I am proud to say that I just bought a '91 hatchback. She's pretty clean little car. 197k and I am the third owner. I got a stack of maintenance records up until the last few thousand miles. During that time an engine swap was done. It's a D16Y7 and what I'm guessing is a junk yard motor that was marked with a sharpie on the timing belt cover at 114k. I pulled the valve cover to take a look at the belt. It doesn't look new but it doesn't have any obvious signs of wear either. If it didn't look like such a pain in the *** to change I'd just do it, but not having worked on this car before I'm not sure what I'm getting into. I see a motor mount in the way first of all.

Does this job involve lifting the motor?

The other issue I see is that the new motor as a couple extra pulleys that aren't being used but make the tolerances between the wheel well really tight. No way to get a wrench on to turn the engine over. It also looks like part of the small pulley on the end was broken off, I'm assuming while the engine was installed. Could this cause premature wear on the main bearings? I'm thinking the rest of the weight of the moving parts should make it a pretty small problem but I dunno...

Any thoughts are appreciated!

 

Timing belts are easy if you don't have a cherry picker you can jack the motor up and get the motor mount out to do the change.

 

good stuff here:
http://hondatech.info/downloads/Auto/Manuals/Civic/