Type R Club of America

The time has come where I can finally, comfortably put a build thread together. I’ve had my integra since early 2008 right after I turned 18. Through this car, I’ve made quite a few friends in the car community and learned a ton. The first couple posts are going to cover about 12 years of my ownership and getting to present day status, so fair warning, there’s some rambling to follow.

While finishing up high school, I put tein lowering springs and a skunk2 exhaust on the car. Painted the stock ls wheels and thought I was coolest guy in town.


At that point I joined a local Honda forum and met a few guys who were much more serious (track days, drag racing, etc.) then I was. Started hanging out with them a lot more and that got me into getting deeper into modifications. I had also just started school at Cincinnati for engineering so money was hard to come by.

My sophomore year I decided I wanted to try my hand at something a little more in depth on the car. So during my spring break, I decided to pull the engine, clean up and paint the engine bay, delete some of the creature comforts and tuck some wires. Still kept the ls due to money, and did some really tacky teal green powdercoating.



At that time I also threw on some function&form type 2 coilovers and some Rotas with cpr stickers.


Around that time I met some other guys in Cincinnati who were big into Honda’s and had a couple Honda tuning features between them that I started hanging out with. These guys were more into drag racing, but still into quality builds with non-counterfeit parts. So I started collecting parts after starting my co-op job and making a little money. First item I bought was a Jdm itr 36mm 5 lug and shortly after that was a jdm front end. I knew by that point when it came time for a swap I wanted to go k series, so I scooped up a set of first gen hasports from a member on here. They came off a yellow itr that was at one point a project feature in Honda tuning or one of the magazines, I think it was quickly turned into a race car by that member (and possibly wrecked?)

All those items were stored back at my parents house while I continued going to school, and my 4th year I ended up picking up an 04 tsx to finally have a nice daily. The integra got parked and pretty much ignored for a year until I graduated. I did end up finding a genuine Mugen gen 1 for a stupid deal my last year of school, so I bought that and put it in the parts pile.

Upon my graduation, I moved back to Columbus after taking a full time position. And when I got my first check, I treated myself to a set of itr spec volk re30’s that belonged to a friend of mine. Around the same time, my best friend through high school’s dad bought a 3000 sq ft shop for us to all work on our projects. They had a few mg projects, some old Alfa’s, an old mini and a first year new mini. Having a place to work comfortable was the domino that led to totally stripping the car to a bare shell to try my hand at a ground up build.

I don’t have any of these pictures on my phone, I’ll try and dig through my old laptop and find pictures to update some of these.

To be continued...

Rock on, I look forward to this thread.

There are several from this community that are far or are based in Cincinnati and Columbus. We have also hosted multiple Type R Expo's at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, so the community knows your area well.


*Type R Expo 13 (circa 2013), photo by Keith Meilink. More photos here

So going back to 2013ish, I had stripped the car down, used dry ice to get all the sound deadening out and ended up finding that the passenger side quarter was getting some rust. The car was hit on that side with the original owner (I’m the second owner) and the quarter was replaced with an rdot panel. I had figured that made the likelihood of rust low, but I found the moisture had made its way into the panel glue and caused it to rust from the inside out... so I ended up purchasing a new rdot type r quarter panel from a local dealership (don’t hate me for buying one and using it on a non type r now that they’re not available). I was trying to save the labor of shaving the mouldings. I felt it would be pretty dumb to get a new quarter just to weld the holes up. I removed the quarter in 2014 and had quite a bit of life happen shortly after to where it got left on the back burner and didn’t get touched for a couple years (got married, bought a house, had a kid).

I finally bit the bullet and reached out to a local guy who does body and paint work. He had done a little bit of paint work for a friend and I decided to give him a try to just do the new quarter install and other body work. I wanted to spray the car myself.










$1500 later I got the shell back and wasn’t pleased with the way the inner quarter attached to the outer quarter at all. After a few days of contemplating I cut the inner out and started reconstructing it myself.




Welded in my patch piece, put a coat of seam sealer over that and then was able to roll the quarter like I wanted. My intention is to run 15x8’s with a meaty tire in the future. The way I got it back, it couldn’t have been rolled. Was almost boxed where the outer met the end of the inner quarter.

Now that I had that where I liked it, i scrubbed the underside of the car with purple power, wire wheeled surface rust areas and hit them with some epoxy primer to prepare for undercoating. I decided to undercoat the car using lizard skin. I ended up doing the sound dampening coat followed by a coat of the thermal insulation.













