Project, 4g Distributor / Ecu ( Obd-1 )

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Originally Posted by A20A1

Awe, did you hurt your hand swap?

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Yep, managed to cut myself the last time I was at the junkyard, ended up with 6 stitches, but it was worth it. :) I got the B181B intake, a OBD1 PR4 ECU with harness, and an intercooler that day.

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Originally Posted by A20A1

I thought someone said they cut and welded the arms/legs...

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Hmm, I will have to look at it some more, the problem I ran into was right here:
http://img398.imageshack.us/img398/5...e0fg0fq.th.jpg
(Circled in red)

The legs really don't bother me as much as the housing of the distributor hitting the place the thermostat bolts up to. Maybe they could each be ground down a little bit for clearance? I will have to take apart the distributor and see how much can be ground down.

The OBD0 Civic/Integra distributors I looked at in the junkyard all touched in the same location too.

heres a question thats somewhat boggled my mind a bit, is there a certain direction the distributor much be pointing? what i meant is, how do i know its pointed in the right direction and everything positioned correctly so itll fire up as soon as i turn the ignition instead of just cranking with nothing else

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Originally Posted by newaccorddriver

..is there a certain direction the distributor much be pointing?...

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That is a very good point. I looked in the dealer manuals, and it looks like the f22 distributor mounts in a totally different way.

Here is the A20 hole pattern: (From A20A1, look at the bracket he is holding)
https://www.3geez.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=3393
(Like a Y)

Here is the F22 pattern
http://img520.imageshack.us/img520/7...zmxk1nde4v.jpg
(Upside down Y)

Now, in theory you could mount the distributor in a non-standard way, and compensate for it in an edited BIN for your ECU, but this would probably be a bad idea. The "limp mode" code on the ECU wouldn't work at all, and I do not know if an ECU could handle that much of an offset for all your timing values.

Looking at the first picture in this thread again:
http://openloopmotorsports.com/distributor.jpg

It looks like they mounted it in the standard position for an F22 engine. This means none of the brackets would line up, and one of them would be in the themostat housing.

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/3...arge1rq.th.jpghttp://img518.imageshack.us/img518/9...arge3nb.th.jpg

The one leg in the thermostat could be cut off. It could even be ground down a bit into the case without hitting the sensors inside. Worst case a little JB weld would be needed to close it back up. Then there is just the mounting:
http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/1...arge9dk.th.jpg

They may have done it this way with short pieces of steel:
(I used thin scraps I had sitting around as an example)
http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/4...arge7ev.th.jpghttp://img518.imageshack.us/img518/5...arge9vp.th.jpg

I would really like to hear from Justanothermike (or someone who has done this before) before I start hacking up my distributor's case.

The second to the last pic, just use some washers or an aluminum spacer between the head and the flat bar of steel.

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Originally Posted by A20A1

The second to the last pic, just use some washers or an aluminum spacer between the head and the flat bar of steel.

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kinda what i had in mind...(or something to that extent)

atleast swap file is making huge progress and taking his time to share his work. im planning on doing this project as well, but since i live in canada(it makes a HUGE difference cause i lack the resources here, atleast junkyard wise), im kinda rendered semi-helpless...

try looking in the other ecm options thread. theres alot of info over there.

I used the link that carot provided for the vss problem and figured out how to make it work on the accord. been like 2 months and no vss cel.

this is a post on I made with pictures fr the obd1 distributor https://www.3geez.com/showpost.php?p=493400&postcount=170

The other thread has alot of useful information, I should have read through it earlier. They fixed the distributor position problem by just redrilling the key:

https://www.3geez.com/showpost.php?p=506657&postcount=213

I guess its time to get out the grinder and JB weld...

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Originally Posted by Swap_File

The other thread has alot of useful information, I should have read through it earlier. They fixed the distributor position problem by just redrilling the key:
https://www.3geez.com/showpost.php?p=506657&postcount=213
I guess its time to get out the grinder and JB weld...

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Redrilling the key is just what I did to get the distributor facing the way it would be in an obd1 car.( with the square part facing up) If you choose to do that then you must first get the car running before you weld the legs on or it might not be in the correct position.

You dont have to do this. You can do it the way justanothermike did it and juust use brackets to attach it but then the square part of the distributor will have to face almost straight down slightly forward in order to get he car to run . In order to get it to face this way you must bend the coolant pipe comin out of the cylinder head just under the distributor down.

I didnt want to bend this pipe plus I wanted it to look as stock as possible. Thats why I decided to frdrill the key and cut and reweld the tabs on the distributor.

i emailed the guy at boomslang and he told me that they have a OBD0->OBD1 harness for the 88-89 accords. i sent him the pin outs for the 86-87 accords, and he told me they were the same. im just curious, are they actually the same?


he also asked me what ecu i was going to run and what engine im going to be using. are these questions really rellevant? i thought all those OBD0->OBD1 harness' were the same, just plug and play into ANY ecu and it should work. atleast thats what justanothermike did. he tried out different ecu's and i doubt he had to change any of the pins on the OBD1 ecu's. can anybody comfirm that for me?

its possible that some of them have vtec for example, and some dont, which would mean possibly one less wire is needed, thats about the only thing i can think of, is the slight inconsistancies from one ecu to another. :)

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Originally Posted by newaccorddriver

i emailed the guy at boomslang and he told me that they have a OBD0->OBD1 harness for the 88-89 accords. i sent him the pin outs for the 86-87 accords, and he told me they were the same. im just curious, are they actually the same?
he also asked me what ecu i was going to run and what engine im going to be using. are these questions really rellevant? i thought all those OBD0->OBD1 harness' were the same, just plug and play into ANY ecu and it should work. atleast thats what justanothermike did. he tried out different ecu's and i doubt he had to change any of the pins on the OBD1 ecu's. can anybody comfirm that for me?

