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First start on the All Wheel Drive V6 Swap Civic

Firing up the AEM Infinity 6 ECU on the j35a8

Contributed by: Enginebasics.com

            What a project.  The motor is in and all of the accessories have been hooked up.  They are not bolted down or really where half of them need to be at all, but that is not the goal currently.  Currently the goal is to see if the motor will turn over and start after completely redoing all the wiring on the car.  While any motor swap is hard when it comes to wiring, this one is especially difficult.  The reason being that I am actually merging three wiring harnesses together.  The first harness is the 1993 EG civic hatchbacks harness, the second being the 2005 Acura RL harness, and the third being the harness for the AEM Infinity 6 ECU.  DO NOT attempt to wire your own car unless you feel very confident doing minor wiring jobs like troubleshooting electrical problems and wiring up your own injectors.  The infinity harness could have over 60 pins while the factory RL harness was 90+ pins and the civic harness was 40+ pins.  You’re digging through 190+ wires and figuring out what you need and what you don’t.  When looking at the amount of time it took, I would guess the wiring took me something around 60 hours.
            It was now time to try and turn over the motor and fire it up.  Gas lines had been run, and radiator piping had been built so fluids were all ready to go.  The AEM Infinity Tuner software was booted up and the basic engine parameters were keyed in.  I then went and set up all of my inputs and outputs based on how I had pined the ECU.  If you have never tuned a standalone ECU than this might be a task beyond most people’s ability and you should bring the car to a competent tuner.  This was “not my first rodeo” and I find the Infinity Tuner software to be one of the easiest to use.  Most of the set-up is done with “wizards” that just walk you though the basic set-up. 
            With everything keyed in and doubled checked I went for the key.  Honestly I didn’t expect much more than a bunch of backfires to happen, or the vehicle to start and die, or who knows what else.  Usually when you first fire up a car that has had a new brain installed (ECU) it is a mess just to get them going and to idle.  Surprisingly the car actually cranked for a second and fired right up and settled on an idle.  I couldn’t believe it.  Let me just say right now that I have no idea if that was just pure luck or AEM has done an excellent job with the new Infinity ECU’s.  I have not had the opportunity to install another Infinity on another car so at this time I will chalk it up to dumb luck, but how exciting that everything went so well. 
            Before you think this is too good to be true, the car wouldn’t rev and died once it had warmed up.  Also once it was warm I was unable to start the car again since the cranking tables were too high and it was flooding the engine.  BUT REALLY WHO CARES, the thing fired up.  It was a good night and has motivated me to hurry up bolting all the accessories and other things together so that I can actually try and drive the car.  To be clear it is currently not AWD.  At this point in time the rear output shaft is just spinning air and has no driveshaft hooked to it.  Based on the way Acura’s AWD is controlled, this will not cause any damage and is totally fine to drive like this.  The current plan is to drive the car this summer in FWD mode and get all the kinks worked out.  Once the car is driving 100% and all is well then it will be torn back down this winter and the rear of the car cut up to install the rear diff and driveshaft.  I am 90% sure I can get the infinity to control the SH AWD, but we won’t know for certain till we try. 
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