The Journey to Revive the 95 Honda Odyssey Minivan

It's been eight months since we blew up our beloved 95 Honda Odyssey minivan, and it's amazing to see how far it has come since then. The entire project has been a labor of love, with every single part replaced or upgraded to give this vehicle a new lease on life. We've taken quite a bit of weight out of it, which not only makes it lighter but also gives it a more agile feel. This new diet for the van is just one aspect of our plan to transform this car into a powerhouse.

One of the most significant upgrades we've made so far is swapping out the 32-millimeter axle shafts for larger ones. We're now using 36-millimeter axles, which have already been installed in factory Honda Preludes. This upgrade not only gives us more traction but also allows us to take on heavier loads and navigate tougher terrain with ease. The new axles are bolted onto upgraded hubs, ensuring a secure connection between the wheels and the drivetrain.

The journey to get here has been long and arduous, but we're finally making progress. We've recently hooked up the drive shaft, which is currently loose due to the need for further adjustments. However, with the drive shaft in place, we can now move the van onto the lift and begin working on all the other components that will bring this minivan back to life.

The steering column has been replaced, new brakes have been installed, and the transmission has been rebuilt from the ground up. It's truly amazing how much of a difference these upgrades make. The entire car feels like a different vehicle now that it's gone through this transformation. We're also curious to see just how heavy our van is, as we've taken significant steps to lighten it while still maintaining its performance capabilities.

We'll be pulling out the spindle assemblies from both front wheels and pressing out the old hubs to make way for the upgraded axles. This process will not only give us a more modern look but also provide improved handling and traction. With the new axles in place, we'll need to figure out how to mount them properly, as they have different spline configurations than our current rear differential.

Next on the agenda is getting the radiator back on the van, followed by installing a charge pipe to complete the electrical system. We've also been working on some external modifications, including reactions and collaborations, which we're excited to share with our audience in the coming months. However, for now, we'll be focusing on getting everything properly assembled and tested.

We're eager to get the van back on the dyno to ensure that all the upgrades are working as intended. With a new rear differential and upgraded axles, we hope to achieve mid-to-high-eights performance, with consistently strong results. While it's ambitious to aim for eights, we believe our minivan has the potential to exceed these expectations.

We're also planning on attending the Freedom 500 event in April, where we'll be showcasing our creation and sharing its story with fellow car enthusiasts. It's going to be an exciting time, and we're grateful for the support of our audience as we near completion of this project. For now, it's essential to keep pushing forward, even if that means working with limited resources.

