Five-Angle Valve Job

HT: You also mention a custom valve job on the tech sheet. Any details you'd care to share with readers?
JE: It was along the lines of a 5-angle valve job. It might not quite be a 5-angle; the machinist we used [for the valve job] does his own little tweak on that.

HT: The crank triggered, distributor-less ignition you list-was that a custom job?

HT: All tolled, how much time have you guys spent on the build so far?
JE: About a year. We started in April 2005. The owner didn't want to dump a bunch of money into it all at once, so it has been an ongoing project. It also came at a time when we were moving from our old shop to the new one. That didn't help move the process along.

HT: JE makes a business out of building and tuning cars. Was there anything especially troublesome with this one?
JE: Getting the custom fabrication done, that was a little time consuming. None of it was really a pain in the ass. The problem was the fuel, having to repeatedly take the car off the dyno to redo the fuel setup. But none of it was really difficult. We spent a lot of time tuning with the Electromotive.

HT: Do you prefer the Electromotive? Are you normally an AEM or Hondata guy?
JE: Actually, I personally do a lot of Hondata, and I'd say [the shop] does a fair amount of AEM. We wanted to try something different, for our own education, and we heard good things about the ignition setups on the Electromotive system. I was actually pretty pleased with the way it all turned out. Once we did a base map tune, the first run we pulled on it was perfect. It's got a wizard feature that sets it up, whereas in most other systems that setup wizard is worthless. With 1000cc injectors, it took a little bit of work to get the motor to idle with a decent air/fuel ratio. Those big injectors don't like to open and close very quickly at low RPM.

HT: So is there anything left for this Civic? Is the owner pretty happy with what he got?
JE: He's having us test it at the track and dial it in as fast as it'll go before he takes delivery on it. It's kind of become our baby-we almost feel like we own it at this point. He's going to race this thing, and he's talking about transmission upgrades now. I warned him about H22 transmissions, which aren't as strong as B-series trannies, so we might do an H-to-B trans conversion. He also might invest in a newer aftermarket custom tranny, or he might just leave it the way it is and sink the rest of his money into this 1000hp K-series. He just wants to have 1000 horsepower at the wheels. It should be an interesting journey.