gsr swap

[Miataracer]

'94 Civic EX, manual tranny, D16Z6 sohc Vtec engine.

My car had a few basic mods, CAI, Chikara header, high flow cat, cat back exhaust. The CAI and header were not reuseable on my swap. (these do not work with a GSR engine) The high flow cat and cat back exhaust were reuseable.


In this pic you can see that the CAI, valve cover, dist., and vtec sol. have been removed. If you are doing a swap make note of the fact that you do NOT have to take some of this stuff off to pull the engine, I only did so because I had someone who wanted to buy the head before I was ready to pull the whole engine out.


This is a view of the partially disassembled engine bay. As can be seen if you look closely I have started to unplug the stock EX engine wiring harness.


Looking down at the deck of a D16Z6 engine.



Front and back views of the D16 intake manifold. Again, this was only removed separate from the engine because I had to take the head off to sell.


On the left is the vtec sol. and on the right is the dist. both of these are from the d16.


The short block and tranny is getting close to being ready to come out. I took out the radiator for a little extra room. I would have taken the A/C out as well but I did not want to take it apart and have to recharge the system later as I planned to keep the A/C with my GSR swap.



Short block and tranny out of the car as a unit.


This is the header that came off the D16 engine. It will not match the bolt pattern on the GSR engine. Note that on this header the O2 sensor is just before the flange.


As you can see here the O2 sensor for the GSR is mounted at the front of the cat. My solution to this was to use my high flow cat that did not have an O2 sensor bung and have a short connecting pipe made with an O2 sensor bung installed. (there was a gap of about 6 inches between the GSR stock exhaust manifold and the front on my high flow cat)


If you want to keep A/C you can get the stock engine out and the new engine in without having to disconnect any of the lines. By doing this you don't have to get a recharge. As you can see from the picture the A/C mount brackets are different both in how they mount to the engine block AND how they mount to the A/C compressor. Hasport makes a bracket to mount your stock D16 A/C pump to a B series block. I need this bracket and have not yet gotten it.




Here you can see the length difference between the B series shift linkage and the D series shift linkage as well as the reversed layout of the linkages. The Integra shift linkage mounts perfectly in the Civic. The pin holding the linkage to the tranny is EASILY removed if you have an air chisel. I first tried using a hammer and a punch with little success.


This is a picture of the D16 wiring harness fully uncut. I did not reuse this harness as I had the harness from the GSR. The GSR harness has a few things the D16 harness does not have such as secondary port wiring and knock sensor wiring.


This is the GSR tranny after it was cleaned up. I actually used Eagle One A2Z wheel cleaner on the bare aluminum and it did a pretty good job.


This is after I put all of the parts back on. I actually ended up having to take the front mount back off to put it in the car because there was not enough clearance.


Here is the GSR mounted in the car. Now the process begins of plugging in all of the wires, connecting the throttle cable, water lines, etc.

I know that was a pretty major jump but I seem to have lost my other pictures of putting the engine and tranny together and beginning to drop the engine into the car... I will look for these and try to post them later.


Here is the finished product. Please ignore the horrible intake peeking out from behind the dist.!


Look, you can't even tell from the outside!

Thats all for now, I will try and find those pictures from just before the engine was installed. Questions/comments? Post away!

[Ricochet]

I have a question. How many more posts are you going to make of your swap?

I'm kidding, looks good man
Now all you need to do is paint that yellow valve cover black!

[Miataracer]

I want to do something with the yellow cover... I have been trying to trade it but no one seems interested.

[jcrx]

You can give it to me, I'll add it to my collection


Looks good, if it's ok with you, I'd like permission to steal some of your pics, specifically the ones comparing the shiftlinkages, those can come in real useful.

[T!mmy]

Did you ever worry your engine might fall on it's ass from the stand? :P

[Miataracer]

feel free to take whatever pics you want. the whole point of me taking a lot of those pics was to help other people who might be dealing with this stuff

[Miataracer]

Originally Posted by T!mmy

Did you ever worry your engine might fall on it's ass from the stand? :P

nah I didn't worry about that... plus that was just the old d16 anyway

[projectsilvia97]

thanks for all the pictures, i like them a lot keep 'em coming. your one lucky bastard.

[~ls/vtec~]

i have a question. what did u do with the wiring. how did u do it? cause i have a 97 hatch waiting to recieve one of those beaties with a yellow valve cover(like in my avatar and like u see under his hood)

[Miataracer]

I had the GSR wiring harness for the engine and the plug ends from the GSR car harness where it plugs into the ECU, so I actually pulled the pins I needed to add to my car harness out of the GSR harness. If you look at the plugs closely you will see that the backs of them actually flip up if you pry the sides out a bit (look at the plug close up and you should see what I mean) so when you flip the back part up you can stick something small into the plug and it will release a little catch that the pins hold in the plastic plug piece. when you do that you should be able to pull the pin right out.

[Miataracer]

to clarify... you stick a little pin or something into the FRONT of the plug. each pin has a little top hole and then a bigger bottom hole. what i used was a really really small screwdriver made to fix eye glasses. so you put whatever you plan to use in the bottom hole

[~ls/vtec~]

ok, i could probably take care of the ecu side, but the drivers side is what troubles me. i dont know what to do on those plugs.
and did you get the little wire harness between the engine harness and the ecu?
and which wires did you pull and where did u relocate them to?
mine should be very similar to urs because i have an ex wire harness in my car. i changed all the wireharnesses to ex because i wanted to get power windows in my hatch, and now i bought some power mirrors. so its not gonna be a dx anymore by the way thanx for all ur help

i dont know if you can read the engine code which reads b18b1 and the gsr head

[Miataracer]

hmm... well on my car the GSR harness plugged right in on the drivers side. i didn't have to change anything

[kittedb18bt]

great post, i hope everything works out for you well.

[~ls/vtec~]

ok, i know whats wrong. my engine is obd1 and the car is obd2. can anyone provide a diagram of the plugs so i can compare the pins and connect them how they are supposed to be?