I posted on this before, but walking around Mugen’s headquarters parking lot is every bit as interesting as walking around inside. As you’d expect, anything that was modified was done so with Mugen bits. I wonder what the employee discount is?
Not having a lift in your home garage means you’d better be creative or willing to take your car to a shop. I wasn’t interested in towing my NSX back to one of my friends’ shops to reinstall the drivetrain. Doing so would have meant loading and unloading my car onto a trailer and risk damaging it twice. I just replaced the AC condensers up front and wasn’t about to risk damaging the new ones. I’m also not interested in leaving my car unattended at a shop for who knows how long at which time customers can take turns sitting in it while I’m not there. Besides, I work better alone, without distractions, which makes my garage the perfect place to get things done. But I still don’t have a lift, which means I had to get creative. In short, I needed 27 inches of clearance out back in order to slide the drivetrain in place. The solution involved two ramps, four three-ton jack stands, two six-ton jack stands, two hydraulic floor jacks, and an engine hoist. Both bumpers also had to be removed, which wasn’t really a big deal since they’ve only been held down by a couple of bolts since the car left the body shop. If not, the front bumper would’ve hit the ground when jacking up the rear so high and the rear bumper wouldn’t have allowed the engine to slide in. The only downside to installing the engine this way is that the subframe must be installed separately, after the engine and transmission are hung in place by the two side mounts. One of the nice things about installing an NSX engine with a lift is that you can install the axles, assemble most of the suspension, connect the front and rear engine mounts, even fill the transmission with oil, all without having the car anywhere in sight. But doing it my way works too—and I didn’t even need an expensive lift.
Despite the NSX’s cost, exotic nature, and exclusivity, its construction is quite raw. The car has two strikes against it from the get-go: it’s made of aluminum and it’s hand-built. Both attributes make for a difficult reassembly process, one in which I’ve been struggling with for days. Mass-produced, stamped-steel body panels—like those for your Civic—are relatively easy to put back where they came from. It isn’t terribly difficult to line up fenders, hoods, and bumpers as they pretty much go back on the way they came off. Aluminum parts like to re-shape themselves after sitting around getting painted, and NSX aluminum panels vary from one another. A lot. This is where shims come into play. You might not expect to hear the words shims and NSXs in the same sentence, but they play a vital role in assembling one. But the shims are not some body shop hack. No, NSXs were shipped directly from Honda this way, shims and all. You might find one nearly a quarter-inch thick behind the lower part of your driver-side fender, all in an effort to make the fender and door flush with one another. But don’t expect to find a similar sized shim, if any, behind your buddy’s NSX’s fender. The whole process is quite random and, while a single shim might have worked in a certain spot before teardown, it’s likely that it won’t work there during assembly. The solution is to have a big bag of shims handy and plenty of spare time.