As we continue to work on the van, we're doing our best to move at a steady pace, despite having only one mechanic on board. It's not ideal, but we're managing just fine. We appreciate the understanding and support of our viewers, who are eagerly following our journey as we revive this 95 Honda Odyssey minivan into its former glory.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's up guys before we get into today's video if you haven't heard already your boys racing in the freedom 500 and that is coming up next weekend April 1st and then the day after that on April 2nd is Cletus and cars and we will be out there as well if you guys want to come hang out be sure to swing by we will be there all day we're going to bring the 240 to do a burnout for you guys and we're gonna try to bring as much of the fleet as we can we'll probably bring the MR2 out there the row to see the NSX Wago we don't know how much room we're gonna have and uh time to get cars transported down there but we want to try to bring as much as the fleet as we can now that almost all of them are running which is kind of crazy to think about but yeah be sure to come out to Cleveland cars we'll have merchandise and everything as well if you guys want to pick something up and I'm sure you guys already saw the prize as well for the freedom 500 winner a freaking Lamborghini with an LS in it that would be pretty sweet and uh yeah we'll give it our best shot boys but uh be sure to check that stuff out and let's get into today's video all right guys got Kyle up in the car we're trying to diagnose this weird clunk that we have on the 240 and I think I found it uh go ahead and fire this thing up and then do like your clutch dump deal so you can watch this whole stuff all right do it again tough very nice all right got Kyle back up in the air we're going to test out our we're Engineers are extremely professional fix to the whole cradle movie we had a bunch of old really big stainless that we used for like exhaust manifolds or something cut them to length used them as spacers can't go nowhere buddy I think it's super tight now so we'll give it a try make sure it don't go nowhere sounds a lot better fixes it yeah no more big clunky leaves nope you know we should probably get some new bushings for that make it right eventually but she's a beater yep and it's better than that whole subframe clocking around back there yeah I'm surprised it didn't fall out so yeah that was pretty rough dude there was like a solid inch of travel back there that should be good for another burnout or two Yep this thing's been a trooper let's it's probably gonna do another 10 just fine oh this is ready to rip brother I think he's good to go buddy the Top's gonna be here probably fire their eggs gonna give you guys a quick update on which race truck builds he has been in here hustling working hard yeah man you want to show the people the the thing the front tires do now yeah something they haven't done them for years sure can look at this guys let's clip the steering wheel big steering kind of guy now look at that it steers yep not too shabby first time I've done that probably like two and a half years it's getting there yeah that came out great so we got the rack all mounted up there you got everything all painted up and then you got those tie rod ends all welded together so I'll put on there okay the stairs yeah it's looking pretty good I'm excited did we show the uh the brake booster and stuff too no let's show them that yeah so a whole bunch is going on um I don't even know if they've seen the driver's seat mounted I think that was in the video yet I think so yeah you were getting that mounted up but now it's fully mounted in there yeah so like now it's like almost a complete driver's compartment um got the Hydra boost and master cylinder mounted it's out of like a 19 Duramax and just built some little plates and little gussets to go to that got the throttle or the throttle pedal assembly in there as well you can see the plate he got in there got everything kind of mounted off of that guy and then the bars coming off of that to kind of help beef it all up and then the steering columns all mounted yup gotta pull it back out and finish welding it but it is in there now and yeah I didn't go nowhere next to build the uh the brake pedal and the throttle pedal and then go from there I don't really know what's next I've been so focused on getting that done I don't really know where I'm headed after that but get those things done do one more step out of the way well it's really starting to look like something now now that it steers it has the seat and steering wheel in there it's rolling on all four Yelp it's starting to come together she's steering yep she's a little heavy ain't gonna lie so I'm excited to try out all the power steering options we're gonna give a shot on this thing freaking yeah you're gonna need something yeah I mean it's it's definitely a lot better than a stock truck would be like a stock Duramax on these tires you wouldn't really be turning them especially with this small of a steering wheel so I must be doing something right but power steering and power brakes will definitely be a huge huge help on this thing so hopefully that little electric pump keeps up not we'll be going back to Mechanical one and uh let's get some more done on it we're getting really close to actually starting to wire and Plumb the truck waiting on the intercooler to show up I got everything to make a water box a fuel cell all that stuff so it's kind of getting closer to the time of actually the fun stuff of putting this thing together got a whole bunch of electronics for it too so so yeah totally but surely well guys I hope you're excited to see the route as you back up in action because we are just about ready to fire this thing up we got pretty much everything put back together on the minivan here we just need to get the radiator on it but we just got the harness put back on to this thing so you guys know we switched to a fuel Tech and everything is all mounted up we actually got power going to our ECU there check that out while I got that mounted up and it looks really nice we are just loading in some settings for our first fire up here and I wanted to show the harness that why it got done so this is the factory harness or the k-tuned harness that we had on there originally but we cut the end off and why I added this nice bulkhead fitting it's kind of hard to see down in the bottom there so you see that quick connect down there why it basically just re-pinned everything to that guy so if we ever need to pull the engine out of this thing it'll be nice and easy just disconnect it from the firewall right there yeah it'll come right out one ground and you can drop the whole engine out with the entire harness on it so yeah that came out came out really good you look inside the van right here you can see how much simpler our wiring got there used to be a massive pile of wires down here but now it's literally just that bulkhead and a couple