CATEGORIES FOR ARTICLE LINKS BELOW

Fabricating the rear sub frame mounts

Contributed by: Enginebasics.com

So the car has been a blast to drive in FWD form, but let’s face it…..that’s not the point of this project.  The point is to have a fully torque vectoring AWD system under a civic.  For the project to live up to the name “civic type RL”, it needs to have it all.  The torque vectoring, the front acceleratory differential engagement, big brakes, all aluminum sub frame big v6 motor, short ratio 6 speed manual transmission, blah blah blah, you get the idea.

I hated putting the car back up on jack stands and pulling it a part when it had been so much fun to drive, but it had to be done.   So the first thing that had to be done was cutting out and removing the rear suspension, A-Arms, A-arm pickups and cutting out all of the bracing.  Also the fuel tank, the fuel filler, and all the straps had to go as well.  Don’t worry, this will all be replaced with the RL sub frame, which is much stronger and will better tie the rear of the hatch together.

The sub frame was put in place and aligned but wouldn’t fit at first.  It was time to bring out the persuasion hammer. 

When I started this project I assumed I would have to cut the entire trunk out to fit the big sub frame and differential, but it looked like I needed only about a 1” clearance where the spare tire used to hang down.  After beating the spare tire up the rear diff was in

Now it was time to build some custom sub frame mounts and to make sure everything was plumbed square, and leveled.  This is NOT EASY and takes literally hundreds of measurements and markings over and over to double and triple check everything.  Messing up here would mean the car would never drive right, would wear through tires, and might crab walk down the road.  It was a very stressful part of the build for me till I got those mounts in and then measured everything and saw that I was good.