The Suspension Upgrade on a Civic: A Step-by-Step Guide

Always see them hanging out, something like that, on the backs of civics and I never really knew why that was, what the purpose of that was, and it turns out it's actually got two purposes. First off, this is our rear subframe and it's pretty flimsy or so they say, so this helps reinforce it strengthen it up, and you know it just gives it a little bit of extra bracing. But also does a second thing; these cars, especially the lower trim models, don't have sway bars okay, like at all, this car doesn't have a sway bar in the front or the rear.

But adding this in the rear gives us places to mount a sway bar so we can add one to the car and now you may have noticed we didn't do that in the front; we still have no sway bar in the front, but this is a front-wheel drive car which usually has some understeer. So adding a big sway bar to the rear with this kit will allow us to dial in a little bit more oversteer or close to it and make this car feel a lot better and now I know what it is, so do you?

So, we've got our brace and our sway bar hanging all tightened up, so now we can start throwing in these control arms and then the coils. See these are solid bushings; they are literally they're spherical, so if you give it a push, you'll get it to break free. Alright, one of the last things we're gonna do in the rear is replace These Arms which go right there with these and the difference is well not only are these stamped steel and these are tubular but these are adjustable and that'll give us adjustment over camber, which is pretty important for dialing in a good performance-oriented alignment.

Okay, and here we've got a rear strut brace from Cusco matches the one in the front; we're just going to tie together our two strut Towers to add a little bit of rigidity and of course, a little bit of STEEZ. Well, I was afraid that might be the case, we got to trim the interior a little bit. Not my best work, but it works, okay? Now this thing is ready to go to the alignment shop and then we'll take it back to the streets to let it rip.

Oh yeah, I forgot the muffler is off; you can't even tell. Rabbit, damn it sounds awesome, so we're back in the canyons to rip up and down the hill to see if installing all these expensive suspension parts on such a cheap car was actually worth it, let's go for a drive.

The first thing I noticed is how much less body roll there is; this thing stays way flatter through all the corners and feels great. I mean, it makes it feel much more predictable but it's way more fun now, I mean, it's like a go-kart; so everything we put on this car is a fairly mid-range park you know, we could have spent way more money and we could have spent less, but I think the mid-range is really where The Sweet Spot is that's where you get the most bang for your buck.

And I'm super happy with what we chose, but it's going to be a lot of fun to wrench on this thing and get into the Honda world a little bit. And I think we made a big first step, this thing feels so much better; I hope you guys had fun watching this video; it was fun making it, I look forward to doing a lot more with this car, and I hope you guys do too. Let me know in the comments what you want to see us do next; thanks for watching, don't forget to subscribe to the channel, don't forget to like the video, leave a comment, you can follow me on Instagram Zach Jobe at Zach Jobe, you can follow Donut at Donut Media; see you guys next time.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is our 500 Civic it's got 400 000 miles on the clock it's got a salvage title the windshield wipers don't turn off and it's got four wet trash bags for suspension So today we're going to be installing four thousand dollars worth of suspension upgrades on our 500 Civic we're gonna be installing coilovers like these we're gonna be installing sway bars like these and we're gonna be installing whatever the heck this thing is that you see hanging off the bottom of every Civic ever I'm Zach welcome to Donut I'm a Honda boy now so I've never really been a Honda guy I've never owned a Honda I've never owned a Civic or an Integra and I've always wanted one and I really like the EG which is the generation that this is you know I really haven't driven it much I drove it up here today that was my first time driving it this is the slowest car I've ever driven so let's uh let's take a look under the hood and see what uh what the reason for that is so this is a D series uh four-cylinder look at the size of the intake tube it's like it's like a straw so this is one of those cars where you're never going to break the speed limit but you're gonna have a lot of fun so I'm excited to do some stuff to it like the suspension that we've got planned but first I just want to take a look around it's not in the best shape but that's okay she's got character but it's not about how things look it's about what's underneath it counts and I'm not sure that what's underneath of this car is any good either but we are gonna have some fun with it so right now let's go hop down the canyon run this thing around get used to it get to know it you know then we'll take it back to the shop and start upgrading some stuff for now my goals are just to get it handling a little bit more like a go-kart maybe make it look a little cooler but I also want to be able to get into the the Honda Community I hear there's a thing called VTEC Club out here which is a group of Honda owners that get together and hang out and