The next post I’ll show some pictures of the 5 lug install after I stripped it down, blasted it and powdercoated everything.

coolhandluke wrote:Rock on, I look forward to this thread.

There are several from this community that are far or are based in Cincinnati and Columbus. We have also hosted multiple Type R Expo's at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, so the community knows your area well.


*Type R Expo 13 (circa 2013), photo by Keith Meilink. More photos here

I actually attended the first year expo at mid Ohio as a spectator (can’t remember which year). Did a couple ride alongs with other members here. I can’t remember his name, but it was a 98 with a Mugen gen 2 wing, red koseis and some other stuff done to it.


That was where the bug bit and just reinforced what I wanted to build the car for. My buddy steve (who towed my car with the half ton Chevy) has a 98 and has attended most expos since I think expo 3. He’s tracked his blue tsx the last few times he’s tracked.

Just realized my pictures aren’t posting in order. I’ll have to watch that going forward.

Awesome work! Look forward to seeing more

DC4MC wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 12:24 pm I actually attended the first year expo at mid Ohio as a spectator (can’t remember which year). Did a couple ride alongs with other members here. I can’t remember his name, but it was a 98 with a Mugen gen 2 wing, red koseis and some other stuff done to it.


That was where the bug bit and just reinforced what I wanted to build the car for. My buddy steve (who towed my car with the half ton Chevy) has a 98 and has attended most expos since I think expo 3. He’s tracked his blue tsx the last few times he’s tracked.

Just realized my pictures aren’t posting in order. I’ll have to watch that going forward.

Awesome! Forgive me, I wasn't aware. The first year at Mid-Ohio was Type R Expo 12 (prev. ITR Expo), circa 2012. We returned the following year for Type R Expo 13, circa 2013. The 98 you are described sounds like 98spec022/Jeff.

coolhandluke wrote:

DC4MC wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 12:24 pm I actually attended the first year expo at mid Ohio as a spectator (can’t remember which year). Did a couple ride alongs with other members here. I can’t remember his name, but it was a 98 with a Mugen gen 2 wing, red koseis and some other stuff done to it.


That was where the bug bit and just reinforced what I wanted to build the car for. My buddy steve (who towed my car with the half ton Chevy) has a 98 and has attended most expos since I think expo 3. He’s tracked his blue tsx the last few times he’s tracked.

Just realized my pictures aren’t posting in order. I’ll have to watch that going forward.

Awesome! Forgive me, I wasn't aware. The first year at Mid-Ohio was Type R Expo 12 (prev. ITR Expo), circa 2012. We returned the following year for Type R Expo 13, circa 2013. The 98 you are described sounds like 98spec022/Jeff.

That was him. Super cool guy. I just walked by his car in the paddocks and he asked if I wanted to ride along so I couldn’t turn it down. Hoping this car is ready if there is something going on this year!

So right before I bought my tsx, I kept having wheel bearing failure on my original 4 lug. Learned the hard way to not use an impact on axle nuts. Due to being poor at the time, a friend gave me a set of prelude axles and I threw the 5 lug on the car for a short while. When I tore the car down, I decided I wanted to totally redo the 5 lug. So I ordered extended studs, new bearings, a complete bushing kit from PIC (hoping these hold up okay). And ended up powdercoating everything myself (subframe, rear trailing arms and wheels were done by a shop my work used due to them not fitting in a conventional oven).






So right after the undercoat was dry, I started throwing everything onto the car. By this point, the shell had been rolling on the dolly I made for 5 years, so getting it back on the ground was a pretty satisfying moment (although I only got the rear put on up to this point).






From here, it was time to finish up prep work on the engine bay. I decided to shave a few holes, but nothing crazy. Was just attempting to make it look like it was from the factory this way.







After finishing up this prep work, I set a little “booth” up in the back corner of the shop to keep overspray away from the other cars. And sprayed the engine bay. The color is curva red (racing Rosso) off the 2017+ nsx.









The day after I came back, peeled they tape off, moved it back to the lift and threw the subframe in to see how everything looked with the paint color. Was pretty happy with the gunmetal suspension components, wheel color and car color combo.





Edit - Should be in the correct order now.

Good stuff! Keep the pics coming.

Lturner wrote: ↑Fri Feb 28, 2020 8:18 pm Good stuff! Keep the pics coming.

Agreed