Drivetrain
With great power comes great………..strong drivetrains. Gearing to suit street and track and with the estimated power these cars will be putting out, we needed to build the drivetrains to suit.
Honda Fit - K20 Gearbox
We got creative with this one, mainly due to no Integra Type R box available at the time, they are getting expensive, and the fact we had a ton of parts in the spares bin, JP ended up building his gearbox himself. The box he used is a 5 speed from a Honda Integra Type S, but all the internals got pulled out and in went a 6 speed gear set made up from a mix of Civic, Integra and Accord gear ratios and final drive. Differential is currently from an Integra Type-R but JP is looking at sourcing a 1.5 way from Cusco. Because of the shifter design on the Fit being a bit different, and it looks boring when compared to what’s in the Golf, a Ktuned shifter assembly will be sourced.
Clutch is a Japanese made Exedy 3 puck disc with sports clutch chrome cover, a lightened flywheel was also sourced from Exedy. We have some drive shafts from Repco to get the car on the dyno for tuning, but we have a feeling these are not going to last so some stronger ones will be on the list. Unfortunately we didn’t get pics when the box was put together but here it is complete with some pics of the clutch we are using.
VW Golf - 02J Gearbox
This needed a bit more thought due to the car originally being auto, we needed to source a few extra parts extra than just the box. Luckily we found a wrecked manual Golf GTi 5 speed and sourced everything needed for the swap, and then once we had everything back at the shop and all laid out, we threw away almost 80% of it. Obviously we kept the gearbox which is a 5 speed 02J VW transmission, however these are only really capable of around 300hp and have been known to blow 3rd gear, so off we went to search for a stronger gear set which we found courtesy of Quaife, who had the options of either a 6 speed straight cut dog set or 6 speed semi helical synchromesh gearset, both capable of handling the power output of the engine.
We settled on the synchromesh kit due the car still being street legal, and also being semi helical it will be a bit quieter too. We also looked into other areas we could improve the transmission, which included upgrading the shifter tower to one from a later 02A transmission which had better cable mounts, is made for a 6 speed, and works well with a CAE shifter assembly now installed in the car. other parts added was a input shaft brace from 034 Motorsport, adjustable short shifter arm from Forge motorsport and solid mounts for the cable bracket.
Clutch & flywheel is sourced from ClutchMasters from USA which is their FX400 unit with sprung center and their lightened single mass flywheels. We have some HD driveshafts from FEQ but we don’t think these will be up to the task so we may have to source something from The Driveshaft Shop, but they should be good enough to get the car together for the dyno.
