🤔 What's so special about Honda K-series? | TECHNICALLY SPEAKING |

hi there and welcome to another hal tech what's so special about and today we've got the mighty honda k24 here okay so let's start with a little bit of history about honda itself believe it or not honda's founder soy shiro honda actually started out making piston drinks for toyota he then moved to motorcycles in the late sort of 1940s which were actually assembled in a wooden shack the bikes were followed by small pickup trucks in the early 1960s and then the first ever honda production car was the s 500 sports coupe that was in 1963. um why a sports car well it turns out that old hondasane was mad about motorsport in 1954 he decided honda motorcycles would race at the isle of man tt it took him five years to develop the motorcycles and on debut in 1956 honda won the manufacturer's team award in 1961 with motorcycle legend mike halwood on board they won two of the tt races not only that they also won the 250cc and the 125 cc titles in the world motorcycle grand prix season with that success under their belt in 1962 honda decided to aim for formula one a few more years of development and honda was on the podium with a win at the 1956 mexican grand prix honda's been racing in formula 1 and supplying engines on and off throughout the years right through to the present day the highlight of which is probably honda's partnership with mclaren in the late 1980s and early 1990s and the relationship with the late great art and center who was instrumental in the development of the original honda nsx possibly one of my favorite sports cars of all times it's such a unique and beautiful car now it could talk for days about honda's involvement in the japanese super gt series the british touring car championship the world touring car championship indycar of le mans more motorcycle racing than you can poke a kickstarter at but what it all boils down to is that honda has done a huge amount of motorsport and that motorsport experience has led to honda's power plants not only being very efficient but also incredibly well engineered and extremely reliable which brings us to this power plant the honda k series for years the k series has been the favorite swap of front wheel drive hondas fans of golden era 90s hondas have been binning their d f even b series engines in favour of the k series since they hit the scene in sort of the early 2000s there are now entire companies devoted to manufacturing parts for k-swaps into these older hondas and a whole bunch of other model cars the honda k series was first offered in 2001 in the hot hatch type r trims of the civic and integra and is still today offered in di form of several honda and akura models nearly a 20-year lifespan means that there's plenty of variance of this engine to choose from and it's now done 20 years of engine development from the early 2000s right up to today the most popular models for swaps and performance applications are the early k20 engines from the 2001-ish to 2006 ep3 civic and dc-5 integra and the k-24 engines from the 2002-ish to 2008-ish honda accord and acura tsx these are my personal favorite often pushed as the best performing package is a hybrid combination of both with the high flowing k20 head and the larger dis medicine k24 bottom end in recent years rear-wheel drive k-swap markets absolutely exploded with several after-market manufacturers producing rear-wheel drive gearbox adapters conversion parts and even full kits to swap the k series into honda s2000 mazda mx-5 mazda rx-7 and even the nissan s and some r chassis [Music] with pieces and parts from these manufacturers and a little fabrication knowledge it is possible to put honda's incredible four-cylinder into virtually any chassis that you prefer within this segment the k24 from the 2009 to 2014 accord tsx is also extremely popular due to its massive supply it's low cost and advantageous exhaust packaging with the exhaust manifold runners being cast right into the cylinder head the honda k-series engine has enjoyed continued success in motorsports from drag racing to time attack wheel-to-wheel circuit racing and even european autocross when used in drag racing the k-series does have a torque advantage over the older honda designs and the rules are actually set up in a way that allow advantages to the older b and h-series engines to even the playing field a little bit the fastest all-motor k-series races are all in the eights now in the quarter mile and the turbo cars are pushing deep into the sevens these cars are getting so fast that racers are now employing all-wheel drive conversions to try and go even faster time attack racers like james horton and rob newen rely on high horsepower k series to set records on tracks all across the world a detuned k series is the winning formula in power-to-weight racing series like gridlive's touring cup where over half of the top contenders are k-series powered in european autocross legendary racers like marcus thomas use a 2.7 liter stroked version of the k-series and this thing propels his buggy to numerous wins and championships [Music] haltech elite ecu's support the factory trigger patterns for all of the variants of the k20a k24a k20z and k24z additionally all forms of ivtec are supported including single or dual cam control and the electronic lift control your ecu choice depends upon the features of your specific engine engines with variable intake