I Accidentally Blew Up The NB [2-Day VVT Engine Swap]

what's up everybody it's greg peters and today i'm going to talk about one of the stupidest mistakes or as i like to refer to it as one of the biggest learning experiences i've ever been through i blew up the engine in my nb miata by doing something that was completely avoidable and that turned into doing a full vvt engine swap in just two days which i'll also be talking about in this video all that and more right here on the car passion channel [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right i'm gonna cut right to the chase and answer the question that everyone is asking right now and that is where the heck did i get these awesome led signs and those are from my friends at my led neon design and they reached out to me and asked if i'd be interested in checking out their products and i said you know what if you can get me a pair of your signs that match the miatas a green nb and a red n a you're on so here they are they look awesome they include a remote so you can control the brightness depending on like what kind of room you're putting them in they have different mounting options you can run them off a wall outlet or a battery pack they do they have all the different miatas n a through nd they just came out with the hardtop version they also do other cars and custom designs as well so check them out when you're done with this video and if you like them you can save yourself a few bucks by using car passion channel 15 as your coupon code and stylize your room with a couple miatas i wasn't sure how i wanted to go about uploading this video because most people would probably not want to get up in front of an audience and say hey i made a huge mistake and it was really dumb and avoidable i just want to let everybody know but everybody makes mistakes and it's fine and everyone who i told this story to instead of being like oh wow that was really stupid they instead shared a story of their own about how they made a silly mistake that cost them a lot of money or work or both so what i want you guys to do is down in the comments below share your biggest learning experience the most expensive thing or the most labor-intensive thing you've ever caused yourself to have to do so we can all go through and just uh kind of read each other's stories and i think that would be fun to share now i'll warn you in advance that i'm not going to have full production videos on the engine swap the transmission swap the subframe swap and everything because no matter how it seems i'm just a normal person and the green and b is how i get around and i just if i were to film full videos the way i normally do it would have taken at least a month to finish all that but instead i got it done in two days so hopefully that in itself can provide you guys with some motivation to get out in the garage and get back to work on that project that's been sitting for a month or three months or six months just because you feel like it's never gonna get finished so you just don't work on it and one of the biggest things that's helped me in that scenario is just make yourself a checklist and break your project down into much smaller pieces and i promise if you just chip away at it it will get done and you will be out there ripping that car again sooner than you know anyways what the heck did i do to my motor so it all started with this clip right here i have a meeting at my work i have to leave in about 20 minutes so we're put pushing it pushing it down into the wire it's coming down to the wire i don't even know right now i just finished putting the rebuilt head onto the engine it was a monday morning i was rushing to get to work and i changed the oil i buttoned everything up and i left for work and i pulled out of the driveway everything was fine i went down the block and i was like kind of it feels like it's down on power a little bit i wonder if i for like didn't hook something up right or i did a little pull up to like 5000 rpm in first gear and i was like yeah it's definitely down on power so i'm just gonna run back to my house grab the laptop i'll take a couple data logs on the way to work and then i can analyze them later and just kind of figure out what's going on with the tune so turn around i'm on my way back to the house and all of a sudden the motor doesn't want to idle it keeps stalling i'm like man what what could i have forgotten on the you know forgotten to plug in or what could be going on with this thing so get back to my driveway and like really won't want to idle and i can barely get into the driveway and it was at that point that i realized that i drained the oil but i did not refill the oil so i just drove the car two blocks and then two blocks home with no oil in the motor so i just kind of sat there and i was like uh that's not good so i filled the motor with oil and i was like just pretend that didn't happen and i drove it to work and i actually drove the car for a few weeks and it was completely fine until it wasn't and it developed rod knock which i can't say i was really surprised when that happened [Music] but how the heck could i forget to put oil in the car i'm a car guy car guys don't make mistakes like that well we do apparently there were a couple different ways that this happened number one i had the car on jack stands when i was finishing the head replacement and i drained the oil and i was like i'm just gonna drain the oil and change the filter while it's in the air and then i'll put the splash guard back on put the car back on the ground and then i'll fill it up with oil got distracted with something and i just forgot to put oil in the thing and when i fired it up another thing that didn't help is i have a can checked in place of my oil pressure gauge so i have no oil pressure gauge no oil pressure warning light and i don't have oil pressure hooked up to the