Installing the Potbox

The Belktronix system tries to make installing the potbox a no-brainer by allowing the user to put it right under the accelerator pedal. For the Civic, this works out quite well.


Here are the heavy-duty Velcro pieces that come with the Belktronix kit. The intent is to put the "hook" side of the Velcro on the rear side of the potbox and simply stick it to the rug under the pedal.


I found that the rug moved around quite a bit, so I wasn't comfortable sticking the potbox directly to the rug. In the above photo, I've cut away the rug and the rubber pad underneath the rug to expose the firewall metal under the accelerator. I want to line up the bulge on the backside of the accelerator pedal with the plunger on the potbox. There's a seam with a right edge and bottom edge shown in the photo above. Mark a horizontal line 3/8" above the bottom edge of the seam, and align the potbox with it and the right edge of the seam.


Clearance is tight, so I added the "hook" sid of the Velcro to the backside of the potbox between the assembly bolts.


To get the "fuzzy" side of the Velcro to line up on the firewall, I just pressed the fuzzy Velcro onto the "hook" Velcro attached to the potbox and just pressed the whole assembly into place under the pedal. Again, the bottom edge is 3/8" above the bottom seam and the right edge lines up with the right seam.


Here's the potbox installed with the bump of the pedal resting on the plunger. There are also some small "L" brackets in the kit that I could also use to mount the potbox to the firewall, but I'll try the Velcro version first and see if it sticks (pun intended).


With the potbox mounted, I need to find a way to route the potbox wires into the engine compartment. After hunting around, I found this 25mm plug on the passenger side under the glove compartment. The picture above shows the plug (red arrow) from the engine compartment side. I'm guessing a 1" grommet would do just fine here. I could have drilled a 1" hole in the firewall, but I think this is cleaner.


Since we're on the topic of routing cables, I thought about how to route the high-current battery cables from the front engine compartment to the rear battery rack area. It turns out that there are also two 25 mm plugs (the ones we used to align the front bolts) in the rear area that line up neatly with the ends of the batteries. I figure I can route the cables under the car and tie-wrap them to various brake lines down there and they will come up through these holes (with grommets added) to attach to the batteries.

The next step will be to figure out how to attach the vacuum pump or extend the engine wiring harness to reach all the places we need it to.

Onward!