cam and without drive by wire in non-motorsport applications might opt for something like our elite 1000 but most applications benefit from the added 4d or 4-dimensional tuning flexibility of the elite 1500 applications with drive-by-wire or dual variable cam control will require the elite 1500 series ecu for early model k20 and k24 engines with harnesses that suit either honda ep3 civic or dc5 integra or rsx haltech offers pro plug-in ecu's and plug-and-play adapter harness that'll suit our system here like the elite 1500 so that's a style of ecu that typically would be getting used on basically all of the k series we make this adapter harness that goes into sort of ep3 or dc5 factory wiring harness then all we have is our simple little adapter harness here that just plugs straight in we snap that in there that in there that in there we plug our haltech ecu into the other end one two factory harness plugs into here and we're ready to tune with few common flaws a standard compression check is just about all that's really needed to ensure a healthy engine's chosen for your project if you've got the time or resources to inspect an engine before purchase it's worth pulling off the valve cover and having a quick look at the valve and camshafts you can tell if the thing's been really looked after or not what you're looking for here is like a oil sludge buildup or heavy oil varnishing this could be evidence of a lack of routine maintenance and may result in premature camshaft or bearing wear and let's be honest most of these things are in family commuters that have done a couple of hundred thousand miles or kilometers and are probably getting serviced you know they're supposed to be every ten thousand fifteen thousand kilometers and then you know people are pushing them out to twenty twenty five thousand kilometers so just be very wary of that [Music] on to the main event the k series at first glance honda's k-series doesn't appear to be worth any high-performance merit just another pedestrian four-cylinder mill known for excellent fuel economy from the factory it's a bit boring it doesn't have a turbo and it's got a pretty modest rev limiter what's not immediately evident is the platform's potential it's a robust all-aluminium double overhead cam engine outfitted with a coil on plug ignition system roller rockers a forged crankshaft cast iron sleeves and hondra's elegant eye vtec which includes electronic lift control and variable timing control simple and ingenious in design honda's electronic lift control allows one single camshaft to have essentially two profiles the low profile provides excellent fuel economy in cruising situations and a more aggressive high cam profile allows greater airflow and top end performance the sound of the crossover from low to high cam is something honda's absolutely famous for you get that honk when it comes onto the second camshaft new for the honda 4-cylinder in 2001 the k-series had variable timing control via hydraulically adjustable cam gears this complement of technologies that allowed both economy and performance was dubbed iv tech as the next generation of honda's revered vtec system k-series tuners have expanded the horsepower out of these engines by outfitting turbochargers superchargers and even nitrous completely stock long blocks which is what this thing is holds upwards of nearly 400 horsepower at the wheels swap out pistons and rods and the stock crank and sleeves can handle 700 horsepower fully built engines can achieve impressive horsepower numbers cresting over the four digit mark well we've spoken about this thing enough it's time to get down and dirty let's strip it down and see what's inside just to note i have spent the day already disassembling this thing cleaning so much oil out of it so i don't destroy the studio here it's been reassembled so just keep that in mind that i've done that so that we can get through the video nice and quick and don't bore you to death [Music] all right well all we're going to do is we're going to start at the top we're going to work our way down so we'll pull the rocker cover off we'll have a look at the valve gear inside then we'll just start going through and we'll get right down to the bottom and today we might even try and pull some pistons out [Music] well that's where all the efficiency is cylinder head these cam shafts and what's so special about them is they've got one lobe per valve it's got 16 valves because it's got eight valves for the intake and it's got eight valves for the exhaust side twin camshaft the camshafts are driven by a timing chain this thing has continuously variable intake cam control and then we've got our vtec lift solenoid on the side here what's absolutely amazing about this thing like i was saying before is how essentially it does have two different cam profiles when this solenoid on the side here allows oil pressure through there's a whole bunch of little locking pins that we're going to get to here that allow basically a different cam profile to be activated and you get that that vtec honk in aspirated form the thing on the low camshaft will say let's make say about 110 kilowatts at the wheel somewhere around there as soon as we engage that high camshaft the thing will make about 145 kilowatts at the wheels so to put that in perspective that's a huge power gain on an aspirated engine [Music] this is pretty special and this is a part of the honda that i just