can checked yet because i've been procrastinating it so no warnings on the dash and the motor fired up and idled and ran completely fine there was not a hint of ticking knocking clattering no weird noises there was nothing to that would cause me to suspect anything was wrong which was extremely surprising to me i guess the oil tolerances on those motors are so tight that when there's no oil pressure it still doesn't knock but anyways i mean it ended up knocking eventually but it's still fired up and ran without making a peep but even after develop rod knock i was thinking to myself this might work out okay because i've got to replace the front subframe anyways which i'll show you why in just a second while the front subframe is out i can drop the oil pan i can find the cylinder that's knocking and i can replace that rod bearing or i can replace all the rod bearings because you can do that with the motor in the car it's not optimal but it's possible and i've even got an extra set of acl race bearings that might be the right size now the nb was in some kind of relatively serious accident before i bought it it's got lots of bondo and some bent things one thing being the front subframe so other than the fact that i couldn't really get it to align that well the problem didn't really surface until i installed the fly and miata kogeki wheels nothing to do with the wheels but just the fact that they were wider than what i had on before and now on the right side of the car the tire would rub the coil over if i would steer about one full steering wheel turn so if i had to make a u-turn i would have to like do a three-point u-turn which looks pretty silly in a miata it's livable but i wanted to get it fixed so i bought a subframe from a car that i knew had not been crashed and i also got a brand new set of upper control arms with ball joints and a set of used lower control arms that i knew were straight and all i had to do at that point was put all the arms together and put the subframe on and hope that the bolt holes line up because my fear was that if the car was in a crash it's possible that the chassis bent and the subframe bent with it and if i put a straight subframe on the bolt holes wouldn't line up but before i could get to that i had to drop the oil pan and see if the engine was fried or not my preferred way to drop the front subframe is by using what's called an engine sling or an engine bridge that just sits on top of the fenders you guys have probably seen it in several of my videos before and it suspends the engine while you can drop out the front subframe and to do that all you do is remove the wheels remove the brake calipers unbolt the hubs from the control arms and then unbolt everything else that connects the car or the engine to the subframe which would be unbolting the steering rack which i left in the car so i didn't have to disconnect the power steering lines unbolt the anti-sway bar the coilover bottom bolts and the motor mount nuts then you have four nuts and two bolts that hold the entire front subframe to the chassis and you can just drop the entire thing out and i just use two floor jacks or you can use a transmission jack to lower the whole front subframe out with the control arms you can see how the upper control arm is square with the subframe and then panning over to the other side the upper control arm is twisted clockwise and that's what was causing the coilover to almost contact the arm and while i have this clip pulled up i'll go ahead and fast forward to after i completed the subframe swap to show you how perfectly centered the coilover is in that upper arm and that's exactly how it should look to make sure that i'm being safe if i'm working underneath the engine and it's just supported by the engine sling i always put two jack stands at different points underneath the transmission so if the engine sling were to fail if you know the hook were to break or anything like that the jack stands will support the weight of the drivetrain and it's not going to fall on you which is not good don't just trust the engine sling by itself to hold the motor up once the subframe is out the oil pan is really easy to take off it's surrounded by a bunch of 10 millimeter bolts including two really long ones at the back of the pan and then you have to remove the four lower transmission bolts once those are out the pan will come off it's gonna be pretty stuck because it's they use sealant from factory from mazda so you'll want to pry it between the block and the pan to get it off but once it kind of pops loose the pan will just drop out and make sure you got to shimmy a little bit so you're not pulling on the oil pickup because you don't want to bend that tube but yeah the pan just drops out that's it so how exactly do you tell which cylinder has rod knock well you rotate the engine until if you have a four cylinder two of the connecting rods will be at the very bottom position and you just grab onto it with your hand and try to move it back and forth and although from factory there is a clearance there it's so tight that you're not going to be able to visibly see the connecting rod moving against the crankshaft now a cylinder that has rod knock you will be able to move it with your hand and see that movement which you can see in this clip right here [Music] [Music] and don't be thrown off if you can move the connecting rod front to back that play is completely normal that's just the thrust play it doesn't have to be super tight and that's not that's not rodnock it's the back and forth motion or what makes the sound is the up and down motion when the engine's actually running that you're looking for so it only had one cylinder that was knocking that's number two and i decided to pull the rod cap off and no surprise that the bearing is completely fried but the crank actually looked totally fine which is a good