Hey guys I have 97 Civic swapped to B18c1 Gsr Motor. I Will get straight to the point so here's the problem. The car is turboed, to 8 pounds of boost, street tuned. So heres where it starts ,about 2 weeks ago i opened the hood and saw this, if your standing directly in front of the motor to the left (tranny side), between the head and the block there was oil seaping from there. When i did the swap the head was off from the block and during the assembly process Instead of using an oem headgasket i used the feltpro advance auto parts gasket. I know i know , I learned from that mistake.So i went to Acura bought a brand new headgasket and changed the headgasket to oem, and also had a friend put in arp gsr headstuds while i was at it. The head that was on their , looked like it had been warped , according to my friend. So i had another head that was lying around which looked very good compared to the old one. So we swapped the head also while we were at it, and swapped the stock intake manifold for a Edlebrock victor x . Assembled everything and went to start the motor, it would start but die it kept doing that , brought it to a shop and they diagnosed it as the valve lashes being too tight,so they loosened them and the car ran fine. 2 days later i went to go get the car Dynotuned. On the dyno the power the car was making kept steadily rising, Until it hit the 4th pull which was 285whp @ 8 psi and the next 2 pulls , the car dropped to 230 hp and the tuner said Vtec is not coming on . He put an oil pressure gauge on the head and tested oil pressure , it had pressure . He took the wire from the vtec solenoid and ran it to the battery and the solenoid clicked,he claimed it was a mechanical problem. I drove all the way home ,And had a local shop check all the vtec pins in the head to see if it was missing any . All pins were in place. So that same night a friend and I changed the whole vtec solenoid itself. Drove the car for the first time and man the car spun tires and it felt like all the way power was there. So the next day i went back to the tuner he puts the car on the dyno and the same problem again.Except this time when He went to go check the oil pressure it had no oil pressure whatsoever. But the last time he added a quart of oil this time as i recall he checked it and said it was good. i drove all the way back home again.Some symptoms are that the car on cold mornings or just in general when you first start it up will rumble up and under 1000 rpms and at times will shut off the first try and then the 2nd try after rumbling it will stay on like normal. Now as of today it was a very cold morning close to 10 degrees out i went in to start the car and it started rumblinmg and shut right back off. I went to crank it for a second time and it wouldn't even crank over after that . What is going on please help anyone ??
Thank you so much in advance to anyone that can help!


Some symptoms That i have recently confirmed -
-After a few Mins of driving the car will throw an ecu light. (not at start up though).
-No Restrictor on turbo . Will be getting one asap.
-Vtec is intermittent ?
-Some people claimed oil pump issues but don't those go bad all together>?

Thanks again guys for any help .Its greatly appreciated.

 

the loss of oil pressure will disable vtec, try to fix that oil leak first. i had the same problem, oil was a little low/low pressure to the vtec switch.. and it disabled vtec and did all kinds of funky things

 

I know Im the one asking for help and i appreciate your help but I don't think that little leak at all would cause vtec to not come on period. I just can't figure this out because it did come on ,on the dyno for 4 pulls before it stopped.

 

pull the solenoid off and clean the vtec oil screen or just replace all together, there cheap. sounds lik debris clogging it, but see what kind of debirs because i could be bearing material then you have other problems. i sure hope you cleaned the head that was "laying around"

 

The car won't start period at the current moment, I have bigger worries than the vtec .Thanks for the suggestion though.

 

Didn't know Honda started making phones.

 

yeah , its something recent they have been trying out you should call them i have been hearing they are giving them out for trial purposes.

 

you probably wasted your time pulling the the head originally. Oil below the vtec solenoid often appears to be a leaky head gasket when it in fact is just leaking out of the dizzy or cam plug and needs to be re-honda-bonded.

could be an oil pickup problem too. Do you have a catch can? ive seen catch cans overflow and loose enough oil to cause vtec problems. The car not starting and running sounds like a more serious issue.