think is absolutely incredible so full roller rocker set up as a factory car that makes like i said 130 kilowatts 140 kilowatts of the wheels that is going to go in all types of family sedans the engineers absolutely outdid themselves these engines amazing the things that were really nice about it are the caps for the camshaft the same single cap holds the inlet and exhaust camshaft together so there's less components in total to hold the camshafts in less bolts but it holds the whole thing much more solid because it's one part that's bracing the top of the engine really really nice all right so what we were talking about here with the two different cam profiles is that we've got the little driving around town cam profile here and then we've got the big high rpm high power cam profile here the magic inside the honda engine is how we use oil pressure and an electronic solenoid to be able to switch back and forward between cam profiles on the fly so let me give this an option let me give this a go trying to explain how this part works so we actually don't have oil pressure in the engine obviously that's going to be a problem for me explaining how this piston shoots out but i'll do my best to explain it so i'm just going to pick one cylinder here to explain it on a single cylinder so this is cylinder 1 cylinder 2 cylinder 3 cylinder 4 intake side intake and exhaust work in exactly the same way what normally happens here is our camshaft is pushing on our rollers here and normally i'm just gonna leave those two this is what's going on the camshaft is pushing up and down on our rollers which are in turn pushing up and down on our two intake valves you can see there that i can move them independent of this middle one which not many cars have this one's actually doing nothing when we're cruising around town all it's doing is just chilling out it's going up and down on the large cam profile but it's not actuating any valves now watch this i'm going to pull this little bit apart so at the moment you can see that everything's working independently if i pop this one up if we can see just on the inside here there's this little piston that's sitting on the inside here if we applied oil pressure to the engine and we activate the vtec solenoid this little piston is going to spit out in this direction when it spits out in that direction i'm just going to pull this piston out and see that on this rocker arm we've got a little piston that's spring actuated here can you see that so what would happen is when we apply a pressure across through this piston this piston in turn locks this rocker arm and this rocker arm together when the piston shoots out of this one this piston in the middle shoots across here in turn locking into this arm so i'll manually do that now that goes into there that goes into there that goes into there and what we end up with is here we go we'll move that one you can see now these two are locked together if we had oil pressure here pushing this piston out this third arm would also be locked together so then these three would be working in unison i might pop that out and this might be a better way to show it these three would now be working together and working off the center or off the high lift part of the camshaft now that we're past the magic of the variable valve lift system remembering that we also have this is the exhaust side let me put the intake side here we've also got the continuously variable cam control as well so this is the one that can advance or the intake cam i think a lot of factory cases about 30 degrees you can adjust these to get up to 50 degrees of intake camshaft movement the way that works is we pulse this solenoid here we let oil in to advance it we pull oil out to it and we hold it at a certain position in order to lock the cam in place so if we wanted to say advance the inlet cam for example we would let open the solenoid to let's say 60 of its available flow we would monitor the cam angle until it advances to the right position then we would come back to what we call a lock position or a steady state position on that solenoid where we might apply say 50 of its available flow which will lock that cam in position so it can't advance or if we then want to the camshaft we might want to operate this valve at say 40 of its maximum flow the camshaft will then we'll come back to our 50 lock state and lock it at the next position we map this cam angle against all rpm all throttle position or manifold pressures so every time that you're driving your car this continuously variable camshaft is doing exactly that it is continuously moving around in order to make the most power across the entire rev range so think about that in the old school style engine where you had your vernier cam gear so you put the thing on the dyno you had a bunch of allen keys in the front of the cam gear you'd give it a run see what power it made then you would talk to your tuner and say all right well it's making a lot of top end power i can sacrifice some of that top end because i want to get more bottom end so you would mechanically move the camshaft a few degrees give it another run it would lose some top end but you'd pick up some bottom end then you'd talk to the tuner and decide on okay where do i drive the car which cam angle best suits me and how do i want to lock it up so that was how we used to do it and we used to have to make sacrifices when it's continuously variable