After 9 months of research and spending more money than Michael Jackson at a Toys-R-Us I finally have a turbocharged import sleeper.
Nothing about this swap seemed easy (mostly my fault but hey, got to learn sometime...) but when I heard the BOV kick off for the first time I giggled like a schoolgirl.
From the beginning then:
I bought a s14 from Yury at Heavy Throttle (Jeff and Yury - great guys, I recommend them highly to anyone) where I would get many of my pieces. It had a lot of goodies already on it: lightened flywheel, ACT clutch, 555cc injectors, a s15 turbo - the works.
I also bought a few other things to help carry the load: custom hotpipe (more about that little #$% later Blitz FMIC Blitz SS BOV Blitz SBC-iD boost controller and power meter Apexi turbo timer Koyo Radiator Walbro 255 fuel pump Z32 MAFS Apexi N1 Dual catback Catco cat Greddy 3" downpipe C's short shifter trunk mounted battery kit
I was also going for a automatic to manual swap (yes, I'm ambitious, I know) so I had to go scrounging around for master slave cylinders, driveshaft (the automatic is not the right size), clutch pedal assembly, etc. Included in that "etc" which I failed to notice in other peoples explanations is the crossmember which holds the transmission up. Just a word to those doing the transmission swap, the crossmember is NOT the same - you have to pull one off of a manual car. They look very similar but the bolts just won't line up. Hopefully that will save you some time that I wasted
So we got to work. I had the install done at a local shop called Fastech by a great mechanic, Billy, who did a great job of dealing with all the unforseen headaches of this swap. We yanked out the KA:
and started installing things...
The first headache came when we realized that the s13 hood/body did not give the same clearance that an s14 does. When the intercooler piping was all connected we noticed that the hot pipe was just a little high. High enough that the hood wouldn't close.
Not a terribly good picture because of perspective, but the hot pipe rose about three inches above the engine and bumped into the hood. I didn't want to have to modify the hood (you know- wanted a sleeper as much as possible) so we took a sharp rotating object to the hotpipe and cut out a ring so as to shorten it without affecting the angle. After three tries we finally got the sizing correct. Each time we had to be extremely careful when putting the two pieces back together to make sure my car wouldn't be unintentionally whistling when the tubo decides to get out of bed and go to work.
That's not that bad, right? Oh, there's more....
After we installed the engine and started to put some oil in it, we noticed that the floor was unusually shiny. With a black substance. Which looked like oil. After digging around we decided to take off the oil pan and look what we found:
I know, I know, you're supposed to expect this kind of thing, but still, this car is my daily driver and we were now working on our third week of it being in the shop. We sewed that up slapped it back on, and moved on.
The driveshaft and exhaust went in without a hitch (surprisingly):
Now we move onto the final headache - wiring. To all those who are thinking about putting an s14 engine into a s13 car - DONT! I spent a whole lot more money and a whole lot more time for about 20 HP. Honestly, it's not worth it. If I had known earlier what a pain it would be to get the wiring harnesses to match up I would have just gotten a black top, plugged the two in, and been out on the street a few weeks earlier. Ok, sorry...just hoping to help a few others out with what I have learned. Check this out:
Nasty, huh? There seems to be very little documentation in the US about the s14 wiring harness so my mechanic had to start from square one. After extensive use of a multimeter, wire stripper, and soldering iron (and about 2 weeks) we thought we had it. We turned it over and it fouled the plugs almost immediately. We rechecked everything, changed the plugs, same thing. We did this several times, sent an email to Yury, called all our friends. We showed that we had compression, we had spark, we had fuel ( we had LOTS of fuel - 555cc injectors work well
) but we had no boom. We were mystified. We double checked the timing with the only manual we had for an sr20det s14 (which was one I had found from Australia). It matched, we were flabergasted again. We took the head off and looked inside but everything was cleanWe talked to JWI about the ECU because we thought that was all it could be - they were adamant that it wasn't they're reprogramming. We were now about 2 months into the project and I was about ready to throw batteries at kittens by this point. Finally, at midnight, just messing around, we changed the timing again and VROOOM!
("And there was much rejoicing") To all those who have Australian manuals, THE TIMING NOTCHES ARE WRONG. I'm not sure which year it was for (it was in really bad shape when I got it through the grape vine) but approach with caution.I'm going to drive around in it for about a week before we put the boost controller, power meter, and turbo timer in just to be sure all the bugs are out. I should be able to run about 1 bar I decided. We'll see. Maybe in the next few weeks I'll have an opportunity to get it on a dyno and see what I'm making. Till then I'm going to go pick on some Hondas!
I have a lot more pics of the swap if you want to see them: Sr Swap
