2000 Insight 5 speed repair & build thread

[Ecky]

Mine feels like it's badly glazed in patches. One of these days I'll pull my transmission and fix the synchro issue, resurface (or replace) the flywheel and, if it needs it, do the clutch. I'm waiting for something else to come up though, like ISB.

[Daox]

How many miles are on your Insight?

[Ecky]

225k, it only started to happen recently though, maybe the last 5k miles it's gone from none to noticeable shuddering from a stop.

[California98Civic]

The before/after flywheel photos look good. It seems that the change was from a dull surface with uneven flecks of dark grey and black clutch material to a clean dull uniform gray/silver color and smooth. Yes?

[Daox]

Yep, that is basically it.

Heres is a video I found showing another guy doing it with a drill and sander attachment. He went at it a lot more aggressively than I did with my sanding block.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63Ww4S-nK9w

[Daox]

Necro thread bump! I'm back working on the Insight.

I took the weekend and this afternoon to reassemble the transmission. I put all new seals in it along with a new input shaft bearing. I also did the 2nd gear synchro mod to stop it from grinding when downshifting into second gear. I was going to put a second skin on the transmission so I could circulate coolant through it, but I have decided not to do that mod.

I must comment that putting this thing together is way easier than taking it apart.

Anywho, here is a shot of the transmission with shiny new RTV gooping out. Yay.

[MetroMPG]

Nice to see this moving again!


So it's ready to go back in the car?

[Daox]

Just about! There are a few other things that need to get bolted on. I'm also debating cleaning up some of the rusty bits at least a little. Its pretty bad from 18 years of living in a salty winters.

[Daox]

Today was quite productive as far as Insight progress goes.

I started out by finishing up my grid charger harness. I had already made the grid charger months ago, but never made or installed the harness that connects the charger to the battery pack. To do this, I used a female molex 4 pin connector. These are the old school ones you would see in a computer. From there, the 4 wires split up and two go to the battery pack, and two go to the battery cooling fan so you can cool the pack while its charging.

Here are some pictures.


These are the connections to the battery pack.





Then the wires come around the back passenger side. The two connect via wire taps to the fan. I drilled a hole and threw a rubber grommet in to get the wires out of the aluminum case (which gets a cover).





Here you can see the molex connector to connect the charger and harness. I have my voltmeter's probes jammed in the connector to monitor the voltage.





And, here is the setup charging. The pack started at 96V and very quickly jumped up as the charger started its job.





Next up was a simple fix, but one of those things that was quite annoying when driving the car. The back of the headliner had been peeling away. It just makes the car look junky IMO when you see a bad headliner. So, a bit of spray adhesive and that was fixed.

This is the stuff I used.





And here is the fix half done already. The sag was the full length of the rear hatch nearly.





All done and pretty again.





And, finally I got the clutch mounted back up to the flywheel. Thankfully, the clutch alignment tool from my clutch replacement in my 04 Civic doubled nicely as the spline and pilot bearing are the same.

[Daox]

I took some time this afternoon to start buttoning up things in back. Its mostly there.





I still have the charger going. It seems to have settled at around 175.5V. Not sure if that is good or bad, but I'll let it go a bit longer.