SirPaperbag

Finally found the time to continue this thread. Work has been hectic lately. Anyways- When I finally saved up enough money to buy myself something nice, I reached out to a buddy of mine who (at the time) worked for a certain wheel manufacturer... Guess which one it was. I got that set of Turbos for an amazing price and let me tell ya, unboxing a set of brand-spankin' new wheels is really something else. :D Ordered some nice tires to go with them and did a test-fit. With the car being my daily driver, I chose some with good grip in wet conditions. Sadly, it was in the middle of winter and I had to put the ugly ol' steelies back on, as I didn't want to get into trouble with the race marshalls. ;) A few months of pretty much nothing happening went by and a peculiar thoght crossed my mind. 'Didn't my pa tell me he did lots of engine swaps back in the day? Maybe I can do one, as well?' Well, you can guess what came next... I actually consulted the owner's manual (of all things) to find out which engines I could choose from, as swapping in an engine that came stock in your chassis is a lot easier and cheaper to get entered in the car's registration. So, some scrounging up money and searching the interwebs later, this ugly duckling arrived on my doorstep: A D16Z9, a 1.6 liter single-jingle with 126hp. Not that much, sure, but a huge upgrade over the stock 1.4 engine, barely coughing up 90hp. About 8 hours of work later, the engine was installed and we fired it up for the first time- Success! The swap was surprisingly straightforward and actually... easy? We could'nt believe ourselves how simple it was. This was around spring of 2020, mind you. Half a year after I bought my first car, it had already been engine-swapped. I would call that a resounding success. ;D By the way, I was still running the original 1.4l ECU. Without any problems, I might add. Oh, and I also kept the 1.4l transmission- the gearing is *chef's kiss. Perfect. Folks talk a lot about S20 transmissions on D-Series engines (A000 is what you'd want, by the way) but nobody ever talks about the fact that trannies made for lower displacements are also naturally geared shorter than those made for higher displacements. Makes sense, no? Less torque = shoter gears for same acceleration. My pa also told me that folks often used Diesel trannies for their builds back in the day, as they were a lot shorter than the 'regular' ones. Here is an excerpt from the manual, please ignore the fact that it's all in German: As you can see in the table, the maximum speed per gear (when revving up to the limiter) is the shortest in the 1.4l version. Coincidence? I think not! As I now got my hands on a VTEC engine, yo, I also wanted to use the VTEC. Duh. So, I grabbed some tools and, as I was learning the trade of an electronics technician, got to work. After about a week, I had managed to create this absolute abomination: Behold, breadboard! It's a super simple cicuit actually. A simple step-up converter for the power supply, a microcontroller for the logic and a 12V relay to switch a bigger relay in the engine bay, finally switching the VTEC solenoid. It didn't work. Turns out, the RPM signal is not a voltage-based signal, but a pulsing signal with rising frequency as the RPMs increase. Had to get an oscilloscope to figure that one out... This is what the signal looks like @4800RPM, for anyone interested. With that being the case, I had to go back to the drawing board and design a new curcuit, capable of boosting the roughly 1.4V signal to a nice 5V signal so the microcontroller is actually able to detect it. With the added difficulty of not changing the signal as it does so. Lots of research later, I came up with this: (again, in German :P) This cicruit uses a voltage divider to supply an operational amplifier with a fixed voltage of 0.5V to compare with the 1.3 to 1.4V signal coming from the ECU. Why 0.5V and not 0V? You might ask. To filter out noise, of course. :) The rest stays the same, with an Arduino (microcontroller) to do all the comparing and deciding when to switch the solenoid on, and a few relais to do the heavy lifting. Writing the program for that thing was ... enlightening. You see, I already had a pretty good grasp of programming languages, as I went to a technical school and had IT as one of my four 'major' school subjects. Different countries and school systems, you know the drill... But even though I already had, ehh, maybe three years of programming experience, this was a challenge to pull off. Not only does it have to count the individual pulses of a relatively high-frequency signal, but it also has to evaluate that signal an decide whether to switch fun-time on or off, while staying accurate in reading the RPMs... I did it, though. :) I now had a fully working D16Z9 with functioning VTEC, all while keeping the original ECU. :D

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