K24 Gets a New Home

Finally it came the time to see if all the cutting, welding, grinding and 3D modeling was going to pan out — the K24 was going in it’s new home.

I started by prepping the firewall with some automotive primer and DEI reflective heat tape. It may be a little over the top, but for how close the engine sits to the firewall and how little clearance I left on the other side, I wanted to make sure to keep as much heat out of the cabin as possible.

While the empty engine bay looks spacious with nothing in it, it’s a rather laborious effort to get the long and tall K24 in there. It was pretty clear that it wouldn’t be possible to join the engine and transmission together and install them as one unit, so I didn’t even try. What surprised me was that even the engine with the adapter plate, clutch and flywheel on it was too large to drop in. Even though it seemed like there was enough room I ended up having to strip down the engine to the basic long block to get it into position.

I was pretty excited to see it resting in there for the first time without help from an engine hoist or cinder blocks. Still a long way off from it running and driving but things were starting to come together.

Clearance on the exhaust side was pretty good. I had previously used an angle grinder to create a little more space for the exhaust manifold, and I’m glad that I did. Should be plenty of space to allow for a little engine movement without making contact.

The driver’s side has much more real estate since the K24 leans over at such a steep angle. There is ample room for coolant lines and wiring harnesses in addition to the intake manifold and alternator. Unfortunately there is no room to run an A/C condenser. I would have loved to keep A/C but the condenser mounts down low and in this engine bay, the lower you go the less space you get. Maybe some day I’ll think of a creative way of solving this problem but it’s definitely not high on my priority list.

With all the manifolds and accessories back in place it was really starting to take shape — it almost looked like it belonged in there! There was still tons to do but at least I had something solid to work with.

Once everything was in position I realized a few short-comings of my design. The first issue I chose to address was the valve cover. Honda has the breather for the valve cover coming off what was now the rear of the engine. Since it would have interfered with the firewall I tried to modify it myself to exit through a 90 degree fitting. This ended up contacting the firewall and overall was just wasn’t happy with the solution. I ended up having a AN bung welded on the driver’s side and capping the original hole shut. This would allow for a much cleaner install and easy hose routing to what would eventually be a catch can.

I really didn’t do a great job documenting the plumbing or wiring work. I was really quite timid to take on electrical work, but to be honest, it was quite simple. I purchased a used RSX Type-S wiring harness, a Wiring Conversion Harness and a Charge Harness. The only soldering that was required was getting the correct power sources to the conversion harness. It comes with very well documented instructions and as long as you use the correct power sources from the RX8 side it goes together very easily. The only tricky part to figure out was the cooling fans. The RX8 has two stage cooling fans which made me scratch my head for quite a while trying to figure out how it worked. I eventually ended up just bypassing the low setting. Now any time the fans come on they come on full blast. Once I get some miles on it I may revisit this if it’s constantly cycling on and off or it just gets plain obnoxious.

Next order of business… starting it 🙂