sign so i'm thinking at this point i might be able to just put new rod bearings in this thing and i'll be okay i took a brand new pair of acl standard size rod bearings and i installed them with a piece of plastic gauge which is like this little wax string that you install with the bearing and you torque down the rod cap or the main cap whatever bearing you're checking and then when you pull it off you will have squished that little wax string and you use the little ruler that the plastic gauge comes with and you match it up with that squished wax and you can tell what the bearing clearance is and the clearance in this case came right out to 20 10 000 which is completely perfect so i'm still getting pretty excited the bearings are the right size and i might be able to get away with just replacing those but i still have to check the main bearings which i don't have spares of but i could get those hopefully i mean there's like a global bearing shortage right now but i can still find them and technically you can replace the main bearings with the engine in the car with just the pan off it's definitely not the recommended way to do it at all but at this point i was completely willing to risk losing a set of bearings rather than having to pull and rebuild the entire engine so i pulled off the number three main cap and the bearing was not only completely fried with metal like oozing out of the side of it like when the t-1000 got hit with the grenade launcher [Music] but the crankshaft was also very scored and at that point if the crankshaft is actually damaged and you put a new set of bearings in it it's pretty likely that you're just gonna fry that new set of bearings very quickly it's happened to a few of my friends before i just knew the motor was basically done at that point so after laying on the concrete and just kind of staring at the car for a while i went inside played video games for a half an hour and then just proceeded to lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling for a while thinking about what i had done but then realized that the car's not going to fix itself so it was at that point that it was really time to get to work so where did this vvt engine even come from so about a year ago or so i was looking for a six-speed transmission which i would eventually put into the nb and i found one for sale from a gentleman named ricky who's with the throttle youtube channel shout out to ricky he was selling the six speed from his miata he also had the vvt engine that came attached to that transmission and he's like hey do you just want to take this engine for free also i don't really have a use for it and it doesn't start or it didn't start when it was pulled out of the car and what happened is it did run and then it was in his miata cart so it was like very the engine's very exposed and the car somehow fell off a trailer it landed on the crank nose and then it wouldn't start anymore and then the engine and transmission was pulled out to put some other ludicrous engine into that car the you can see damage from here the ac condition got pushed up this is the radial that's completely broken off and ended up hitting the crank pulley and now it doesn't start and my prediction is that the crankshaft is done ah so i think this thing is done i'm not going to rebuild the this engine if if i do something we're going to end up doing an engine swap on it and i assumed that probably what happened is the trigger wheel got bent and the crank sensor wasn't picking it up anymore but i didn't know for sure but nonetheless i figured even if the crankshaft was bent or something i could at least use the vvt head so i took the engine home and i transported it in the red car of course let's recap here i'm about to pull out the engine that is fully fried from my car and replace it with another engine that won't start what could possibly go wrong i did want to minimize the amount of work at this point just by leaving the five speed in the car but obviously i changed my mind on that and i was like you know what i already have this thing all apart might as well put the six speed in with it and then i'll have a six speed with the vvt swap and it'll be epic removing the engine from the car is just a matter of disconnecting everything that attaches the engine to the chassis itself in fact it's very similar to the process that i covered in the head removal video in fact it's almost exactly the same you're removing or disconnecting all the electronics the fuel system a couple grounds i actually unbolted the power steering pump and the ac compressor and just zip tied them out of the way kind of to the side of the engine bay so i wouldn't have to disconnect the power steering lines or the ac lines again trying to just work as quickly as possible and get back to having a running car at maximum speed so i left those systems in the engine bay i left the alternator on the engine because that's just like a plug and i pulled the entire engine out of the car we're up to saturday night now the old engine's out of the car and i have the new vvt engine and the old engine sitting next to each other in the garage and i wanted to swap some parts back and forth before i put the vvt engine into the miata one of the main things was the fuel system and even though this isn't really necessary because nb1 and nb2 fuel system is compatible i knew that the injectors are good in the nb and i also just resealed the injectors so i wanted to use that fresh set on the vvt motor i also of course swapped over the square top intake manifold because friends don't let friends use vtcs manifolds it is by far the worst flowing intake manifold ever put onto a miata from factory and i'm still trying to break 150 wheel horsepower with this engine so of course square top it is i also swapped the ignition system over from the bp4w because no matter how simple it is which