Forget The K-Series, You Need A J-Series V-6...Now
In case you're not geek enough to get it, TNG refers to The Next Generation, the successful Star Trek remake. Twenty years after Kirk and Spock had trouble with Tribbles, Picard and Ryker battled the Borg, and the entire franchise was reborn. The analogy is there. Really. Honda land's been slow lately. B swaps are far too common to be cool and the K, when done right, is still too pricey; engines and transmissions together are still $4,000. So what do you do when you want all eyes on you or you're just looking to haul some ass? The old hot-rodders say it best: "There's no replacement for displacement," especially 3.5 liters and 24 valves of six-cylinder, VTEC goodness.
Arizona Performance Imports' (API) Tim Beadle has been working with Honda's J-series V-6 for the past three years. Tim was among the first to install one in a sand rail, which means he was among the first to get one to run outside of the engine's OEM chassis. Of course, if you can get a J-series to work in a fabbed-from-scratch sand rail, then dropping a J35A4 into a '92 Civic should be easy. In part, due to the sand rail business's recent downturn, this is exactly what Tim, a 20-plus-year certified Honda mechanic, did.
It's difficult to talk about Honda engine swaps without mentioning Hasport though. The project began with modified Hasport mounts, which went through several revisions to get the drivetrain to its final positioning. In the end, ground clearance remains the same and, with the exception of the tachometer and speedometer, you'd swear Honda test-fitted this themselves at some point. Of course, that probably never happened, but it doesn't matter. API now offers everything you need for your own trouble-free V-6 engine swap as does Hasport, who offers power steering-compatible kits for Civic and Integra chassis.
The J-Series: Getting The Right One
Honda's current line of V-6s, the J-series, ranges in displacements from 3.0-3.7 liters. Each has VTEC, some have i-VTEC. While none of them offer the horsepower-per-liter characteristics of some of the best B- or K-series engines, the J-series does offer one thing no Honda four-cylinder engine does--torque. And lots of it. To further the case for the V-6, there're simply a ton of them out there. Today, there are 13 different J35 engines and few of them are terribly expensive. Look around; an Odyssey minivan's J35A4 can go for as low as $900. You simply cannot argue with 240 hp combined with Honda reliability for less than a grand. There's bad news though and it has to do with the transmission. API's swap kit currently supports only the manual transmission. An automatic kit is coming since there're far more automatic transmissions out there, despite how weird it may seem at first to go from a manual trans to an automatic one. Nevertheless, dropping an automatic J35A into the wife's sedan is enough to reinvent grocery getting.
And then there's the J30A. It's smaller and doesn't have the displacement or torque of the 3.5-liter engines nor a coil-on-plug ignition. Despite that, there's a 240hp J30A4 that can be found in the '03-'05 Accord, which has the second best power-per-liter ratio of all. Of course, the '09 TL SH-AWD's J37A4 takes the cake here but one of those will likely require you to slang body parts on eBay.
The J32A is another good choice. These can be found in various '99-'07 CL and TL chassis, including the Type S. There're plenty of these out there, with the Type S and newer engines being the next logical steps up. Like the older Accord's J30A1, pre-'00 engines have distributor ignitions. The good news is that the Type S' extra power comes from a different intake manifold, cylinder heads, and camshafts, all of which can swap over to any '98-'02 non-Type S J30A or J32A. The Type S' intake manifold is similar to the GS-R's, Prelude's, and NSX's dual-stage versions but isn't as important as the heads and cams.
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