Engine Archive

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Heater Core and CV Joint Have Fixed Them Selves

By
Bart Piotrowski
– September 14, 2009Posted in: Automotive & Garage

My recent issue with my CV Joint was actually loose lug nuts on one of my front wheels which was surprising but at the same time educating. From now on I will always have to double check and torque down my  lug nuts as they seem to have gotten loose over time. And as far as the heater core I’m a bit confused, because the issue seems to have disappeared and no more smell of antifreeze is present in the car anymore and I’ve been driving everyday since the smell became present. I will keep my eye on this issue but so far it seems to be OK.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Engine
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Heater Core and Drive Shaft a Double Header Issue

By
Bart Piotrowski
– September 2, 2009Posted in: Automotive & Garage

So 2 days ago I was driving with a friend and noticed a funny smell in my car and at the time I didn’t think of it and let it go. Well next day which was yesterday I was driving my car again and realized that the odor that I was smelling was antifreeze my Civic’s cooling fluid. I checked the engine bay and nothing leaking was visible and I couldn’t smell anything so I poked my nose inside the car again and guess what, ewwwww it stunk. So yeah it’s definitely my heater core as I have replaced the radiator already and  most of the hoses were replaced when I did the engine swap.  Oh and also while driving last night, I started hearing a scrubbing loud wheel noise. I thought it was just my tires but later noticed it got louder and louder. So today I looked into it and yeah my drivers side driveshaft outer CV-Joint is gone and making a whole lot of noise.

I will try to fix the CV Joint in the next day or so and after that look at the heater core issue. From the reasearch that I have done it’s not easy to replace the heater core as you have to pull the whole dash out to get to the heater core which is behind the blower.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, CV Joint, Driveshaft, Engine, Heater Core
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Knowing How to Spec Your Main and Rod Bearings

By
Bart Piotrowski
– May 6, 2009Posted in: Automotive & Garage

I’ve already put my D16Z6 block together and spec’d the bearings but if you need more info on this, here is a link to D-Series forum post that explains it a little more. Click Here for the link.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, D16Z6, Engine, Main Bearings, Rod Bearings
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Angled Exhaust Whats The Diff?

By
Bart Piotrowski
– January 31, 2009Posted in: Automotive & Garage

Have you ever seen an import car like a Honda and wonder why it’s muffler looks like it’s crooked? Well it’s not. The theory behind it, is that the less 90 degree bends in the exhaust the more power you will gain. To make this work the muffler is attached to the car in a such a way that it looks like it’s crooked and pointing to the side but actually it’s suppose to be like that.  I found a link to a forum post on D-Series.org that explains this a bit more.

Click Here for the Link.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Engine, Headers and Exhaust
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How To Do an Oil Change on a 92-95 Honda Civic

By
Bart Piotrowski
– January 24, 2009Posted in: Automotive & Garage

Click Here!
Tools needed: Oil drain pan, car jack, jack stand, 17mm wrench, rag or paper towels, oil and oil filter




Step 1 – Place a jack under the appropriate jack place on the drivers side of the car and raise it up. Once your Civic is raised place a jack stand under the frame for added safety.




Step 2 – Place an empty oil drain pan under your Civic and use a 17mm wrench to loosen the drain plug and let the oil drain now.




Step 3 – Loosen off the old oil filter from the back of the engine from underneath of the car. Once the old filter is out take a new filter and coat the rubber seal with new oil and screw it back on the engine.




Step 4 – Tighten the oil drain plug back up with 17mm wrench and wipe off any excess oil around oil pan. Then remove the oil drain pan and jack from under the car and lower the car back down.




Step 5 – Add 3.5 Liters of oil into the engine using a funnel so not to spill. Oil Grade will depend on where you live and what temperatures you drive in but I use 5W30 or 10w30.




Step 6 – Check oil level on the dipstick to make sure you are at the full mark.




Step 7 – Start the car and watch your oil light come on and it should go off in a couple seconds. If the light does not turn off  turn the engine off right away and double check the oil level.



Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Do it Yourself, Engine, Oil and Lubrication
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How Car Engines Work, The Basic 101

By
Bart Piotrowski
– August 5, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

Knowing how the internal combustion engine works is the basic concept that all back yard mechanics should know before they begin any kinda of performance mods. But not everyone is a wiz kid when it comes down to the details on pistons and valves so I thought i would do a search on the web and share this great writeup from Honda Tuning that explains everything in great detail. Click Here for the writeup.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Engine
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Honda Civic Starter

By
Bart Piotrowski
– June 3, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

Today I will talk about the starter, a very important part that allows you to start your engine. Back in the day, they had to use hand cranks to turn over the engine to start it, but these days you just turn your key and go. This is only possible because of the modern day electric Starter. An electric starter is a part attached to the outside of your transmission housing or engine that uses power from your battery to turn your engine over.  It uses the Bendix drive which is attached to the end of the starter shaft to turn your flywheel fast enough till your engine starts. Once your engine starts spinning fast enough the Bendix drive disengages and the engine is running on it’s own. I found some images of the possible starter variations that you might have in your Honda Civic. You can Click on them to see a bigger image.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Engine, Honda Resource, starter
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Timing Gears, Belts and more

By
Bart Piotrowski
– May 15, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

The most common cause of Honda engines getting rebuilt is the infamous timing belt breaking. When your engine is running, the bottom half (block, crankshaft, and pistons) and top half (cylinder head, Valves, springs and retainers) are synchronized to make sure that the valves don’t hit the pistons. When the timing belt breaks the top half (valve train) stops working and some valves maybe left in such a position that when the pistons comes back up to TDC (TOP DEAD CENTER) they make contact. The piston is much stronger then the valves so usually what happens is that the valves get bent in the valve guides and you may have a good mark left in the top of the piston from the valve head.

If you would like to know more about this subject I found a great post at D-Series forums today that describes everything in detail. Click Here for link.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, cam gear, Cylinder Head, Engine, timing belt, timing gear, valve train
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Oil Extraction And Compression Test

By
Bart Piotrowski
– May 10, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

I went out for a luncheon today in Richmond with my brother and a friend to meet some fellow bloggers. I met a bunch of interesting people including famous blogger John Chow and Yaro Starak. Once I came back home it was only 4pm and the weather wasn’t to bad so I had a friend come over and help me out on the ’95 civic project. Last week I found out that I had oil in the spark plug holes so today I decided I was going to clean them out.

I pulled the spark plug wires out and used a syringe with a fish air hose at the end to suck out all the oil, then used bounty paper towels to soak up any excess oil at the bottom.

You can see in the left picture the oil is almost covering the spark plug and in the middle picutre it shows one of the bad seals that caused this whole issue. The last picture shows the spark plug soaked with oil on the threads. Once I pulled the spark plugs out I let the small amount of excess oil at the botttom drip into the cylinder. I then inserted the spark plugs back into the engine and started the car up to burn off any of the oil that got into the cylinders.

I pulled the spark plugs out again and did a compression test on all 4 cylinders and they were very consistant at around 175 to 180 PSI. Back in January when I did my engine swap I had about the same compression 170 to 180PSI. You can also see that the seals from this engine were totally toast and started to burn into the cylinder head.

I cleaned the cylinder head spark plug seats and used my old D15B7 valve cover to replace this one because my seals were in better shape. My old D15B7 valve cover was a bit dirty on the inside so I clean it up and mounted it back on the car. The black colored valve cover looks way better then just straight aluminum, so this was a good choice.

Tags: 92-95 Honda Civic, Compression Test, Cylinder Head, Engine
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Did My Valve Adjustment Today

By
Bart Piotrowski
– January 28, 2008Posted in: Automotive & Garage

Well it was a cold but sunny day today so I decided to do my valve adjustment as i’ve heard it’s suppose to snow for the next few days. I pulled out the spark plugs, wires and the distributor cap first, then pulled the valve cover off and finally pulled off the timing belt cover. I set the engine to TOP DEAD CENTER (TDC) on #1 cylinder and adjusted both the intake and exhaust valves. While the cylinder was at TDC, I inserted a plastic rod down the spark plug hole and marked it. Then I rotated the cam 90 degree’s and inserted the plastic rod down the #3 cylinder plug whole to make sure I was at TDC and adjusted the intake and exhaust valves. Then I rotated the cam another 90 degree’s and did cyclinder #4 and finally did the same thing for #2. Once it was all done I double checked all valves for each cyclinder at the proper cam position. One thing I forgot to mention is that while turning the cam 90 degree’s I checked to make sure I was on the right cylinder by looking at the distributor rotor postion with the distributor cap. Doing the valve adjustment today was the perfect day as I did not run the engine today so it was totally cold. Below are pictures of the valve adjustment.

Picture 1 shows finding TDC on my Crank, and picture 2 shows my marked plastic rod

Checking valve lash with a feeler gauge, and using a flat screw driver to set the adjustment

Picture of middle VTEC cam lobe between the 2 valves, and my plugs after 800km’s after swap.

Tags: 1993 Honda Civic Project, 92-95 Honda Civic, Cylinder Head, Engine, valve lash, valve train
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