Hello all.

I have a 99 Honda Accord EX, 2.3L automatic. The engine began leaking oil into the radiator. These engine are known to have what are called porous blocks, and as they get into the higher mileage, some of them begin this oil leak. It's also possible that the head gasket blew, but I don't think that's what happened, there was no smoke coming out the tailpipe, a usual indicator.

In any case, I decided it would be better to simply swap the engine rather that dink with trying to fix a high mileage engine with what I believe to be a pretty serious issue in any regard.

I I also decided if I was going to swap the engine, I would check and see if it was much more to swap the transmission while at it, putting in a much younger , lower mileage trans and engine in the car. It turned out to be just a few hundred more. This made things easier overall to swap all together.

I bought a JDM engine and transmission from a place in Florida, and had it shipped to the door. I finished performing the swap and wanted to give some details for others interested in ever doing this, as I could only find bits and pieces of what to watch out for when doing this.

These engines come from Japan and have between 40k-60k of mileage on them. Mine had 53,000 miles on it. I found this stamped onto the engine from the salvage yard in Japan (mileage when pulled-85,000 kilometers which is about 53,000 miles -it was written in Japanese).

The overall trick is determining what needs to be swapped over from the original engine. And the short answer is...many things. The long answer is what I will give below.

The engine comes with everything attached, alternator, pulleys, wires, plugs, power steering, injection, wiring harness (hacked up). All sensors are left on it from the yard.

However, most of that is going to be junked.

The parts you keep:
Engine block
injection rail and injectors
power steering mount
crank pulley
lower intake
valve cover
transmission only (meaning- no sensors or solenoids should be kept)

Throw away the alternator, it's different in style, mounting position, connectors
Throw away the power steering
You are going to remove most sensors from both engine and transmission. Several are a different connector, produce different signals, or shift the transmission differently.
Throw away the exhaust manifold, it has no O2 sensor bung
throw away the air conditioning bracket, it's different
throw away the alternator bracket it might not fit correctly with your existing alternator.

So most of those extraneous things just throw away.

Drain all fluids before doing anything further: radiator, power steering, oil, trans fluid. Saves a mess you will make later otherwise.
Disconnect the battery, remove it and the tray it sits on.
Remove hood
jack car up and put on stands (I only jacked the front, and chocked the back)

For the engine swap, I started on the drivers side of the car, removing power steering, alternator, motor mount, removed pulley belts.
I then started in the drivers side and began disconnecting all the sensors from the wiring harness. You start from the drivers side so when you get to the passengers side you are going to eventually pull it out and drape it over the passenger fenderwell. If you remove the front motor mount, radiator hoses, ground strap you can then start pulling the wiring harness around. When you get to the distributor area, there are a couple underneath to reach and unplug.
Pause at this point at the top, and change directions to now remove the axles from the transmission. Hardest part is here on nut removal. It's a 36 mm but and you need 181lbs to take off and put on. There's also a dimple that has to be removed so the nut will turn. I used an electric impact gun gotten from Harbor Freight for $99 that was perfect for the job along with a screwdriver jammed in the disc brake to hold it still while I broke it free. They also had the 36mm socket needed for the nut.
Loosen the nut but don't remove yet. Take off the brakes, disc, loosen strut, then take off axle nut. Climb under, take pry bar, pop it quick to get the axle loose, then remove axle.

Once done with that, you have freed a lot of space to then crawl under the car to the back of the engine. Here you will find two hoses for coolant that must be removed, along with the knock sensor, power steering sensor, and one other (oil pressure?) sensor that must also be removed. This is much easier with the axles out of the way, but you can do it with them there, you will just be cramped.

Looking way up, you can see the upper intake. There are two hoses there to remove, a vacuum hose and a coolant hose. I personally think this is the best position to remove them rather than from up top.

With those removed, go back up top, and finish remove the rest of the sensors. Once that's done you can "unwind" the wiring harness starting from the drivers side, pulling it across the front of the engine. You should be able to carefully pull it under the distributor and then get the rest of it from the intake manifold area and off to the side. Some people like to pull the distributor, but I saw no reason, it definitely comes out pretty easily without doing that.