just tune for the most power everywhere [Music] all right the next task is a pretty straightforward one we'll just pull the 10mm off the side here and pull the v-tech solenoid off so this one on the side here is the one that's responsible for the oil flow to do the cam switching the one on the front here is responsible for the oil flow to do the variable continuously variable cam control i'll zap this one off i understand that this one does have problems every now and then where if you don't change the oil enough this thing has got some filter baskets down the bottom here which do fill up with junk so it might be worth just popping that off having a bit of a look clean it up and then slap it back on if you've got any cam control switching problems [Music] this is where the timing chain tensioner is so this is a hydraulically assisted tensioner basically when you put a chain on you've got a little sort of hole in here that you put a pin into after you've pulled back that tensioner set everything up pull the pin the time the charming chain goes tight and away you go so nice to have a little inspection plate there this is the crank sensor itself so this is a hall effect crank sensor so it's got a power supply a ground supply and a signal wire that comes out it measures a tone wheel that's mounted on the actual crankshaft itself here we go that's what the sensor looks like so it's just got a three pin connector it faces down like this looking directly at the crankshaft and when we get the bottom out we'll be able to see how many teeth are on the crankshaft and the pattern that's there the crank pulley if you've seen any of the other videos these ones always get me today this crank pulley got me as well uh one thing to note is that honda do it a little bit of a different way where there's a special tool that actually holds the outer of the harmonic dampener here and then you can use a rattle gun on the inner to try and get the bolt out we had all sorts of fun with that so dampener off a woodruff key so the woodruff key sits in the crankshaft and then locates in the balancer to stop it spinning the grooves on this are really interesting because it locates onto the crankshaft with the woodruff key but it's got a whole bunch of grooves here there's no receiver grooves on the crankshaft so these grooves are here simply to make it easy to get this on and off on other brands of engines they don't have any sort of notchings or anything like that on the inside of the balancer making it so that you've got two metal surfaces jammed together makes it almost impossible to get balances off sometimes so i really appreciate that i think it's a really nice idea so there we go so that is the cam solenoid that's controlling the oil to the inlet cam gear so basically as this plunger moves forward and backwards it allows oil through these filters to either fill the cam solenoid empty the cam solenoid or hold it a steady state that's another one that's got a whole bunch of filter baskets across the front of it as well so if you do get a high k wrecker engine might be worth pulling that out and giving it a bit of a clean before you start tuning it timing chain comes down through to really nice really long tensioners and guides that hold everything in place and make it so there's no rattles very rarely have timing chain problems in these things down the bottom here where we were talking about our crank sensor before so the crank sensor was coming in through the side here of the timing cover case and it's looking at this tone wheel here and that's what it looks like so when they talk about your crank trigger or your cam trigger on your engine how many teeth it's got well we can count it here so this thing has got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve and a little extra tooth sitting there and that's what the honda k24 trigger type is the sensor sits like this as the teeth go around it counts all of the teeth it's a really nice crank trigger for a factory engine so beautiful keep in mind this engine is going for a rebuild so most of this stuff is going to get binned so that's why i'm being sort of pretty uh pretty rough with most of it all right and that's about all we've got time for no no i'm just kidding i'm sure that you've got this far you want to see the bottom of it you want to see the crankshaft come out all right well first thing we better do is take that cylinder head off nice long head bolts i did notice that it had a set of aftermarket cam shafts in it it has got titanium retainers in the springs as well so there must be something going on so the inlet manifold would normally be sitting on here this particular engine looks like it's had a little bit of porting work done on there so that the air is flowing in a little bit nicer if we get the camera right in here we can actually see which is pretty cool that the tract going in where the air is going in little bit in the top where the injector is actually sitting to spray the fuel in and then the back of the inlet valves right there so you can see that the way that air is going into the engine i understand it's not fully indicative of the whole airflow modeling of the thing but just looking at it and seeing how close and the shape of everything is really really nice so we can see here four cylinder it's got cast sleeves like we were talking about it's of an almost open deck style design so there's plenty of cooling um let's flip