you know have Honda needs I need to uh bask in all of its stock Glory right now get a feeling for how it feels right now with what might be the wall softest suspension I did feel very leaned over and like the whole car was on the front left tire pretty much yeah there's no tachometer so you just shift when it starts you know banging off the limiter so it feels crazy how much I've got my foot down I'm pedaled right now and I'm going through corners which is slow but fun okay so she's slow she's a little bit beat up she might be a little ugly but we're gonna fix that and she's home now let's work on this little pig Okay so we've got the Civic on the lift for the first time and before we go getting into all the fun stuff we're gonna give this thing a bit of an inspection see how much damage there is on the car see if there are any surprises and anything we need to fix that we don't already know about the first thing we're gonna do I got a pry bar we're just going to put it under the tire against the ground and go up and down and this will help us check for ball joints but all of these tests that we're going to do if you've got really bad parts you'll you'll probably notice so let's see how it feels not bad so what you're looking for there is like some clicking at the ball joints this has an upper and a lower ball joint and when I do this there's no like play so they they feel okay next thing we're going to do is grab the tire at three and nine and just shake back and forth and that feels pretty bad there's something wrong there so this should be pretty solid you'll get a little bit of movement but there shouldn't be any play any like clunkiness and I am getting some pretty significant clunkiness so that's usually indicative of a tie rod not sure if it's going to be inner or outer but you can kind of poke your head under there and look seems like the inner or maybe the whole steering rack is moving that sounds like a lot of noise so we'll have to dig a Little Deeper to find out exactly what's wrong but now we know that something's up with our steering system and up next we're going to grab the tire at 12 and 6 and go like this and this will help us check for a worn wheel bearing or you'll feel some play if you've got really worn control arm bushings and I do feel some play oh yeah okay so this Civic has dual Wishbone suspension so there's an a arm up here and one down below and just at first glance when I do that I can see the whole control arm moving and it looks like at least the forward bushing is totally blown out what I'm hoping is that it's just those bushings that's causing this play and that there's no issue with our wheel bearing and that we won't have to replace the wheel bearings but there's only one way to find out all right now that we've got the car up in the air and the wheels off we're going to check the rest of the suspension bushings and see what we're dealing with so to do that we've just got this pry bar and we're gonna you know poke some stuff so first let's look at some bushings that we know are bad we could tell that our upper control arm bushings were pretty whooped so let's shake them around see what they look like and you can see we've got a lot of play there but I think we're also going to have some side to side yeah that shouldn't do that and then at our front lower control arm at the front bushing you can see it's pretty much looks like it's entirely separated and if you look you can see that it's ripped all the way around the middle so it's probably pretty disconnected which doesn't lead to Great handling or a good feel oh this looks like an okay bushing I don't see any tears and it actually kind of looks relatively new let's give it a little pry yeah now that's kind of what you want to see from uh you know like a factory rubber bushing it's not flopping around there's no clunking no noises no tears it looks okay but we're gonna replace it anyway okay so now that we know that we've got a bunch of bad bushings it's time to go about replacing them let's look at the parts we're going to be replacing them with and compare them to the stock stuff first we'll start with the coilovers this is the stock one nothing special about it but we're going to be replacing it with these feel 441s these are basically feels entry level coilover they're damping adjustable 30 ways but it's uh it's one-way adjustment so rebound and compression is tied together because again these are pretty entry level coil over but you still get a lot of nice features you get ride height adjustability you get preload adjustability you get a nice spherical bearing Top Hat you do get the Swift Springs which should help with handling and they are valved for this chassis they should really improve the handling of this car so I'm excited about these so we just gotta stick them in there foreign so this is the stock control arm setup and you can see we've got rubber bushings in three places here one of which is totally gone and we will be reusing this arm here but replacing this outer arm like that and this bushing out here like this I was just looking at our kind of blown out rubber bushings here these are cheap they're good at reducing noise vibration and harshness and they wear pretty well they're good for for most people but you can see how much they move especially when they're worn out and the problem with that is that that causes a lot of deflection and twisting in your suspension and it changes your suspension geometry when you're in hard Corners which is really when you want