked, etc. It ran pretty good and started a bit easier than before. Unfortunately, my worry about the bowls on the carbs was a well founded one. They were both leaking alarming amounts of fuel. So, both carbs get to come back off and I gotta have a rethink on how to tighten the bowls down.

Once I get the carb bowls sorted, there's not a whole lot left to do! Just need to bleed the brakes, tighten the hub nuts and pop new cotter pins in, check for coolant leaks and then put in new coolant, change the oil and filter, clean up the wiring, re-install grille, remove that Daihatsu radio and get some new floor mats in. Sounds like a lot, but most of that can be knocked out in an afternoon. Can't wait to get off work today and get back down there to sort the carbs!

Cheers,
David

nwclassichonda · **Posted:** Tue Mar 05, 2013 6:43 pm

Keep up the great work!

Sideglide · **Joined:** Tue Nov 06, 2012 9:11 pm **Posts:** 19

Dave, for the carb, it's just a motley crue of bolts and screws? If you tightened them down, how are they still leaking? Are some of them too long i.e. not able to cinch down enough?

Also, I envy your selection of hose clamps. My home store doesn't even seem to carry them!

DmK66 · **Posted:** Tue Mar 05, 2013 11:40 pm

Hi David.
Are the fuel bowl mating faces dead flat ? I know you have gaskets but it doesn't take much of a twist to make them leak.
Get a bit of flat glass and smear some fine valve grinding paste on it, put the bowl mating face down and make little circles. Works for anything with a paper (or indeed no) gasket.You'll be impressed.
Or am I teaching my Grandma to suck eggs ?
Good luck, Dan.

pierren600 · **Posted:** Wed Mar 06, 2013 9:17 am

Great ! Sounds like you are going to get it back on the road soon. Fantastic !

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Wed Mar 06, 2013 4:11 pm

Sideglide, the collection of screws holding the bowl down was just a mish mash of different types forced into the aluminum. Really, I should have fixed it on the spot.

Dan, that actually was a bit of a problem as well, although not because they weren't flat but because with the fuel cross tube in place, it tweaked the bowls just enough to make them not sit flat. I think that mixed with the problems below were what was causing it to pee fuel all over my alternator.

Pierren, I'm hoping this weekend it will be near road worthy!

So, I was going through many different ideas in my head about how to go about fixing the fuel leaking problem. As you can see in this picture, I think the bulk of my problem was that, aside from the mish mash of screws, the original screws had ripped out all the threads that were in the carb.

Ya, not pretty. So I went through several different ideas in my head, from tapping it larger to filling it with epoxy, then drilling the hardened epoxy and tapping that, but I knew that there was only one proper way to do it and that's the way I should have done when I first noticed the problem. So, I went to my local bolt and screw specialist store (http://www.geocities.jp/gyokusaioh/omise1.html) and picked up these!

M4 Helicoils. I wasn't sure what length I needed, so I just bought a whole bunch of different lengths as they were pretty cheap. So, time to get to work.

I drilled each hole out, tapped them and then started installing the helicoils. Here's the first one.

I got into a groove and before I knew it, I had all 8 holes repaired. So I popped the bowls back on and cinched them down with brand new screws.

Installed back on the car with fingers crossed.

I flipped the ignition on and cranked it over a turn to get the fuel pump running. I double checked all around the carbs for any leaks and didn't see any, so I sat in the car, pulled the choke out and cranked her over. She fired on the third turn, faster than some EFI cars I've seen. This is from a dead cold engine to boot! She runs pretty damn well.

There's still some carb tuning that needs to be done as it idles pretty high (around 2k) and pops occasionally. Although some of that could be because I don't have any vacuum lines hooked up. I let it idle long enough to warm up and the fan never kicked on, so that will have to be sussed out as well (could be air in the system causing problems or I could have some wires hooked up incorrectly). Also, I was alarmed at a whining noise the engine was making that I thought was a dead water pump, but after removing the water pump from the system by taking off the alternator belt, the sound didn't go away, so it must be something intrinsic to the engine. If you listen closely in the first video I posted of the car you can hear the whining noise a bit, my guess is that it sounded louder yesterday because I was in the garage and my face was pretty close to the engine.

At any rate, now that it runs decently well, it's just buttoning things up from here on out!

Thanks again guys!
Cheers,
David

Sideglide · **Joined:** Tue Nov 06, 2012 9:11 pm **Posts:** 19

Excellent to see this! I bet that car hasn't seen this much love in a loooooooong time. I might just be up there in a few weeks. You bet I want a ride in this sucker! :tu:

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Thu Mar 07, 2013 4:01 pm

Lets hope I can get it completely sorted by the time you make it here Sideglide!

