Thursday March 14th 2013:
You probably remember that I picked up a Small Port 4AGE a little while back. What I didn’t pick up at the same time was all of the sensors to make things work. Sure I had some, but when I priced out the cost of the rest of them at the local Pick N Pull I was shocked. They wanted so much money that it would have cost more than I paid for the swap itself. Absolutely ridiculous. So a decision was made to try out this whole Honda ECU thing.
I’m just going to assume you know something about the OBD1 Honda ECU’s if not. Do some Googling. Back in the day I tuned more than my fair share of these via the removable Eprom chip. Best of all I still had a P28 that I kept as a back up as well as my Romulator and Burner.
Saturday April 6th 2013:
I’ve been splitting my time with another project, but I finally got the wiring done and all but one of the Honda sensors mounted. The distributor is the tough one of the bunch. The 16 Valve 4AGE distributor just doesn’t produce all of the signals that the Honda ECU needs to see. Where the Toyota unit sends out a 1 and 4 pulse per rev, the Honda needs those as well as a 24 pulse per rev. The mechanical connection is a whole other pain. The Honda unit was designed to mount into the end of the camshaft, where the Toyota was designed to intersect it at a 90° ish angle. I’ve seen people run the distributor off of the cam sprocket, but it just looks wrong to me. Nothing more than that. I’m sure it works fine, but it just looks wrong. I made the adapter and extension to be able to fit int a stock location
Saturday May 25th 2013:
And it fits! Time to throw this thing back in the engine bay.
What haven’t you ever seen someone lift an MR2 up with an engine hoist before? When you don’t have a lift handy, you do what you gotta do to slide the drive train back under the car. I did learn that the Honda distributor is a really tight fit and it had to come out to fit the engine back in the car. It did eventually slide home though.
Saturday June 8th 2013:
Yay more wiring! Sure you can (and should) do the engine side of the wiring with the engine out, but the car side is a bit tougher. If you want it to fit properly and not end up looking like a spaghetti dinner gone wrong its better to suffer through doing it in the car.
Saturday July 6th 2013:
Whitey’s been spending some time outside lately. It’s not quite done, but I had to finish up another project before getting back to this.
Sunday August 4th 2013:
Saturday August 17th 2013:
I’m using a vintage version of Crome, and don’t have any additional data logging software on the Honda ECU so I set up my Innovate dynamic duo; aka the LM1, and Aux Box. Luckily I have a pair of Thinkpads from a few years ago that still have Windows XP to run all this stuff.
Some temporary zip tie installs to make this thing driveable so I can start tuning.
Sunday August 18th 2013:
Look at that Whitey made it home under his own power.
Thursday August 22th 2013:
Isn’t this how everyone drives to work? A bit more tuning going on during the daily drives.
Friday August 23rd 2013:
So in edition to the engine installation, wiring, tuning, etc. I also managed to re finish the dash to get rid of a couple of cracks (sorry no pics), replace the windshield (thanks to some help with the dash), install some new Toyo Tires R1R’s, and update the stereo installation a bit. That’s of course all mostly before Friday. Key word being “mostly”. Friday was a mad dash to finish up a lot of little things, remove all of the temporary