i really haven't even looked into it yet i didn't want to mess with changing any wiring at all to run the coil on plug system from the vvt motor i knew that i could just plug in the the nb1 ignition system and that would be completely fine i wouldn't have to mess with anything the only thing that's kind of wonky is the ignition coils are just zip tied to the back of the head because with the vvt feed line you can't just bolt on the ignition coils from an nb1 onto an nv2 motor and then the final thing was just swapping over the crank pulley and the trigger wheel from the motor that came out of the car onto the new motor because again i knew it was good and i also suspected that that's what was causing the no start problem and then the lightweight clutch and flywheel of course i swapped over as well and by the end of the night around midnight on saturday i had the fresh vvt motor ready to drop into the nb sunday morning i started working on the transmission swap bits so i just dropped the five speed out of the nb and if you're doing a five speed to six speed swap in an nb1 or an nb2 it's like the easiest six speed swap to do out of all of the miatas even though putting a six speed into like a 1.6 is very easy if you're doing it in nb it's the easiest you don't have to change any connectors around everything matches up the main things that i did are swap the speed sensor from my five speed into the six speed because the six speed came out of a car that had a 3.9 diff and my car has a 4.3 diff so i wanted to use the 4.3 speed sensor and that makes the speedometer accurate and then i just swapped over the boots from my fresh shifter rebuild so i could have that nice setup with the new trans oh yeah and i also stole the awr motor mounts from the na build to put on the nb motor because the stock motor mounts were just completely exploded so i'll have to get a new set of those for the n a as well but that's no big deal because the n a is still going to be down for a while i have uh quite a bit of work to do to kind of get that car back up to where i'm satisfied with it and it's really ready for its new engine which is i also haven't even started building yet so but anyways that's for future videos now for the first time i decided to put the engine and transmission together on the ground and put the whole thing as one unit into the miata and i know there are a lot of people who are big fans of doing it this way and i will say even though my first time doing it it was very easy to do it definitely helped to have two people bree was able to control the position of the crane while i control the angle of the engine and transmission but once you get it started to snake into the tunnel man that whole thing just just drops right in and you can start getting it hooked up to the ppf and start to get it all straightened up there are a lot of people out there that say even if you're just gonna change your clutch it's easier to pull the whole system out change the clutch with everything out of the car put it together and put it back in i don't know if i necessarily agree with that because there is still quite a bit of work involved with getting everything disconnected and pulling the engine and everything out of the car i probably still prefer to do a clutch only on the ground but it's definitely not that bad to do it all as one unit so at this point i made myself a quick checklist of everything i could think of that the car needed to be 100 completed and road ready and what was on the top of that list at oil let's not forget this time okay so by sunday night everything was 99 ready to go the only real change i needed to make to use the vvt engine was i had to extend the harness for the cam angle sensor because the nb1 engine has the cam angle sensor at the front and it uses the cam gear and in order for the ecu to know what the vvt angle is it has to take the reading off of the camshaft itself because the camshaft position changes in relation to the cam gear so it needs to see actually where the cam is so i built a little crank angle extension harness and man i'm so proud of how that came out it has to be like the best looking piece of harness that i've ever built and i wouldn't have been able to do it so well without the awesome wiring courses from my friends at hp academy so i've been taking a bunch of the wiring courses from hp academy and man i'm learning so much on every video just all about soldering versus crimping and the different types of heat shrink wrap and different wiring gauges and when to use what it's really awesome because wiring in a car is probably the thing that intimidates me the most and i'm the worst at it i'm always wondering like how to properly ground things and where to pull power sources from and what gauge wiring to use and do i solder or use crimp connectors and a lot of times i end up with like a rat's nest of wiring that's sort of just an afterthought and it just gets literally pushed under the rug so you can't see it and i'm like well it works but for how long but i've been making some big improvements to my wiring skill and if you guys want to check out any of hp academy's courses i will link them down below in the description you can use the coupon code carpassion50 to save 50 off of your first purchase at hp academy in my opinion it's always money well spent to be able to better yourself at any hobby you're undertaking this one being building race cars and high performance street cars and you're also supporting the car passion channel at the same time so i greatly appreciate it and now back to the engine swap okay where was i so things that you have to change to put the vvt engine in your car got the harness extension as far as the tune is concerned on a standalone ecu you don't have to touch anything in the tune if you did it the way that i did and there's actually a lot of confusion on swapping