Now, you need to remove the upper intake manifold. Start by unhooking the throttle cables, and tying them off on the drivers side so they are out of the way.

The upper intake will be reused, so pull it off carefully. before you pull it away, now unbolt the fuel line to the fuel rail. You will use a very large wrench to detach it, about 3/4 of an inch or 7/8 inch open ended wrench. There is also a smaller item to remove there for fuel that is two 10 mm bolts. Have a sandwich bag ready to insert the line ends into and tape them up or you will have the fuel smell annoying you and filling up the garage. I also opened the gas cap before doing this to reduce pressure on the lines, otherwise I think it might spray a bit. I then taped up those bags to keep the smell at bay and not drip fuel.

Now you can remove the intake.

At this point, I now would recommend bringing over your engine hoist and start connecting it to hold the engine as the next steps completely loosen the engine from the car.

Once the engine is connected to the hoist, you can remove the motor mount on the passenger side. You will want to completely remove the motor mount and bracket to clear space here.

The engine at this point might start moving and rolling forward because the only thing holding it is the back motor mount, so shore up and make sure you really have the engine and transmission chained up well.

At this point, reach back behind the engine, and undo the bolt holding the motor mount to the engine.

You should now be able to pull the engine up.

In my case, I didn't want to deal with an open air conditioner, so I had loosened the air conditioner and wire tied it out of the way. This means once the engine comes loose, you will need to get the engine over the top of the back motor mount and move it towards the front of the car a few inches.
Next, you will need to tip the engine so the drivers side is much higher than the passenger side. I used a load leveler, so this was easy for me, I just cranked it over to one side, the engine tilted, and I could get under the air conditioner lines easily.
This also let me then lift the engine high enough so the crank pulley cleared the lower engine bay, and I could then slide over more to the drivers side and lift the entire engine and transmission out. I did slowly have to move several more inches toward the front of the car so the lower intake manifold did not catch on the lip of the windshield area.

Once engine was on the ground, I was able to swap over all the sensors and solenoids, put on the original air conditioner bracket on the block, put the original alternator bracket on the new block.

Picture below to show which areas had sensors brackets that needed to be swapped over. I circled each area.

One area which people might do differently was the crank pulley. I measured the crank pulley, and the second or outer pulley was 4 inches on the original engine and 5inches in diameter on the JDM engine. At first I was going to swap pulleys but I realized it was much easier to switch belts. The original belt for the accessory was a 4k419 belt and I found a 4k425 belt that Honda uses for the 5 inch pulley (it's about an inch longer). This saved me from trying to break that crank nut free, which can be really difficult (250 plus pounds of force I think).


I hope this helps if anyone does this in the future. If there are other details, just ask I can fill them here in this thread.

I did all this with almost no power tools (just the axle nut impact), and with no other assistants, so if I can do it, in my garage, anyone can.

 

While not something I'm ever likely to do, you deserve much credit for your incredibly detailed post and clear, marked photographs that would be invaluable to anyone who may be interested.

Nice work!

 

Thank you. Just wanted to give back to the community. Drove it a few hundred miles already, took it in for emissions inspection and passed with flying colors. Idles and drives perfectly.

 

Good it didn’t throw any cel light.

 

updated: Driven for 6 months, and the only thing I would add to my original thread is that the axles seals should be replaced before putting the engine in. It's the only issue I had, and only on one side, but for $5 it's a fast and easy thing to do. Probably put close to 10,000 miles on it from driving all over. No other issues with the replacement engine.

 

About how many hours would you say that it took you overall?

 

I'm going to take a stab and say about 40 hours total. I wasn't rushing, I definitely spent some time slowly going over things like doublechecking the sensors, doublechecking the bolts were tightened, measuring pieces on each engine to compare, like the crank pulley.

I spent about a week, started on a sat, finished the next weekend, that includes going to get and put together the engine hoist and other tools I was missing like the 36mm socket and the electric impact wrench.

The engine has purred since in, and was obviously tested through this lasst week when I was starting and driving it in 5 degree weather. I've driven it to a few states and back, colorado, new mexico, florida since it's been in, and it's been fine on long treks. The only thing I did end up replacing and it was leaking everywhere was a new power steering rack and power steering pump. Not engine related, but that's all that's misbehaved. Not burning oil at all with it. I've put about another 5,000 miles on it since my previous post.