Yesterday, I had one main goal. That was to bleed the brakes. So, I poor fluid into the master, crack open a bleeder and get my lovely girlfriend to start pumping the brakes. After about 10 pumps I hear this weird noise so I look down and see brake fluid spraying sideways across the engine bay. Turns out, one of the lines had this rubber cover around it that had apparently trapped moisture and rusted a hole in the line.

Yowza. That put a stop to bleeding the brakes real quick. I'm going to swing by my local motorcycle shop on the way home from work and see if I can find a braided flex line to replace it. If not, it's off to the Life parts car at Classic Car Nagoya. If that fails, I'll just rip a section of clean brake line off of a random parts car, cut it, re-bend and re-flare it. Since the brakes were out of the question yesterday, I tackled a bunch of other small things. First and foremost I put the front end back together.

With the air cleaner on (although there's no filter in it at the moment) and all the vacuum lines properly hooked up it runs a thousand times better. No more popping at idle and sounds nice and smooth. I'm very pleased with how the carburetors are working. Once I get a nice sunny day to park it outside I'll let it warm up and properly dial in the carburetors by reading the plugs. I also popped in new H4 bulbs, so now I have bright, fully working headlights!

I also changed the oil and filter, and torqued the hub nuts down and installed new cotter pins. It's getting pretty close to being able to take it for a test drive actually. Aside from the brakes, I need to tackle the fan not kicking on and properly bleed the cooling system, but that's something I would prefer to do in the daylight. Not far to go now!

Here's how I've been parking her at night while she's got no brakes.

Thanks for reading guys!

Cheers,
David

AJS · **Posted:** Fri Mar 08, 2013 5:13 am

What a great little car. Good to read that the engine runs nice. I guess it's really hard to find replacement parts for such engines.

kansaiwalker01 · **Posted:** Sat Mar 09, 2013 1:30 pm

Amazing car and amazing story! The interior is so clean! Good luck with your Life!!!

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Sun Mar 10, 2013 4:10 pm

Thanks for the comments guys!

My fantastic girlfriend swung by city hall with my Jibaiseki hoken and picked these bad boys up for me on Thursday.

These are Japan's temporary plates. You rent them for about 700 yen and they're good for one week. The sole intention of these plates is to allow you to drive an un-inspected and unregistered car to the inspection place. Technically, if you aren't driving to or from the inspection place, you aren't supposed to be driving, but that largely gets ignored. My intention was to use these plates to give the car a shakedown and make absolutely sure it was ready for inspection. That of course, meant I had a lot of work to do!

I needed a replacement for the rusted out brake pipe, but I couldn't find a place that would sell new braided soft lines that would work (within the time period that I wanted them, ie. right now). So, I pilfered a random short hard line from a parts car at CCN and kind of ghetto bent it into shape.

It's not super beautiful, but it works a charm! We then bled the brakes and for the first time in who knows how many years, the little Life could go and stop all on her own! Since it was dark out and I didn't want to take her for her first test drive at night, I figured I'd keep working. First was to clean up the mess that was the rear speakers and the Daihatsu radio.

God it felt good ripping those out. The rear parcel shelf looks so much better now.

As does the interior. It also gives my left knee some much needed room.

The next morning, my goal was to clean up the connectors for the water temp. sensor and the thermoswitch for the fan. So, I busted out an old toothbrush, some coke and parts cleaner.

These two sensors were my targets (at least I think these are the two sensors for the thermoswitch and temperature, I'm kind of guessing here).

After a bit of scrubbing with the coke and then a blast with the parts cleaner, they were looking much better!

The connectors were looking sad as well.

Now, not so sad looking!

I have no idea if that actually fixed my fan not kicking on problem or not. It doesn't seem to ever get hot enough while not under load to kick it off. So, I said to myself, lets put her under some load and see if she gets hot.

First impressions? Hilarious! I love this little car. The rack and pinion steering is the first thing I noticed. It's lightning quick compared to my Mitsubishi, which you can literally drive like those old movies where they are constantly moving the steering wheel back and forth. There's no play in the steering here though, you turn the wheel and the light chassis instantly responds. The engine is lots of fun. It revs out very quickly, but do to the mega short gearing, revving out quick does not equal going quickly. It will easily rock up to 75 km/h and with a little space it'll tag 80 km/h easy, though. If you had a long enough stretch and didn't mind taking 4th gear up to 9k rpm, it would break 100 km/h, which is amazing for a little 360cc engine. It still needs a bit of tuning though as the idle is all over the board (sometimes it's 3k, sometimes 2k, sometimes dead). Other than that, it drives fantastically!

