1.8 VVT motor into 1.6 car Advice welcome.
 

Hello all. I just thought I'd share my plans along with a few questions about this swap. I came up with a 40,000 miles 1.8 vvt motor on craigslist locally for 600 bucks with all sensors, wiring from the engine all the way to the battery, full intake manifold, exhaust manifold with downpipe, clutch and flywheel, all hoses, and all solenoids and vacuum lines. The car it's going to is a 1990 1.6 car with a Megasquirt DIYPNP. The idea for the swap is to create the best possible combo with the most powerful engine and the lightest car with plans to eventually go turbo.

I have read through most of the related threads especially Savington's rental thread. I'm going to use the engine wiring from the vvt engine and adapt it to the 1.6 wiring by cutting the car harness right around the windshield washer bottle and adapting the wiring there. I do plan on using the vvtuner to control the vvt. For the exhaust I plan on cutting and welding the flange on my cat and use my current exhaust.

As far as questions I have, is it possible to use the 1.8 rear coolant sensor to run the 1.6 temp gauge? Do I need to run sequential injection, or can I just wire for batch? To use the factory ignition coils, I delete the ignitor and wire them like wasted spark coil on plugs? Do I just use the tach out on the MS to run the tach? Thanks in advance:) By the way, I know I'm crazy for trying to adapt the wiring. Let me be :) Wish me luck.

1. yes, it's the same sensor... at least I though the VVT motor still had that little gauge sender thing.
2. I would. But you shouldn't have to.
3. you'd delete the ignitor, but run them the same way. they just happen to have built in ignitors on the coil pack.
4. or contining running the factory coils/ignitor and not worry about it until you really upgrade to COPs?

1) No, the VVT engine has a different sensor. Drill and tap the heater outlet so that you can attache the original 1.6 coolant gauge sensor.
2) You don't need to, but it sure is better.
3) Yes
4) Yes

The vvt motor has one sensor on the back of the engine with three pins. I was under the impression that one of them ran the gauge, so I was unsure whether or not it functions the same way as the 1.6 single wire sensor.

I would run the factory coils and ignitor but the idea is to keep as much of the vvt engine's wiring and setup in tact for the sake of neatness so the extra work would be worth it for me in that respect. Is there a good way to mount 1.6 coils on a vvt engine? Thanks for the response. :)

zip ties?

Would something have the be tapped? I thought that there was a small plug on the outlet side that was threaded the same way as the 1.6 temp sender... or so I had read.... :) Thanks for the response.

Well to be honest zip ties are not my favorite means of attaching anything to anything....except maybe bumper covers..... I think zip ties would hurt the neatness factor as well..... I more or less like things to look like they were factory....but I'm just weird that way. I could maybe fab a bracket up and weld it to the shock tower maybe....with some long plug wires. But that seems like more work.....lol Thanks for the response. :)

Yes, one of the three pins will work if you connect it to the correct wire for the coolant gauge. I did that and it works for my setup.

Fantastic! Does it seem to work the same way the 1.6 sensor did or does it read a little hotter or colder? I wasn't sure if they worked the same way. Thanks for the response. :)

It seem to work the same as before (NA 1.8 sensors). At about 160 it hovers a little lower than the center.

Oh ok Awesome. Thanks for the response. :)

Also, are you using the individual cam and crank sensors or just the cam angle off an earlier car? Thanks in advance.

The only engine wiring you should have to adapt is for the cam/crank signals and VVT signal. You can simply cut off the stock CAS plug and wire the cam/crank signals into that. Then run the VVT wire back yourself. This should keep the amount of cutting and splicing to a minimum.

I know that's what a lot of people have done, but I'm going to try and use the VVT cam and crank sensors. Thanks for the reply. :)

That is how you hook the NB cam/crank sensors up to the 1.6 harness.

Can you just give us a regular, old fan output? I'm using the boost-control output on my MSpnp1 to run the fan in my 1.6.

If you use the 1.6L wiring harness it is really easy. It might be a lot easier than splicing a whole lot of wires at the firewall. I used the injector harness and a lot of the connector pigtails from the 01. The rest of the wiring was from 1.6L stuff.

Oh, my fault. I misread that.

I found a alen head plug in the rear on the exhaust side by where the rear neck attaches that came out and I screwed the original dash temp sensor in that seems to work fine although I had to extent the single wire a little.
I tried the allen key plugs on the other side and they would not budge.
Please post up details of how you make the stock coil on plug of vvt work with your diypnp I have same car and will be doing this soon.
Also the idle valve will need increase the valve feq (pwm tab under idle/start in TS) or it buzz's and does not work anything over 8 stops the noise I have mine a 10 and I seems fine but I am chasing so many other issues with my swap that I cant say for sure.

Please do not cut and splice the entire harness. The easiest way is to use the existing harness from the car and adapt it where needed. I transferred all the sensors, like coolant etc. over from my old block. You should splice the the Cam and Crank sensors into the CAS wiring. You will also have to splice in the throttle position sensor unless you did that previously. You can de-pin the idle valve connector so there is no cutting and splicing there.

To change over to the Toyota COP's, you will need to open the spark plug holes on the valve cover. To get them tied into the harness on the car you can gut your ignitor unit and wire into it. You can also just de-pin the ignitor unit harness and use an 8 wire plug from the '01 harness, like the fuel system connector, and wire the other side of the connector to the COP's.

How are you going to control the VVT? I am using the VVTuner from DIYAutotune. This will need sensor inputs from the Cam and Crank sensors. I wired all of them from the DIYPNP and used the pass-thru in the VVTuner to bring them back to the DIYPNP.

Please feel free to contact me.

Also, if you need a good start-up map for N/A, let me know and I will send you mine.