Well a few weeks ago I went to a shop to get an oil change and the guy that changed my oil informed me that my transmission is leaking. So after doing some research it looks like its gunna be a pretty expensive repair so I decided to sell my car but after thinking about it I decided to just do a motor swap and since they have to drop the tranny anyways may as well change it to right along with it.

Currently my 94lx has a f23a5 in it and get pretty sweet gas mileage considering I only have to fill up once every week in a half and it drives pretty swell. What are going to be the downsides going from the engine I currently have to the H22a engine with an LSD transmission? Im not trying to turn my car into a race car and I have no intentions of doing turbo or anything like that I just want a car thats gunna last for a while with minimum problems. Will the swap be the answer?

EDIT: Also hows the reliability on the H22a?

 

With an H22 swap you can throw that filling up every week and a half out the window.

If your looking for a reliable cost effective engine you already have one. If you want it even more reliable. You should look into putting the swap money into doing regular maintenance. And maybe a few mods to your current setup.

Swapping a used H22 for a used F23 is not going to be any sort of answer for added reliability. Now if you were to rebuild the used H22 before you swapped it in. that would be a different story. Gas mileage still not the best though.

 

I got 29MPG on 1000 freeway miles doing 60-65 in my 93 Accord with 4 speed auto and all OEM aero. Maybe a mile of that was "city" I usually get 22MPG city.

 

there are no downsides.

 

Thanks for the info ghost! I'll just ride with my F23 till either it or my transmission gives out on me. I guess I kinda over looked the fact that even though I was gunna get a low mileage swap from Hmotors it was probably gunna have to have some extra work put into the engine to make it reliable. Also using higher octane fuel is something that I can hold off on for awhile lol.

 

i do not care what any dealer says about mileage on the used engines. unless you are pulling the engine yourself from the original car you never know what kind of mileage it has. every seller says they are low mileage, 30k to 60k etc etc. i have had some arrive with a wire harness and cluster showing 120k+ km...that's over 75k miles. the reality is tha tyou are buying an engine from a guy that imported an engine from a guy in japan/asia who is getting them from cars in junkyards. there is not an unlimited supply of "jdm" engines with low miles, especially engines that have not been manufactured in over a decade.

 

I guess you have never been to Japan. These cars sit in junkyards for years without being touched before they are bought in the masses to ship over here. They live on an island the size of New Jersey, there are only so many miles to be had.

 

I completely agree. The best insurance is to buy a rebuild kit before swapping the used motor in. If you just buy into the dealer's word, you might as well just burn the money up. I know from experience. Back in the 90's my brother had a Toyota Tercel with a bad engine. He purchased a used imported engine and just swapped it in. He probably put 10k miles and then failed again. In order to avoid this, you could just rebuild your existing motor and extend the life that way. IMO.

 

Not too Japan but I have lived on an island with limited space and very expensive land. Your statement has a lot of fallacies....

first off its a small island, and they did not sell hundreds of thousands of prelude vtecs in Japan. So the supply is quite limited, especially since they stopped produing the engine 10 years ago.

second off its a small island and there is not enough profit in junkyard engines to have them sitting around taking up space waiting a decade or two for some American to buy one of their engines at bargain pricing.

third everything like steel and aluminum must be imported to the islands in Japan, meaning they have a very effective recycling program for those metals. They are much more valuable as raw materials for newer production vehicles.

When land is scarce you will not find people dealing in items that sit around and collect dust. Sure they do have stricter laws regarding registration and taxation of motor vehicles, but that would mean the cars the engines are coming from would have all been off the road for 6-12 years already. They are NOT sitting around in a pile just waiting and taking up space and costing money to store when there are far more lucrative uses for the land. Japan has been striving for decades to have many closed loop industries, for example when electronics are worn out or thrown away most companies are required to take them back and recycle them. That is law, not convenience.

On top of everything else household car ownership is ~80% with 40% or less owning 2 or more cars, and considering that rate of about 543 cars per 1000 people and adding in the shaken makes some significant changes. Fewer cars on the road than here in the west, and those cars tend to be newer. The cars that get too expensive to own, but are not wrecked do get recycled...they get exported to other places in Asia and the pacific rather than just thrown away. So if you are getting a junkyard engine from Japan it is most likely going to be one that came out of a wrecked car, one that was wrecked earlier in its life and most likely long since gone to someone doing a swap here. Most of your import engines are going to come from other places, places where the car was sent when it got too expensive for Japan....thus the high number of shipping containers coming from New Zealand full of "JDM" engines. I am also pretty confident that some of those car exporters are also importing engines back to Japan to redistribute to other foreign markets such as outs. So that JDM engine from the 99 prelude did 36k miles in Japan, then in Malaysia did another 90k miles, then got wrecked and the engine went back to Japan, then onto the boat to the US and was sold as a real JDM engine with 30k-60k miles on it....

 

When I swapped my H22 into my car, it made the car more enjoyable to drive on spirited runs. Normal driving was exactly the same.

The only downside is that you have to use Premium gas. You will get a little lower gas mileage. I average 27-29 MPGs combined driving.

Mine is a JDM H22 and I had no reliability issues with it, and that includes several track events that consist of 5 20-minute sessions each day.

I've had it for 7 years now and not one issue. I did relace all the maintenance items on it before swapping it into my car. Pretty much every seal, timing belt, water pump, oil pump, and converted to a manual timing belt tensioner.

 

Sounds scary, but makes sense when you think about it

 

my statement was 100% accurate. I never said decades and you must assume at best a 2001 was owned for several years before it was made to stop being driven. lets say 5 years that means sometime around 2006-2007 it was put in a yard. its only been about 4 years since then. 100,000 of thousands of these cars not only preludes but accords and other models had these motors. You're not even on the right track for someone thats never been there. "I've been on an island before....." what a tool.

 

is the automatic tentioner a downfall of the h22?

 

Yes! And some would say that having FRM sleeves could be a bit of a downfall at times. If you want to leave it stock you should be OK. If you want to upgrade pistons or go with a larger bore you are very limited in what you can do/use w/the FRM sleeves in there.

 

The tensioner is a downfall but can always be swapped with the H23 one.

 

if your gonna go h22 definitely be ready to sleeve it if you want reliability. as far as the jdm engines go i purchased a jdm f22a from tiger with the 30-40k milesin the item description. i replaced the oil pan and valve cover gaskets before installing. the inside of the valve cover and oil pan looked completely clean and showed no signs of sludge or dark residue anywhere. looked like new parts and fresh oil still. engine runs clean as hell too. i definitely 100% agree with purchasing a jdm low mileage engine

 

so with an H23 you'd have to re sleeve it or what and how much would it cost sorry idk that much about it

 

You don't have to sleeve it if you want to run 87-87.25mm bore pistons that are FRM friendly. Mahle Gold have three choices for 87mm and three for 87.25mm bore. 9:1, 10:1 and 11.5:1.

 

Speeding Tickets....

 

I made 204whp/157wtq and there's no really down side to it. And yes, ^^^ more speeding tickets for sure :D

 

This.

 

Better off with a K24 anyway.

 

x2!