engines from different years of miatas 99 of the time it's your best option to leave the wiring harness and the ecu in the car that originally came with that car there's a lot of chatter online about like oh i want to swap my engine but it seems like a nightmare to do a wiring harness swap and yeah i avoid wiring harness swaps at all costs but you really don't need to do that ever even if you're running a stock ecu think about it this way the ecu really doesn't have any idea of what's mechanically going on with the engine it really only reads electronic signals so it doesn't know if the engine's a 1.6 or 1.8 but especially in the case of the stock ecu what it does need to see are all of the sensors it was originally designed to run with so let's use the case of a very popular swap which is putting a bp4w or an nb1 engine into a 1.6 car you can do it with the original wiring harness and the stock 1.6 ecu as long as you're using the 1.6 liter afm the o2 sensor the idle speed control valve the throttle position sensor and you'll even use your 1.6 cass and that way the ecu it just thinks there's a stock engine in the car you can't go too much bigger on the injectors but you can use the nb injectors and then you'll use an nb1 fuel rail and i think something about an na8 fuel pressure regulator but flipped upside down basically you have to run a return type fuel system on the engine but i'm going off on a little bit of a tangent here i just kind of wanted to cover that because there's so much confusion about swapping engines and ecu's and stuff and if you're on a stand alone you definitely keep the wiring harness and the ecu for the year of your chassis the year of the engine doesn't matter you can change sensors and configure things to work properly and if you put a vvt engine in a car that didn't come with it and you use a stock ecu obviously the ecu is not going to be able to control the vvt in fact you won't even hook it up because there's no point but you're not going to be losing any horsepower you're just going to be losing a bunch of mid-range torque but it's still fine in fact i've been running the car without vvt for the last couple weeks and it still has plenty of power up top it's just a little bit lackluster in the mid-range but you can either get something like a vv tuner or go to a standalone later to get that all figured out okay back on topic let's fire up or at least attempt to fire up this vvt engine swap for the first time oh boy right i got all my engine related things checked off including putting oil in the motor i don't know why i'm nervous right now there's really no reason this engine shouldn't run it did come out of a car that ran but then didn't run but i put all the systems from the bp4w on it including the injectors all as much harness stuff as i could no red flags man even the ignition system from the bp4w so everything should fire up everything is all go except for the ebt is not hooked up obviously what the heck let's give it a fire and see what happens okay [Music] um [Music] so i have a running car again in fact i went from having a running ish car on friday when i started the subframe swap to having a running car on monday morning and i'm pretty gosh dang proud of that also shout out again to ricky with throttle for giving me his engine for free i would venture to say that the car is actually running better than it ever has but we're gonna find out when i get to the dyno driving impressions the very first thing i notice is the gearing is incredibly short i've actually never driven a miata with a 6 speed and a 4.3 and man it is crazy short but i'd say for anything that's naturally aspirated and under maybe 180 horsepower so it's perfect it's really easy to keep the engine in the power band and it's just generally fun well power band it's you know it's a miata so you know how that goes but you get the point it is however not good for road trips or long highway cruises i think at 75 miles an hour i'm at 42 4300 rpm so that bad boy's buzzing but that's not what i own the car for it's designed to just be a fun car kind of like the red car i guess but a very very slow version of that as far as power the new motor does feel a little bit soft i did a virtual dyno and it showed 128 wheel horsepower compared to the bp4w that when it was healthy showed 136 but i did pull a bunch of timing out of the timing map so i'm sure that's it the vbt engines do have a little bit more compression they're 10 to 1 compared to 9.5 to 1 and i didn't want to run like the full on timing tune timing map that i had on the old motor so just pulled a bunch of timing out of it and also doesn't have vvt yet which isn't gonna affect peak power but it will certainly affect the mid-range and i'll be covering some stuff about vvt tuning and what kind of gains you can see with them without vvt once i actually get the car on the dyno again so that's my update i hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned something if you have any questions about the stuff that i talked about in this video drop them in the comments below or tell me your story about how you accidentally messed up something on your car i'd love to hear some stories from you guys as far as the nb is concerned i'm just going to continue it as i normally would have i'm still going to try to break that 150 wheel horsepower barrier with just bolt-ons and tuning i'm still gonna install the nitrous system on the stock motor as i was planning on doing and we're just gonna continue on so i hope you guys have a great day thanks for checking in and watching this video and i will see you guys in the next one peace out [Music] my i'm going fast again

Channel: TheCarPassionChannel

Views: 27,843

Keywords: miata, mx5, nitrous, nb, mazda, vvt swap, miata vvt swap

Id: DMFNT1GO7jg

Length: 30min 43sec (1843 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 27 2022