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

After reporting the blocked solenoids issue to the owner, we discussed about the possible options.


One of them is obviously to overhaul the existing one and I have done it on many units as well as translated and forwarded the method to another owner.


However, I always need to remind the owner of the original ABS on the following points.


1. You must exercise the ABS regularly otherwise you will experience the same issue even after the unit was overhauled.


2. You may already have or about to have multiple issues on your ABS.

For example, your accumulator is already or about to fail.
It could fail next day, next month or next year and you can’t judge the condition without breaking it.

If it fails, the only place that you can get the replacement accumulator at reasonable cost is from US.

You can’t get it in Japan and forget about getting it from Honda UK….

More than GBP900 inc.VAT just for that small accumulator….

I would upgrade to the latest ABS if I’m paying this amount of money for that parts.


3. Without opening the ABS, it is hard to estimate the overall cost

Personally, I think all of these ABS issues are design fault.

These photos are not from the ABS on this NSX and it is from my previous service.


There is only a thin plastic like cover around the solenoids and thus, the moisture or even the spilled brake fluid can touch the body of the solenoids.


Eventually, it will cause corrosion and eats into the solenoids lower body.


The other thing is the amount of debris inside the solenoid chamber.


As you can see, until you remove the solenoids, you can’t tell the status of each chamber.


You can get to this stage without taking the ABS out of the car but the space is really tight and sometimes, you are going to struggle a lot in rotating the solenoids.


If you can't rotate the solenoids or the debris inside the chamber was too much, you may end up removing the ABS out of the car any way and this will add more time for the service.


Once the solenoids are removed, you can test them individually by applying voltage to the terminals.


If you apply 12V to the red with the black as the GND, the solenoid will allow the flow in both directions.


If you apply 12V to the red AND yellow with the black as the GND, the solenoid will only allow the flow in one direction.


Until you can get to this point, you can’t tell whether you can reuse the solenoid or not.


So, hard to provide the good estimated quote.


If the accumulator and the solenoids are still healthy, you only need some brake fluid, rubber/silicone grease and several O-rings as the parts for the overhaul so fairly cheap and majority of the cost is the labour...


Hope we can fix the issue by flushing the system again in the future after applying some vibration with enough back pressure through driving the NSX for a while….


Kaz