Anyways, after my fun little test drive to the local hardware store and back, I needed to get back to work on a few more things. First, in order to pass inspection, I need the windshield washer to work. Originally, the washer uses a hand pump. You push the washer switch in and it pumps some water out. That broke at some point in time in the past and someone swapped it out for an electric pump. I'm alright with that, except that the switch and mounting plate they used looked like trash.

Look at this mount, it's awful. I could construct something that looks better out of Legos.

Instead of Legos though, I just bought a generic momentary switch and stay for a few hundred yen. It looks about nine thousand times better.

I pulled the crappy red floor mats out next.

I was worried about the old carpet falling apart though. It looked halfway decent, but everyday use would quickly rip it to shreds. I needed some new floor mats. I checked the local automotive store but they didn't have anything near the right shape. So, I pulled out some generic floor mat that you can cut and cut me out some new floor mats.

I think it really helps the interior look nice!

My biggest problem for passing inspection now is the flasher. My right turn signal works fine, but my left turn signal won't blink if the revs are below about 4 grand. I popped the flasher out and looked inside it, but it all looked alright to me.

My problem might be crappy old bulbs too. So, I'm going to pick up some new bulbs and a new battery this week and hope that brings it back to life. Now, when I said my biggest problem for inspection was the flasher, that was a bit of a fib. My actual biggest problem is the lack of side mirrors. So, I pulled out the drill.

I hate drilling holes in perfectly good fenders.

I started small and worked my way up to a nice big hole so I could mount these.

They're not original Life mirrors. To be honest, I haven't a clue what they came off of; I think something British because the studs to hold them on were 5/16 not M8. Regardless, I think they look fantastic and really fit the character of the car.

With any luck, I'll have inspection by the end of the week and I can start driving her to and from work daily by next week! I need to knock out just a few more things and it should be completely ready!

Thanks for reading guys!

Cheers,
David

79cord · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 1:38 am

Glad to hear it is useable.
Certainly great fun idling at the recommended 1100rmp, bringing revs up to 2000 whilst letting out the clutch & letting that free-revving little engine smoothly do its thing to the 9000rpm redline as though all engines should, & responding so quickly with its lightweight flywheel. The car itself might not be the fastest thing around but who cares when you can have that much fun.
I found the bigger sensor beside the ignition timing cover/points, operated the engines cooling fan and replaced it with the equivalent component from, an EG Civic (D-series) that shared the same size/thread but actually fitted even better since its outer bolt hex was smaller allowing it to be removed without disturbing the ignition points (which the larger original hex got in the way of). When bought my Z's previous owner had by-passed this for a manual switch in the cabin :shock:

Later Honda relocated this to a more reliable(?) location in the radiator.
Glad it has the luxury of carpets since our Water-cooled Z reverted to rubber mats & non-reclining seat backs to offset the extra cost of the Hardtop bodystyle though had electric windscreen washers mounted in their washer water bags. Can't remember what our Lives had had.
Surprised it did not get the fender mounted mirrors, since even our Z still retained the mounting points under chromed caps, though used round mirrors similar to those you found, also shared with the earliest Civics mounted upon the doors. Perhaps they were covered over or eliminated when it was repainted. So glad it appears so rust free (except door) given such thin sheetmetal & no rustproofing.

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 3:42 pm

79cord, you're right, the engine revs so freely, it's easy to forget that normal cars stop at 6,000 rpm. The lightweight flywheel seems like it's not so much lightweight as it is non-existent. The thing picks up revs so quickly when free revving. It's going to take a while to get my accelerator technique down well enough that I don't sky rocket the revs to 4 to 5k every time I try to start from a stop. I really, really want to drive a Honda S600/800 now. I imagine it takes all the benefits of the Life and just makes them more!

For the cooling system, I'm probably going to swap to a new fan and a new switch at some point in time. I hooked the electric fan directly up to the battery and it spun at a less than convincing speed. I think whether the switch is in the radiator or the engine, the difference isn't all that huge, just so long as it's not a manual switch in the cabin, haha.

My guess is that it did originally have fender mirrors and they were just filled in when the car was repainted. Of course, now I have to find a nice way to cover the holes in the doors for mirrors until it's time for my repaint.

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 3:57 pm

Alrighty, since I'm planning on sending the car in for inspection this week, there were a few things I needed to handle before it would be ready. So, I went shopping.