 

Just realized it was Feb 19, 2020, not this year, that the thread was started! Great job and documentation. Like many others - I wouldn't likely take on such a task - but like to become educated on the process. Having a reference like this can be invaluable for those who will pursue the same project.

Maybe I missed it - but about how many miles on the car when the trouble started?

 

About 170,000 miles on the car when I noticed it. The car drove fine, but it was when I went to change the radiator fluid I saw it had become a chocolate milkshake. Reading up on it, I saw that this was not uncommon in these cars. Not every car has it, but it's unfixable, once the block does this you have to replace it. that's why I wanted a JDM block and from a slightly newer year, in the hopes that 1 - it might never happen again and 2 - if it did, at least I would get another 100,000 miles out of the car before dealing with it again. My hope was that other people would see that it's really not that difficult, just tedious, and they can save that car if they put some effort into it. I helped someone in my neighborhood with their engine swap as well, and we knocked it out in a long weekend since I already knew what to do, plus having two people made it so much faster than doing it alone. Sold the old engine to someone who wanted it for the heads.

 

Oh boy - mine has about 176.000! Started it today and moved it to snowblow some snow around it from earlier this week. I start it once a week and let it get to operating temp. Right now I just have my truck on the road, can't afford both.

Dumb question - is JDM an engine brand or does it mean made in Japan? Searching resulted in JDM engine companies in different locations.

 

Yes, my fault for not typing that out.

Now, just because it has that' mileage doen't mean something will happen, I'm going to say this happens to maybe 10% of the engines (totally made up crazy guess, it's not that unusual, but it's not rampant through all models, just a known possibility during these years).

JDM means it came from Japan, rather than made outside of Japan. Now, some people slang it meaning a japanese item, but that's not accurate. These engines come from Japan and have between 40k-60k of mileage on them. Mine had 53,000 miles on it. I found this stamped onto the engine from the salvage yard in Japan (mileage when pulled-85,000 kilometers which is about 53,000 miles -it was written in Japanese).

People pick JDM items for different reasons. In my case, it's because I wanted an engine from a different plant with the hopes the defect in the engine was even less likely to appear (I could find no cases of a JDM engine failing due to this issue). But some people want JDM items because they are options not necessarily offered in your local country. For example, there might be a JDM bumper or light configuration, a certain kind of seat, side mirrors, and people like that because it looks cool or different from the local cars.

Sometimes it is because there is a more powerful or completely different version of a car that isn't sold here. This is why the Skyline car became so legendary, it was a higher powered vehicle not sold in the US and had to be imported in a special way or one had to wait for the 25 year limit to pass so it could be brought in. It was never sold here in the US.

 

Thanks for the JDM definition. That's great finding an engine for a Gen 6 Honda with low miles like that! I didn't think that was possible. Maybe typically cars are driven less miles in Japan compared to the USA? So now you've got a 22 year old Honda (like mine) with maybe 5 - 6 years worth on the drivetrain given our driving standards, good deal!

I know Honda has been assembling cars here in the USA, I think Marysville Ohio, for years. That's where my 1984 Accord hatchback was built. Are the engines built there as well?

 

I don't know all the years where they were built, I know that sometimes you can look at the VIN and decipher if it was made in US or Japan, but i don't know how to tell with the engines normally. But yes, in Japan emissions are hard, like germany, and so in Japan people trade in after 5-6 years because it will fail something, it's very stringent. The wrecking yards know that they can't use them in Japan but the rest of the world has easier inspections, so they rip them apart and send them here by the thousands, so you can pick them up cheaply and usually with a 90 day warranty. good enough to discover if something is really wrong..

Just look on Ebay and you will see a whole bunch of the JDM wreckers selling them, all with under 55,000 miles:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/JDM-HONDA-A...oAAOSwsYdd6Fnz

The only thing I would add to the above instructions is make sure to change gaskets on the axles, vtec, oil pan, intake manifold for extra precautions against leaks. They have been sitting around a bit, so they can dry out a little. Luckily this is all cheap stuff and easy to do when the car is on the floor out of the car.