your suspension geometry to be working the best so we're going to be replacing those okay and of course you could just press these out and replace them with new rubber bushings with polyurethane bushings or with spherical bushings like we're going to be using so we just got these they're nicely powder coated and they come with spherical bushings already installed and basically that's just a big metal ball in a housing which allows for rotation and angular movement so that these can move with your suspension like they need to but because it's a metal ball in a housing there's really no deflection so when you're under a hard cornering nothing to flex in any unpredictable way and you get to actually make use of that alignment that you paid for okay cool that was easy now flip this thing around and replace this bushing all right same thing here at the rear bushing for the lower control arm it's rubber so we're going to replace it with a spherical unit now that bushing looks like it's in fine shape but even a brand new rubber bushing will deflect a lot under load not the case for these okay we've got our front loaders put together so they're the first thing that's going to go on the car oh foreign this is the stock upper stamped steel piece with our blown out bushings and the new one is this the big advantages of this upper control arm is that you get adjustability in terms of camber and Caster where you don't really have any adjustability on this stock upper arm we will have a bunch of adjustability to be able to dial our alignment in exactly as we want it so I'm going to slap these in real quick yeah pretty much that and then the last thing we're going to do to the front of this car we've got this sweet Cusco strut brace the point of this is basically just to tie together the two strut Towers to keep them from flexing under hard cornering loads the only problem is that when I put it up here it sits pretty good but there are no holes where it seems like there should be holes so for a minute I thought that this was for the wrong car or something but turns out that most of these EG Civics have holes there but this trim level the CX doesn't have the holes so no big deal I mean what do you do when you don't have holes but you need some you guessed it drill something so that's what we're gonna do and then pretty much done with the front all right this car might be a bit of a clunker but it doesn't have very much rust so since we're drilling holes and exposing bare metal I'm gonna hit them with some paint real quick so far so good see roller truth looks like it worked all right the front is basically done so now it's time to start on the reward thank you all right here at the rear we've already got pretty much all the stock stuff taken out that we need to take out and it was in a little bit better shape than the fronts no fully blown out bushings or anything like that but we still got some stuff to replace obviously we're going to be using the same coilovers as the front as it feels and then we've got lower control arms from Megan basically the same deal as the control arms in the front although these are aluminum which is pretty nice but the big thing is that they've got spherical bearings for bushings so that'll tighten things up in the rear but the thing I want to talk about at the rear is the thing I've always wondered about this dang bar and you know this is obviously one for Megan but there are many like it and you always see them hanging out something like that on the backs of civics and I never really knew why that was what the purpose of that was and it turns out it's actually got two purposes first off this is our rear subframe and it's pretty flimsy or so they say so this helps reinforce it strengthen it up and you know it just gives it a little bit of extra bracing but also does a second thing these cars especially the lower trim models don't have sway bars okay like at all this car doesn't have a sway bar in the front or the rear but adding this in the rear gives us places to mount a sway bar so we can add one to the car and now you may have noticed we didn't do that in the front we still have no sway bar in the front but this is a front-wheel drive car which usually has some understeer so adding a big sway bar to the rear with this kit will allow us to dial in a little bit more oversteer or close to it and make this car feel a lot better and now I know what it is and so do you so now he's got to install it so I've got news to install the sway bar that we just talked about we need to remove the muffler this massive Muffler here it kind of intersects the area where the sway bar needs to mount so luckily the exhaust comes apart right here so I can just take the muffler off but this thing is going to sound probably pretty bad but that's okay we'll fix it in the future we'll get a better exhaust foreign yes dude I'm so stoked for this yeah well we've got our brace and our sway bar hanging all tightened up so now we can start throwing in these control arms and then the coilers thank you see these are solid bushings yeah they are literally they're spherical so if you give it a push you'll get it to break free all right one of the last things we're gonna do in the rear is replace These Arms which go right there with these and the difference is well not only are these stamped steel and these are tubular but these are adjustable and that'll give us adjustment over camber which is pretty important for dialing in a good performance oriented alignment okay and here we've