I figured that while I did still really need a new flasher, swapping all the bulbs out and popping in a new battery probably couldn't hurt either. So, I replaced every bulb on the exterior and cleaned all the sockets with coca cola and parts cleaner. After popping the new battery in, the result is that my left blinker now works at idle, albeit slowly. I'll chalk that one up as a success!

Next up was the air filter. Instead of hunting endlessly for a paper filter, I decided it would be better if I could just put some new filter material on the old frame. So, I took the center piece of the old filter frame, wrapped two pieces of filter material around it and zip tied it in place.

This is the same thing I did on my Mitsubishi 360 and it works a treat!

Next I needed to handle the wipers. As you can see, these wipers were essentially non-existent.

I went to the local automotive store and bought the shortest/cheapest wiper blades I could with the hope of making them work. As you can see, the construction is quite different. The new wiper blades (top) have two separate metal pieces that fit in the rubber blade and are held on with plastic clips. The old Life wiper blades (bottom) use a single metal piece that the rubber slots into.

So, the problem with the new wiper blades is that they have the channel for the metal piece enclosed on both ends.

So, all you do is cut off the end so the channel for the metal frame is open from both sides. Then you slide the new rubber into the old Life wiper frame. Once in, you slide the whole blade assembly back into the arm. Voila! New wiper rubber from the local automotive store for a car that's 40 years old!

Today I drop the car off at CCN for them to do a final check over and make sure it's all up to snuff. If everything checks out, the car should be going in for the actual inspection on Thursday or Friday! I can't wait!

Cheers,
David

kansaiwalker01 · **Posted:** Mon Mar 11, 2013 11:57 pm

Good luck with the upcoming inspection. I am glad you are giving the Life some Tender Loving Care it deserves. I still can't believe how clean that interior is with so few cracks on the vinyl. Do you know anything about the original owner(s)? It looks like it has been garaged for the majority of its Life.

The new floormats look much better too. Keep us informed about what is going on! :mrgreen:

Nakazoto · **Posted:** Tue Mar 12, 2013 3:56 pm

Thanks for the comment kansaiwalker! I wish I knew more about the previous owners. I'm sure that at 40 years old, the list is a long one. I would like to thank them though for keeping the inside so nice! History or no, this Life will get some new life!

Yesterday I decided to drop the car off at CCN for inspection. It won't actually go for inspection until Thursday or Friday, which means they'll spend today going over the car nose to tail making sure that everything is ready. For the trip to CCN (which is really just a 10 minute drive), I decided it would be fun to roll up in 360cc style!

My lovely girlfriend would pilot the Mitsubishi 360 and I would pilot the Life 360.

The Star Shark replica wheels look fantastic, but the offset on the front was just off enough to push the tires a hair past the edge of the fenders, which is an automatic fail at the inspection place. So I pilfered two stock front wheels from the parts car at CCN and slapped them on with new tires. As you can see, one of them is white...

... and the other is red.

Regardless, the offset is spot on and with brand new tires on all four corners, it should pass with no issues. As soon as I get my inspection sticker, I'll be making another trip to the tire shop to swap the new tires onto the Star Shark wheels.

That's a combined 720 ccs, 4 cylinders, 4 valves and 57 hp right there. Haha, those numbers don't really make much sense!

I dropped it off at CCN with three items I would like them to check in addition to their standard stuff. First, I'm confident in my work, but brakes are awfully important, so it wouldn't hurt to have a second pair of eyes double check everything. Next, the carburetors need a bit of tuning and since Taira san is a carburetor god, I figured having him look at them would be the best bet. Finally, the flasher relay is still acting up, so that needs to be looked at.

Those are all things I could handle, but it would delay taking inspection for a bit, which I didn't want to do, so I figured it was easiest to ask for a little help this time.

I'll let y'all know how it went at the end of the week!

Cheers,
David

ill-minded · **Posted:** Tue Mar 12, 2013 11:34 pm

Welcome to the 10" club, man.

Some styling ideas, perhaps?

79cord · **Posted:** Wed Mar 13, 2013 6:28 pm

Still love the comparison between them, proportions of the Mitsubishi look spot-on for a scaled down old Bronco or Cherokee.

bob78cvcc · **Posted:** Wed Mar 13, 2013 6:35 pm

If and when you can, please post a pic of a 1st gen 2 door Civic along side your Life.
It amazes me how close in proportion and looks they seem to be.

79cord · **Posted:** Thu Mar 14, 2013 3:39 pm

That would be dramatic with even early Civic being 20cm wider & 55cm longer (with the US bumpers).

Add some Life to your spice

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