O.K. A friend of mine has a 89 Honda Civic EX.It's got a D16A6 with a 5speed tranny .Bone stock with a cat-back system on it ,it does great on mid range and top end but has take off.What's the cheapest and possibly easiest way to achieve better bottom end.I've heard that sometimes you can swap heads but I really don't know how difficult this would be or which head would best fit the engine.Any help would be greatly appeciated.

 

you think that has great mid/top end? I suggest he get another engine, the d16 is lacking one thing he wants... torque.

 

It's great for what it is.I mean it's a 4 door that someone owns that doesn't really race an want to just have fun with the car

 

Well how do you get the torque?I know a little about engines and alot about the rest of cars(susp,audio,exaust,body,and electrical).

 

well the most common way that engines produce torque is by increasing displacement. ie, overboring, stroking, ect....

another common method is by means of forced induction. turbo/supercharging is a great way to get a good amount of torque.
another way is by means of nitrous oxide. i have seen that in some instances a "75 shot" of nitrous may effectively add an approximate increase of 75 horsepower, at the same time add around the neighborhood of 100lbs of torque

of course this all depends on how low in the rpm range that the nitrous in introduced into the engine. the lower the rpm that the no2 is sprayed the higher the torque figure will be. of course you wouldnt want to spray at say 1000rpm. that is surely not good on the stock rods!

on the other hand you can swap out the head for a vtec head. d16y8. this will increase compression thereby adding a small amount of torque. there hope that helped!

 

O.K., I like the head idea.What year and what else is required for this mod.What about a throttle body?and from what?Thank you for the help too..

 

ex huh?

I've owned a 91 dx 4-door; I loved it. Great for carting around the mountain bikes and all the friends. Put a Tenzo cold air intake on it, as well as a 2 1/4 cat back with a hiyama muffler. Had plugs and wires as well. And obviously tires/rims as well.

I now have an 89 lx........stock. Really, really slow in comparison.





You have a ton of choices; you already have the best stock engine tranny combo for that car/year. You can pick up a dohc zc motor for around 400 bucks. Drop it right in and run it off the existing ecu and tranny. Then slowly up grade the ecu and other crap as you get money.

Or you can do little stuff to that motor. CAI, exhaust, header, plugs, wires, coil, yadda yadda yadda. And spend more than 400 bucks for a lesser performance increase than getting the zc motor.

 

also,how hard is it to build a CAI for this car?I personally own a Mitsubishi Eclipse and I can't build one for mine because of the sensor in the intake.Didn't know if honda's were the same way

 

just slap a 200 shot on there, TON-O-TRQ.

 

the head that you want is from the d16y8. 96-00 that way you still use your stock distributor. larger throttle bodies work very well on the d16 engines. you can use an ls throttle body 60mm, or an h22 or h23 throttle body 62mm. you may want to port the intake as well to match the size of the throttle body. i did this on mine