Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

By now, I should have finished the 1st stage test driving session but
I haven’t even managed to carry out the vacuum leak check on the
cooling system yet so not fired up the engine at all.


Things were going smoothly until I started installing the exh pipe.
When I started working on this NSX, I noticed that some of the bolts and
nuts were not torqued to the spec and bit loose but no cross-thread so
I just thought someone didn’t torque them properly.


I was wrong.


What I found was that some of the bolt threads were almost gone and
someone tried to repair them using helicoil but failed and just left them.
Because of this, the bolts were tightened to whatever the torque that
they could achieve with the remaining damaged thread.
No wonder why they were loose.

I managed to repair some of them but I don’t have the correct size/length
helicoil for a few of them.




As reported earlier, I now know why this silver shiny bracket was missing from
this car. I ordered the new one.
The bolt thread marked X above was completely gone and couldn’t even
get any torque with the bolt that I ordered.
As I don’t have helicoil for this, measured the depth of the bolt hole and used different bolt for the time being. The other bolt was fine so we won't loose this new bracket in the future.




There was another issue at the front exh pipe stud bolt.
Again, one of the three stud bolt thread was almost gone and if it was
discovered before the eng installation, I could have used simple bolt and nut
instead of the stud bolt. With the heat shield in place and position of the
damaged thread, for now, I reversed the orientation of the stud bolt just to
gain extra contact length and will check for any exh leakage after
heat cycling the system.


Eng, Exh, etc back in place.




The shift cable area was covered in all sorts of oil and debris when the
car arrived at my place.
Cleaned the are as much as possible and replaced the bolts with new one
although the one marked as X is the one that was damaged in the past.




New nice looking header tank and the new tank cap.

Unlike other ordinary cars, NSX cooling system uses higher pressure so
the coolant hoses and tank are under fairly high pressure.
Considering the surface size of the tank, it will be under extremely high pressure
at each plain so if you open the header tank, it has very strong structure with
about 6 separated chambers.

I have never seen aftermarket one that can exceed the spec and features of
the OEM one so I'll stay with this OEM one for my NSX.



Time to hand crank the engine and leak check the cooling system before the fireup.


Kaz