Hey everyone, so I bought a 91 CRX HF earlier this month, it currently doesn't run, I believe the engine is bad, blown head gasket, so it needs rebuilt and honed.

But I have no clue on what direction to go with this car, I would like it to be turbo in the future. it would be awesome to have 300whp or more. but I will do what money allows and what I can get my hands on, so half of that is awesome too. I'm pretty new to the building honda engines, I've done very little to my B16A2 on my EM1.

So here is my current situation:
If I checked correctly, the car has a D15B6 in it. Transmission says "L3-2367070".

I also have a D16A6 sitting around, it would need to be rebuilt too and probably honed.

So what should I do to get to my goal? is it possible using some of these parts, or am I better buying a used engine like the zc?
Any suggestions and/or comments will be appreciated, bad or good.

 

You can swap in a B18A on the cheap, which can easily make 300 whp turbod in stock form, a hell of a lot easier than the engines you have. Since you're already MPFI it'll be that much easier.

 

Thanks for the suggestion on the B18A, I'll try to keep an eye out for it, at the moment I cannot find any B18A's, I can find B18C's on most JDM engine sites, but those are well over $2000.

 

"If I checked correctly, the car has a D15B6 in it. Transmission says "L3-2367070"."

thats the 60hp 1.5l engine with the hf transmission. i had the same setup in my 88 crx when i first bought it. great for DD with the long *** gears but horrible for speed hah.

cant do 300hp on a mild d16a6 rebuild in stock form, stock rods are only good till around 200-220hp with a good tune. the bottom end would have to be built which cost money lol do some searching on google for other d16a6 turbo builds

 

I was looking up a bunch of different builds and other member's builds on different sites, so I decided I wanted to get a bit more help on the current situation before investing any money.

Even if I got around 220hp that would be fine right now, but if I'm going to build it, I might as well build it right and reach a certain goal.
I was only originally planning on either spending close to a thousand on an engine, or use that thousand to rebuild an engine. If I could get the d15 running for very cheap I'd like to have that as good running engine and then another engine as a more powerful swap.

 

alright so my question at this moment is, would it be easier and a better route to get the d16a6 going with new crankshaft and other internal parts, turbo it, or would it better to get a zc sohc and do that to it instead? and the only reason I'm asking that is there there is more zc's around here then I can find of the b series.

 

The d16a6 is pretty much the same as a sohc zc so it would be pretty pointless to buy that if your just gona be building the d16.

 

Just get a B series and turbo it. Your not gonna get anywhere near your goal with a stock D

 

Because of the cost of the B series engine, especially the B18C, I would probably have to sell these two engines first to put towards that.
And also that being the case, I might as well lower down my goal and save that for a future project. If I could even find a good B18C block, I'd put that in the EM1 and put the b16a2 into the crx haha.

 

Why don't you just turbo the em1 and keep the crx stock

 

The EM1 needs a new B16A head before I boost it. it's got a small crack in it between one of the intake/exhaust ports.

The reason why I brought up this on what to do with the crx's engine is because at the moment the engine doesn't really run... it starts up, but misfires on every cylinder constantly. so that's why if I was going to change/build an engine for it, I wanted to do it right.

 

I'm going to go look at a b18a saturday, it's around 150k miles and the guy is selling it for $550, complete block with b16 transmission. so I think it's a good deal, I'll let you guys know more later.

 

Go with the b18b stock comes with 20whp more then the b18a and is or should be only about 100$ more then the b18a

 

Actually, it's more like 2 hp, and engines are measured in hp at the crank, not at the wheels.

 

Not a bad price for motor and trans if they're both healthy. On another note, if the D just has a blown headgasket, that's cake to fix. Why not spend a little time properly diagnosing it first? After the drop of $550, you will still need motor mounts, shift linkage, ecu, axles, and maybe more depending on if the B16 trans is cable or hydro. You'll be pushing it to stay within your $1,000.00 budget.

 

This may take me a year to accomplish

So I ended up buying the b18a1 with b16 transmission. After visually inspecting it seems to be fine, it came from a running car "supposedly" which we all know how that goes.

Anyways, I plan on completely building the engine to be strong, and while building it I'm also going to begin diagnosing the d15b6 engine and getting it running. I don't have an air compressor at my apartment so i can't do a compression test at the moment. Then after doing the swap I will probably sell the d15, I hear people go crazy over the hf engine.

So this is the issue with the d15 at the moment. it misfires, bad. During idle it misfires, when applying throttle it will not produce any power over 3k rpms, just misfires too much. I've replaced so far the spark plugs, wires, dizzy cap, and cleaned the rotor leads. next up will be timing belt and alternator belts, the timing belt has some cracks, and the alternator belt is really chewed up.
During when the car is running, the ecu shows no errors on it's little screen. which is odd for having misfires.

Anyways, unto the beefy part of this reply, the b18a1 ... Is there any builds anyone used this block on that I can be pointed out to? a quick search was fruitless. that way I can figure out what crankshaft, cams, etc are the best for the job in a reasonable price range, I'm sort of looking for something like a poor-man's type-r type of set up.
the b18a1 didn't came with the air intake manifold, so is there a better one for the setup, or is the stock one for the b18 the best?

 

My D15B7 was misfiring and didn't make power past 2500 RPM. Ended up being a cooked exhaust valve in the cylinder closest to the timing belt. You might want to go borrow a compression tester from an auto parts store. You might get lucky and be able to ****** the head and lap in a new valve to get it running. All the rest of my cylinders had 180psi so I'm dropping a rebuilt D16A6 head on mine.

 

I already did a compression test a few weeks ago with one of those single test gauges and each equally had 120psi.