connectors and that guy just runs up into our fuel Tech so wiring is all cleaned up it's very nice yeah a lot better than it was man I remember the good old days you would sit in the passenger seat of this thing and you had to watch kind of where you put your feet because you might accidentally shut the van off yeah you might kick something important it might kick the ECU power or something you know some weird thing yep but she is all wired up and good to go and it came out freaking great so with any luck dude we don't have any issues we just got it all put together we've got a solid base map in it I believe with any luck we're just going to click the button that's going to fire right up I think it I think it should yeah she should just fire right up boys you want to give it a try yeah I guess so yeah see what it does we're at that stage we're ready all right we got our jump box on there yeah she's been sitting for a minute yeah we're back to the good old days with jump boxes but go ahead and give this thing a crank fired right up baby that's awesome dramatic startup we've ever had I fired right up and it's running foreign no lie I kind of just copied the mr2's tune because it's a very similar setup but it works yeah you know it's not like we had the guys at fuel Tech help us out with a full day working on that startup tune yeah they definitely did nothing to make the most difficult now we're the entire write-up nah dude it was all us we copy and pasted that right in that's a lot of work that was all of us copied and pasted man we're professionals now I'm a tuna I can't believe how much technology this van has gotten she's come a long ways from being a 500. minivan I remember when we jumped this thing over a spare tire yeah throw back to the OG days where we jumped it off I'm gonna send you the video I have the video throw it in there the good old days this thing was a hoopty bro come on nobody cared about it this thing was such a pile of like honestly and now look at it it has so much all-wheel drive yeah a thousand horse fully built engine sequential transmission it's as fully upgraded as a minivan could possibly be it's insane I can't wait to get this thing to the track man it's gonna be a weapon I'm just happy that it's running again yeah finally sounds so good in and out that's what I'm looking forward to yeah well we can't drive we can't drive it in and out just yet not we have to get the axles in it which we will be moving on to here soon as well we actually went and picked up this little press because we have to press out the factory hubs and we have a bigger upgraded hub for the upgraded axle that we have to press into the wheel bearing there so we'll get those swapped out and then 32 millimeter going to the 36 millimeter axle shaft deals right um it's something like that it's based off the number of spline yeah but so I don't know these actually already have the bigger spline from factories the same as a Honda Prelude it does have the 36 mil axle nut okay but it's going even bigger than that so yeah we'll have to get those hubs swapped out and get our front axles in I actually did hook up the drive shaft it's loose right now but technically we could drive it um with the drive shaft and a clutch I mean I could move it forward and back we could try it I gotta crawl back up under there and fully tighten it first yeah actually while we're at it let's just move these around and we'll get it on the lift okay then we can start working on all that stuff we can drive it on over to the lift yep give her a shot foreign foreign well she moves in a rear-world drive mode we don't have any of the front axles in yet just the drive shaft but that's enough to at least moved over here to the side of the lift so we can get her up in the air and get her all buttoned up it's so crazy how far this thing has come since we blew it up like eight months ago because like now it's the steering column new brakes like I mean it was really all just the it was all just the transmission when the training let go we just decided to redo everything and yeah I mean it's just it's so crazy getting in it now it just feels like a whole different car I'm also curious to see how much this thing weighs because we took quite a bit of weight out of it yeah she's been going on a little bit of a diet I hope you guys are just as excited as I am about the route to see here it has been so long since this thing has ran and it feels so good to hear it running once again and she is very close to being complete uh right now we got it up on the lift because we are going to be pulling like the whole spindle assembly off of each side on the front here to get the hubs pressed out get our upgraded axles in the front there but I'm cutting this video a little short just to get something out for you guys we'll keep you posted once we get that stuff done but once we get the axles in there we just got to get the radiator back on get a charge pipe on there and we do have to figure out getting our new rear diff mounted up because right now we have a CRV differential in the rear when we're upgrading to the wagon diff it's a little more Stout can handle a little bit more abuse it's the same one we have in the hatch and with that new differential will come different rear axles as well because the spline on the wagon differential has more teeth to it than the CRV one so the axles are a little thicker a little stronger so we'll have to get that stuff figured out for the rear after all the other things I just talked about that's about it then we're going to get the van back on the dyno make sure everything's good to go there make some power and then we can finally get this thing to the track and give it a solid all-wheel drive launch with some power behind it and that is what I'm really excited to see because I'm just curious what the minivan will do you know I think we can go I think we can go mid to high eights you know hopefully consistently would be the goal even if it could run mid to bottom nines I'd be happy with that but I don't see any reason why we can't run an eight in our 95 Honda Odyssey Minivan here so that's the goal we still have a lot to get done on the car and I have a lot of ideas and stuff I want to do with it like reactions collaborations so many things we can do with the van once it's up and going again but it takes time and I really wish we had like another mechanic or two around here because that would really you know get things going but we're doing our best meanwhile I've been knocking a whole bunch of things out with me being gone recently we have just slowed down a little bit but we're getting back into things and I appreciate you guys watching we don't have a whole team here knocking this stuff out but we're doing our best boys and as of right now almost everything is running don't forget to check out tickets for the freedom 500 and be sure to come by if you're going to be in the area for Cletus and cars April 2nd like I said we will be out there hope to see you there and uh yeah peace out foreign\n"