SirPaperbag

Hi, I'm Patrick and this is my '96 Fastback which bought in late 2019 as my first car. Or at least how it looked a few years ago. Lots of stuff has been done to it since then and I will try my best to dig up some pictures of the process as we catch up to the present. :) The previous owner, who bought it brand-new, was an old man and pretty much all the dents are his work, by the way. Just wanted to clarify. ;) It is (was) a bone stock, base-spec, MA8 with the optional 'Comfort' package installed from factory. Meaning it's got a 1.4l engine that makes 90hp, electrical windows in the front, power steering, A/C and no ABS, with drum brakes in the rear. Oh, and that atrocious fake wood that fools absolutely nobody and looks cheap as hell. What were they thinking? Oldest pictures I could find, was already on some lowering springs by then. Also removed some fugly flower-stickers from the doors and got rid of the 'Comfort' badges. Like every responsible young man before me, I of course immediately went ahead and installed some lowering springs and got myself a nice, quality exhaust. The springs are from Eibach and, if memory serves me right, the exhaust is made by a Polish company called 'Ulter'. We did some proper maintenance, though. You need a good foundation to build a house, right? That, and my old man never would have let me get away without doing some maintenance anyways. :P Beauty shot of the freshly unboxed exhaust. The exhaust arrived on a weekday at around 7PM and me and my old man got giddy like a bunch of kids on christmas eve as we put or grubby hands on it. We immediately went out into the freezing cold to get it installed ASAP. :D Roughly an hour later we were done and it felt like it was the coolest car on the planet for that moment. If I only knew what was to follow... ;) Might be able to find a video, but no promises. In the next episode...! Broke 18 year old me finally saves up enough money to get a set of wheels. And...! Something big on the horizon.

Hope you'll get something useful out of my little essay. ;) I swapped a D16Z9 into my MA8 around two years ago, came out of a USDM EJ1 but was also used in the MB1. It even ran very well with the stock ECU, believe it or not... Regularly checked the sparkplugs' color and it didn't run too lean or anything. Used that setup for roughly 18 months, in combination with my own 'VTEC-Controller' that I built and programmed, using an Arduino. VTEC Wizardry galore! :P Then I finally got my grubby hands on a p28 this summer and it was a 'straight' swap again. Threw that self-built thing out the window the same moment. xD The only mods that needs is wire in VTEC (already done before) and remove a few little plastic keys/guides on the ECU plugs that otherwise prevented it from plugging into the ECU. Though, I checked every single wire with my trusty ol' multimeter beforehand and the pinout is 100% the same. Drop-in replacement, so to speak. My pops helped me with everything (car mechanic for 35+ years and an absolute magician) and even he was surprised just how easy an old Civic is to work on, really. The other big thing you'd have to look up is plugs, e.g. the distributor, and that's basically it. There are adaptors for everything. D-Series engine parts are so interchangeable it's ridiculous. Example: The coil on my D16 dizzy went *poof when I tried to crank it after an oil pump upgrade with all of the plugs not grounded (big dumb-dumb), but I actually got the D14 dizzy to work. Timing was a bit off above 4000 RPM and I had to mount it with a single screw and around five zipties, but it worked until I got a replacement coil... :D The only other issues you could encounter that I didn't would be immobilizer-related, just like @dan1 said. But that should solve itself by using an OBD1 ECU, like a p28 for example, because according to my research OBD1 ECUs don't really communicate with the immobilizer that much. It's more like a simple 'OK'-signal being sent, no real data transfers like with the OBD2 ECUs. And you could of course use certain methonds that I won't get into for multiple reasons to just ... get rid of your immobilizer and remove that factor from the equation. Racecar and all that. Long story short: Go for it, swapping D-Series egnines is about the easiest engine swap one can do. The swap itself is going to take 8-16 hours total, btw. d(^__^)

| hydrogen is the way forward totally! Yup, can confirm. I work for an automotive company that provides testing facilities to many well known manufacturers. All I'm allowed to disclose (NDAs and stuff) is that they are not betting on EVs alone. Hydrogen definitely is on their agenda (at least some of them). But I wouldn't hold my breath yet, I'd expect we'll be well into the 2030s until it finally gets adopted by the masses. For now, E85 is our best bet (even if the mileage completely tanks). Maybe it's time to get a flex fuel setup, after all? :P