got a rear strut brace from Cusco matches the one in the front we're just going to tie together our two strut Towers to add a little bit of rigidity and of course a little bit of STEEZ well I was afraid that might be the case we got to trim the interior a little bit not my best work but it works okay now this thing is ready to go to the alignment shop and then we'll take it back to the streets let it rip oh yeah I forgot the muffler is off you can't even tell rabbit damn it sounds awesome so we're back in the canyons to rip up and down the hill to see if installing all these expensive suspension parts on such a cheap car was actually worth it let's go for a drive foreign the first thing I noticed is how much less body roll there is this thing stays way flatter through all the corners and feels great I mean it makes it feel much more predictable but it's way more fun now I mean it's it's like a go-kart so everything we put on this car is a fairly mid-range Park you know we could have spent way more money and we could have spent less but I think the mid-range is really where The Sweet Spot is that's where you get the most bang for your buck and I'm super happy with what we chose but it's going to be a lot of fun to wrench on this thing and get into the Honda World a little bit and I think we made a big first step this thing feels so much better I hope you guys had fun watching this video it was fun making it I look forward to doing a lot more with this car and I hope you guys do too let me know in the comments what you want to see us do next thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe to the channel don't forget to like the video leave a comment you can follow me on Instagram Zach Jobe you can follow donut at donut media see you guys next timethis is our 500 Civic it's got 400 000 miles on the clock it's got a salvage title the windshield wipers don't turn off and it's got four wet trash bags for suspension So today we're going to be installing four thousand dollars worth of suspension upgrades on our 500 Civic we're gonna be installing coilovers like these we're gonna be installing sway bars like these and we're gonna be installing whatever the heck this thing is that you see hanging off the bottom of every Civic ever I'm Zach welcome to Donut I'm a Honda boy now so I've never really been a Honda guy I've never owned a Honda I've never owned a Civic or an Integra and I've always wanted one and I really like the EG which is the generation that this is you know I really haven't driven it much I drove it up here today that was my first time driving it this is the slowest car I've ever driven so let's uh let's take a look under the hood and see what uh what the reason for that is so this is a D series uh four-cylinder look at the size of the intake tube it's like it's like a straw so this is one of those cars where you're never going to break the speed limit but you're gonna have a lot of fun so I'm excited to do some stuff to it like the suspension that we've got planned but first I just want to take a look around it's not in the best shape but that's okay she's got character but it's not about how things look it's about what's underneath it counts and I'm not sure that what's underneath of this car is any good either but we are gonna have some fun with it so right now let's go hop down the canyon run this thing around get used to it get to know it you know then we'll take it back to the shop and start upgrading some stuff for now my goals are just to get it handling a little bit more like a go-kart maybe make it look a little cooler but I also want to be able to get into the the Honda Community I hear there's a thing called VTEC Club out here which is a group of Honda owners that get together and hang out and you know have Honda needs I need to uh bask in all of its stock Glory right now get a feeling for how it feels right now with what might be the wall softest suspension I did feel very leaned over and like the whole car was on the front left tire pretty much yeah there's no tachometer so you just shift when it starts you know banging off the limiter so it feels crazy how much I've got my foot down I'm pedaled right now and I'm going through corners which is slow but fun okay so she's slow she's a little bit beat up she might be a little ugly but we're gonna fix that and she's home now let's work on this little pig Okay so we've got the Civic on the lift for the first time and before we go getting into all the fun stuff we're gonna give this thing a bit of an inspection see how much damage there is on the car see if there are any surprises and anything we need to fix that we don't already know about the first thing we're gonna do I got a pry bar we're just going to put it under the tire against the ground and go up and down and this will help us check for ball joints but all of these tests that we're going to do if you've got really bad parts you'll you'll probably notice so let's see how it feels not bad so what you're looking for there is like some clicking at the ball joints this has an upper and a lower ball joint and when I do this there's no like play so they they feel okay next thing we're going to do is grab the tire at three and nine and just shake back and forth and that feels pretty bad there's something wrong there so this should be pretty solid you'll get a little bit of movement but there shouldn't be any play any like clunkiness and I am getting some pretty significant clunkiness so that's usually indicative of a tie rod not sure if