it over we'll pull the sump off and then start to get to business on the crankshaft end so inside the sump there there's some very basic no baffling no anything at all just a place to hold the oil because [Music] this is something that when we pull this i i was shocked to see this this is cool this is the oil pump assembly this whole thing so it's not something that's tiny that just sits in the front of the the timing cover case and it's not direct driven off the nose of the crankshaft it's actually got its own little drive chain it's own little set of tensioners so there's the drive gear for our oil pump oil pump chain this is our actual crank sprocket so it was one of these are driving the cam gears the other one is the oil pump so you can understand now why the sump doesn't have too much baffling in it it's almost as if the pump assembly itself has got the baffling internal it's a really really nice design i'll roll this over a little bit so we can have a look inside i'm going to spin that so that's as if we're spinning the pump around it's an amazing thing a really really nice system admittedly i probably wouldn't want anything wrong going wrong with it but in saying that the engines are so affordable that if something ever did go wrong with something like this you wouldn't get that too deep into it you'd be into another record engine and away you go what you'll notice here is there's no individual main caps for the crankshaft this is another thing that i'm just envious of i think it's a really really nice system where the main caps a whole bunch of bolts and then it basically braces the bottom of the block so this is one of the conversions like a lot of the rb guys are now doing these sort of bottom end brace systems factory honda come on look at that wow it's it's solid and yeah amazing absolutely amazing [Music] so if you're going to be building one of these things rods and pistons are probably the first thing you'd be looking at um the rods physically certainly don't look massive at all they do handle a beating so they've obviously got something down with the design and the shape of them but rods and pistons that's probably the first thing that's going to fail when you start to be pushing a good power out of this thing um you know what just before i take the crankshaft out if you ever get told that you need a remain in your car's leaking this is the rear main so this is an oil seal that's on the back of the engine it sits around the crankshaft and goes into the actual engine block itself and stops the oil from getting from the inside to the outside so doing a rear main seal if your engine's in this condition it's pretty easy you just grab one and slap a new one on and job done if it's getting done in your car slightly more painful but anyway that's what a rear main seal is [Music] now that we've got the crankshaft out have a look in the block there's not too much going on the castings are absolutely beautiful so for other engines where you'd spend a whole bunch of time grinding to make everything smooth to get all your nice oil returns and stuff not the case you look inside it's neat it's clean it's got oil squirters on the bottom of the pistons just looks functional and just works it's as a performance enthusiast this is kind of what you would expect an engine to look like inside coming over to the crankshaft again not much you can say the thing's a beast um they don't have problems they don't break they don't break at cylinder number four so that you end up with you know the crankshaft spinning independent of the flywheel it's got a great oiling system that's not dependent on the nose of the crankshaft so it doesn't put a huge amount of load on the front even on this thing you can see very little balancing marks 10 out of 10 guys this thing is um i didn't expect to enjoy pulling this engine apart as much as i did and every time i pulled a new part out of it i thought oh wow makes sense to do it like that and i can completely understand why this thing has got the reputation that it has absolutely beautiful engine well guys that's as far as we can go today we've stripped the thing down to absolutely nothing there wasn't many uh bad surprises in it for me only good surprises to be honest pulling this thing down today has actually sort of inspired me a little bit and i personally would love to do something with a k series engine in maybe one of our next builds or something like that so i'll um i'll try and wheel and deal with the you know the powers that be to see if we can put a k series in something maybe turbocharge it and see if we can find the limits ourselves so now we've stripped an ls we've stripped a k24 if you guys have got an engine that you want to see me pull apart and put into a box at the end of the day leave it in the comments if you'll get a popular one i'll find the engine i'll strip it down and you can see what's inside as always thanks very much for watching and sticking to the end my name's scott and i'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: Haltech

Views: 597,993

Rating: 4.9423776 out of 5

Keywords: haltech, efi, ecu, motorsport, modified, racecar, tuning fork, what's so special, honda, k-series, k-swap, k-swapped, engine swap, engine teardown, v-tec, engine tech, civic, integra, nsx, ivtec, how vtec works, vtec camshaft, k24 review

Id: nJ3tlKsPfLg

Length: 32min 0sec (1920 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020