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For the most part the pinouts are the same on obd1 ecu's. Only thing that change is small things like egr solenoid valves and such. One ecu might have it another wont. one engine might be vtec or not. Theres differences between auto and manual trannies too. solenoids for the vacuum lines or evap change from ecu to ecu also




boba beet me to it lol

so what about the 86-87 and the 88-89 pinouts? are those the same?

I started on getting my OBD-1 distributor to fit. I do not want to mess with grinding on my themostat, so I made a notch in the distributor.

Range of motion:
http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/8...arge2hr.th.jpghttp://img212.imageshack.us/img212/8...arge4ym.th.jpg

Space near thermostat Bolt:
http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/2...arge2tl.th.jpg

Pictures of what I removed:
http://img212.imageshack.us/img212/1...arge4hs.th.jpghttp://img212.imageshack.us/img212/1...arge1lg.th.jpg
The hole I made is under a sensor, nothing is normally there.

Now I just need to close up that hole with JB weld, and figure out the best angle to mount everything at so I can weld the mounts back on.

Hmm that's nice work. You could even get it filled with aluminium if you have access to a welder.

I have a welder, but nothing that can do thin aluminum.

All my friends have been telling me how great JB weld is, I am kinda using this project as a trial to see if its will hold up as well as they say.

im just curious, can 2 of the legs hold the distributor on tight enough? im just curious cause im visualizing how i can do it, and i can get 2 of them on by mounting them onto a steel bar or something. im wondering if the third leg holds it on and makes the difference

Well, the carbed 3Gs only HAD two mounting bolts, so I'd say yeah, no problem.

also if i remember right, the accord dizzy is heavier and bulkier than the 4g one, because ours have the vac advance bs on it. the 4g dizzy, while larger, is still lighter than the 3g one. at least in my experience

has anybody tried taking the guts out of a OBD1 dizzy and swapping them to the accord dizzy?

so... has anybody actually finished the OBD1 conversion as of now?(looks over at swap_file)

So you ground down the 4G distributor to get the camshaft notch to allign properly. Then you're going to add in the mounting legs?

What about the 4G distriutor with internal coil converted to external coil... that one has 3 legs on it.

I have not made any big progess on this since I went back to college after winter break.

I did come up with a quick and dirty way of mounting the distributor for testing:
(I was worried about mounting the legs wrong, and having to re-weld it)

http://img66.imageshack.us/img66/994...arge7im.th.jpghttp://img66.imageshack.us/img66/662...arge9pl.th.jpghttp://img66.imageshack.us/img66/117...arge8so.th.jpg

I just need to find a few longer metric bolts, and some metric nuts so that I can lock the bolts in place (like I am showing in the last picture with the large standard bolt).

I would not trust this for extended use because the distributor could vibrate out, but it should work good for testing. It really holds the distributor in tight.

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Originally Posted by A20A1

So you ground down the 4G distributor to get the camshaft notch to allign properly. Then you're going to add in the mounting legs?

What about the 4G distriutor with internal coil converted to external coil... that one has 3 legs on it.

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My basic plan is:

1. Remove the legs, and grind down that spot for the thermostat housing to fit in.

2. Re-drill the key to compensate for the new angle.

3. Temp mount it, and once its working, weld on the lugs.

I was thinking about getting another A20A3 distributor at the junkyard, and attempting to transplant the legs from that to the new distributor. I am not sure if it would be any less work or easier in the long run though.

The biggest problem I have run into is that no distributors seem to clear the thermostat. And even if they did, there is still the problem of mounting it. Most (all?) newer Honda distributors do not have their mounting holes in the same pattern as the A20 (Y versus upside down Y). The A20 also seems to have the bolt holes closer together than most other Hondas I have seen.

Both the internal and external coil F22 distributors mount the same:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eB...tem=8028710087
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eB...tem=8040532562
Check out the pictures
(I used distributor king auctions alot when looking at distributor mounting hole patterns)

I think that some welding or drilling or cutting will end up happening no matter what route is taken.

Hey guys, just had a thought of a possible solution. What if you had a cnc machined "spacer" made that would wedge inbetween the dizzy and the engine. It would have the holes for the normal a20's dizzy mounting so that you could screw bolts into the block like normal. Then it could have three bolts welded into a recessed area of the "spacer" that the f22 dizzy would slide onto and then you would use 3 nuts to tighten it down. Just a thought. Here's a poorly rendered ascii pic.
I=nut O=dizzy |=spacer - = bolt
I--|--I
OO|
I--|--I
If it's needed I can draw one up in paint to get a better picture. Don't know if this helps at all but, I was just wondering if it would work.

That sounds like a good plan, but you would also need to extend the camshaft snout out too, or some kind of cnc spacer to compensate for the space.