Hello everyone im new to this so please bare with me. I have a 90 civic hb dx with a jdm b16a swap. The wire conversion has already been done by me and it runs when it wants to. My big problem is this when i turn my headlights on the motor will not rev up or accelerate. Meaning when i give it gas it dies out but when the headlights or off its fine. my dash warning lights stay on kinda dim. when i hit the breaklights the temperature gauge raises all the way up and the gas gauge goes down even with the car off! All the lights are very dim with the car off. theres still other little things that happen to off and on. So far i have changed out the entire harness,fuse box, headlight switch, and checked all the grounds. the entire enterior is stripped so everything is easy to get to. I even checked to alternator and the battery seems to be fine. I have yet to be able to drive the car and have had it for 3 months this sucks. Any help will do maybe i didnt think of something you may know about. thanks

 

Brake activation makes the gauges all screwy? That's either an ECU problem or a wiring problem I think. Any way to swap your ECU into another car to check it?

-dave

 

Its possible for me to try my ecu in my friends car so i will try that other than that any other advice a ground im not seeing or something. thanks for the feed back anyways thats cool.

 

There's a ground from the ECU to the t-stat housing that seems to cause a lot of people grief, but what you're describing sounds like it would come from a complete lack of grounds, or bad wiring, or a bad ECU. When you did the swap, you did put all the grounds back where they went in the engine bay, right? Helm books are your friend here.

 

sure did also i just found out that i could be the fuseible link in the engine compartment by the strut tower i didnt know it had built in relays for the lights. whats your opoinion.

 

Not having ever had an issue like yours, I'm not going to make a specific guess about what's wrong. I would advise you to start checking everything you can though.

Grab a multimeter and start checking to see if there's 12V and ground in all the right places. Look for voltage differentials relative to the battery terminals. If something is supposed to be 12V or 0V, and it's more than half a volt off, you've got a suspect. Start at the easy ones, and then start checking harnesses for correct pinouts for power and ground.

Yup, it sucks, but I'm pretty confident that if you can find out where your volts are disappearing to, the ETM will tell you exactly how to fix it.