it's going to be inner or outer but you can kind of poke your head under there and look seems like the inner or maybe the whole steering rack is moving that sounds like a lot of noise so we'll have to dig a Little Deeper to find out exactly what's wrong but now we know that something's up with our steering system and up next we're going to grab the tire at 12 and 6 and go like this and this will help us check for a worn wheel bearing or you'll feel some play if you've got really worn control arm bushings and I do feel some play oh yeah okay so this Civic has dual Wishbone suspension so there's an a arm up here and one down below and just at first glance when I do that I can see the whole control arm moving and it looks like at least the forward bushing is totally blown out what I'm hoping is that it's just those bushings that's causing this play and that there's no issue with our wheel bearing and that we won't have to replace the wheel bearings but there's only one way to find out all right now that we've got the car up in the air and the wheels off we're going to check the rest of the suspension bushings and see what we're dealing with so to do that we've just got this pry bar and we're gonna you know poke some stuff so first let's look at some bushings that we know are bad we could tell that our upper control arm bushings were pretty whooped so let's shake them around see what they look like and you can see we've got a lot of play there but I think we're also going to have some side to side yeah that shouldn't do that and then at our front lower control arm at the front bushing you can see it's pretty much looks like it's entirely separated and if you look you can see that it's ripped all the way around the middle so it's probably pretty disconnected which doesn't lead to Great handling or a good feel oh this looks like an okay bushing I don't see any tears and it actually kind of looks relatively new let's give it a little pry yeah now that's kind of what you want to see from uh you know like a factory rubber bushing it's not flopping around there's no clunking no noises no tears it looks okay but we're gonna replace it anyway okay so now that we know that we've got a bunch of bad bushings it's time to go about replacing them let's look at the parts we're going to be replacing them with and compare them to the stock stuff first we'll start with the coilovers this is the stock one nothing special about it but we're going to be replacing it with these feel 441s these are basically feels entry level coilover they're damping adjustable 30 ways but it's uh it's one-way adjustment so rebound and compression is tied together because again these are pretty entry level coil over but you still get a lot of nice features you get ride height adjustability you get preload adjustability you get a nice spherical bearing Top Hat you do get the Swift Springs which should help with handling and they are valved for this chassis they should really improve the handling of this car so I'm excited about these so we just gotta stick them in there foreign so this is the stock control arm setup and you can see we've got rubber bushings in three places here one of which is totally gone and we will be reusing this arm here but replacing this outer arm like that and this bushing out here like this I was just looking at our kind of blown out rubber bushings here these are cheap they're good at reducing noise vibration and harshness and they wear pretty well they're good for for most people but you can see how much they move especially when they're worn out and the problem with that is that that causes a lot of deflection and twisting in your suspension and it changes your suspension geometry when you're in hard Corners which is really when you want your suspension geometry to be working the best so we're going to be replacing those okay and of course you could just press these out and replace them with new rubber bushings with polyurethane bushings or with spherical bushings like we're going to be using so we just got these they're nicely powder coated and they come with spherical bushings already installed and basically that's just a big metal ball in a housing which allows for rotation and angular movement so that these can move with your suspension like they need to but because it's a metal ball in a housing there's really no deflection so when you're under a hard cornering nothing to flex in any unpredictable way and you get to actually make use of that alignment that you paid for okay cool that was easy now flip this thing around and replace this bushing all right same thing here at the rear bushing for the lower control arm it's rubber so we're going to replace it with a spherical unit now that bushing looks like it's in fine shape but even a brand new rubber bushing will deflect a lot under load not the case for these okay we've got our front loaders put together so they're the first thing that's going to go on the car oh foreign this is the stock upper stamped steel piece with our blown out bushings and the new one is this the big advantages of this upper control arm is that you get adjustability in terms of camber and Caster where you don't really have any adjustability on this stock upper arm we will have a bunch of adjustability to be able to dial our alignment in exactly as we want it so I'm going to slap these in real quick yeah pretty much that and then the last thing we're going to do to the front of this car we've got this sweet Cusco strut brace the point of this is basically just to tie together the two strut Towers to keep them from flexing under hard cornering loads the only problem is that when I put it up here it sits pretty good but there are no holes where it seems like there should be holes so for a minute I thought that this was for the wrong car or something but turns out that most of these EG Civics have holes there but this trim level the CX doesn't have the holes so no big deal I mean what do you do when you don't have holes but you need some you guessed it drill something so that's what we're gonna do and then pretty much done with the front all right this car might be a bit of a clunker but it doesn't have very much rust so since we're drilling holes and exposing bare metal I'm gonna hit them with some paint real quick so far so good see roller truth looks like it worked all right the front is basically done so now it's time to start on the reward thank you all right here at the rear we've already got pretty much all the stock stuff taken out that we need to take out and it was in a little bit better shape than the fronts no fully blown out bushings or anything like that but we still got some stuff to replace obviously we're going to be using the same coilovers as the front as it feels and then we've got lower control arms from Megan basically the same deal as the control arms in the front although these are aluminum which is pretty nice but the big thing is that they've got spherical bearings for bushings so that'll tighten things up in the rear but the thing I want to talk about at the rear is the thing I've always wondered about this dang bar and you know this is obviously one for Megan but there are many like it and you always see them hanging out something like that on the backs of civics and I never really knew why that was what the purpose of that was and it turns out it's actually got two purposes first off this is our rear subframe and it's pretty flimsy or so they say so this helps reinforce it strengthen it up and you know it just gives it a little bit of extra bracing but also does a second thing these cars especially the lower trim models don't have sway bars okay like at all this car doesn't have a sway bar in the front or the rear but adding this in the rear gives us places to mount a sway bar so we can add one to the car and now you may have noticed we didn't do that in the front we still have no sway bar in the front but this is a front-wheel drive car which usually has some understeer so adding a big sway bar to the rear with this kit will allow us to dial in a little bit more oversteer or close to it and make this car feel a lot better and now I know what it is and so do you so now he's got to install it so I've got news to install the sway bar that we just talked about we need to remove the muffler this massive Muffler here it kind of intersects the area where the sway bar needs to mount so luckily the exhaust comes apart right here so I can just take the muffler off but this thing is going to sound probably pretty bad but that's okay we'll fix it in the future we'll get a better exhaust foreign yes dude I'm so stoked for this yeah well we've got our brace and our sway bar hanging all tightened up so now we can start throwing in these control arms and then the coilers thank you see these are solid bushings yeah they are literally they're spherical so if you give it a push you'll get it to break free all right one of the last things we're gonna do in the rear is replace These Arms which go right there with these and the difference is well not only are these stamped steel and these are tubular but these are adjustable and that'll give us adjustment over camber which is pretty important for dialing in a good performance oriented alignment okay and here we've got a rear strut brace from Cusco matches the one in the front we're just going to tie together our two strut Towers to add a little bit of rigidity and of course a little bit of STEEZ well I was afraid that might be the case we got to trim the interior a little bit not my best work but it works okay now this thing is ready to go to the alignment shop and then we'll take it back to the streets let it rip oh yeah I forgot the muffler is off you can't even tell rabbit damn it sounds awesome so we're back in the canyons to rip up and down the hill to see if installing all these expensive suspension parts on such a cheap car was actually worth it let's go for a drive foreign the first thing I noticed is how much less body roll there is this thing stays way flatter through all the corners and feels great I mean it makes it feel much more predictable but it's way more fun now I mean it's it's like a go-kart so everything we put on this car is a fairly mid-range Park you know we could have spent way more money and we could have spent less but I think the mid-range is really where The Sweet Spot is that's where you get the most bang for your buck and I'm super happy with what we chose but it's going to be a lot of fun to wrench on this thing and get into the Honda World a little bit and I think we made a big first step this thing feels so much better I hope you guys had fun watching this video it was fun making it I look forward to doing a lot more with this car and I hope you guys do too let me know in the comments what you want to see us do next thanks for watching don't forget to subscribe to the channel don't forget to like the video leave a comment you can follow me on Instagram Zach Jobe you can follow donut at donut media see you guys next time