Wiseco recently released a shelf piston in 12.4:1 Compression Ratio for the K20A motors.  This was previously sorely lacking in their 2008 and 2009 catalogs.  A high compression piston for K20A motor was almost solely dominated by CP Pistons as they were very early adopters in this category.

I have always been a fan of Wiseco Pistons as I find them to be consistently superior in quality and value.  Most of their offerings come in lightweight guises and also has the skirt coated.  Many other companies tend to charge extra for that.

What we have here are all shelf pistons from the various companies.  They are in the same bore size (86mm) and for stock K20A motors.

Left: CP Piston X-forging.  Weighs 295 gram.  Advertised 12.5:1 Compression Ratio.  Skirt uncoated.

Middle: Wiseco Piston.  Weighs 320 gram.  Advertised 12.4:1 Compression Ratio.  Skirt coated.

Right: Stock PRC Piston.  Weighs 336 gram.  Factory 11.5:1 Compression Ratio.  Skirt coated.

All opinions are just based on visual inspection on these.

Firstly, lets take a look the obvious difference in the pistons.

• Wiseco looks to have the highest dome.

Although these have the highest dome, but only an advertised compression ratio of only 12.4:1.  It could be that the dome volume is being negated by bigger valve pockets and thus sacrificing a little compression ratio.

• Wiseco and stock pistons has the skirt coated.

This would aid in reducing friction and making for a more efficient engine.  This can even lead to improved fuel economy.

• Wiseco pistons offers anti-detonation grooves on top ring lands.

The stock piston also has the same anti-detonation grooves, but they are very shallow and finely cut and does not show up very well in the pictures.  CP pistons however do not have any of the anti-detonation grooves present in their design.

• CP pistons weighs the least.

The mass on the CP piston is very evident.  Just by holding different pistons in both hands, you can already tell that the CP piston is the lightest of the lot.

• Wiseco has the deepest valve reliefs.

Upon measuring with my trusty vernier caliper, I can safely deduce that the Wiseco piston will accept higher lift camshafts with significantly less problems compared to the stock piston.  In comparison to the CP piston, it is marginally deeper, but at this stage where we are getting aftermarket camshafts bordering 14 mm of lift, every little bit of additional clearance adds up.

• CP piston has 2 sharp edges along top ring land

Both the CP and Wiseco piston are machined to accept the largest possible intake valve, and as such part of the top ring land is being machined into.  Running my fingers along the edge, I realize that the machining process CP piston did for their edges does not have “finishing” work done to deburr it.  I would sand it down a little bit more if I were to put it into any engines.

• CP piston under piston area more weight savings

There are more hollows in the forging that the CP piston uses; thus saving weight.  It looks like CP piston used a special custom forging for this piston in order to achieve its superior weight.

• Wiseco has thicker top ring lands

The Wiseco piston measures a thicker ring land of 7.4mm vs the CP piston’s 5.2 mm.  This thicker ring land should give little more insurance in abusive racing environments.  The stock piston ring land measures 6.5 mm.

PS: In all pictures, Left-most piston is CP, Center is Wiseco and the Right-most is Stock PRC.

Now, lets compare between wrist pins, Left is CP and Right is Wiseco.

Both of the wrist pins weigh the same; 72 grams.  The stock one is 90 grams.  I do however realize that the Wiseco wrist pin has a taper on both outsides in its bid to keep the weight to the minimum.

Hope the data discussed here is of some use to anyone who are wanting to choose between these pistons.

My job was to get my ass there and tune as many cars as possible in 1 Saturday.Prior to that, we had already organized all the cars, and made sure that the cars were all in tip top condition and ready for a tune.  It would be pointless to have to go there only to do troubleshooting which is time consuming and counter-productive.

I got there on a Friday night, and was promptly picked up by my host and brought to a hotel.  Come Saturday morning,  it was off to the workshop with the dyno to get some cars tuned.

Upon arrival, I was greeted by some cars that were really out of tune.  Some cars had a stumbling idle, struggling rev counters, and hesitation all through the rev range were just some of the scenarios we encountered.

I briefly  had a chat with 1 of the owners, and he was mentioning that he had the turbo kit on the car for about 8 months, but has not boosted it yet as he knew it was not tuned.  My goodness, that was really some discipline… I know for sure, if it were me, I would probably have put pedal to the metal and also perhaps been greeted by some unwelcomed engine noise accompanied from the untuned engine.

Here are some pictures of the cars that we did… I guess we did pretty well, started at 11AM and managed to do 6 cars that were all tuned from scratched.

Boss’ Car

The one that made 500hp on this “Happy Dyno”

NA Power!

Turbo Power!  With very patient and disciplined Owner!

D series engines still churning out respectable power!  Complete with a large snail.

The one that sneaked out from the Military Base! They sure use fast armored cars in Brunei!

By the end of the tuning session, and we had 6 very happy owners who will vouch for my tunes.

A big THANK YOU to Augustus for all your top notch coordination and organizing this whole event!!

It has been very busy for the past few months.  Been testing many new products and R&D-ing some of my own.  Also been visiting some other countries to get customer’s cars setup and tuned.

Here’s an article from a Hong Kong car tuning magazine that covered my whole tuning event with the great guys at GP Motors.

Hope you understood what was written in there, I for one cannot read Chinese to save my life.  After going through the article for 10 minutes, it is still a no comprende for me.

With the recent uproar in the local media about how Chinese was taught in schools for the past 20 years, I definitely agree with the plans to revamp teaching methods.  If Chinese was taught less mundanely, many of my peers would assumably have a much better grasp of the language.

谢谢您 for reading.

Thanks to www.k20a.org member pb16b for taking time and money to do the testing.  Actually saving us a lot of “grief” from having to find out the results ourselves.

Full story available here.

Having dealt in the Hondata KPros for a long time and being very experienced in its workings.  It is also common for us to have enquiries from customers in different countries.

We have made KPro a Plug and Play solutions for these cars.

- 2002-2007 Honda Accord Euro R JDM

- 2002-2004 Acura RSX / Honda Integra Automatic

- 2005-2006 Acura RSX / Honda Integra Automatic

- 2007-2009 Honda Civic with DBW to Cable Throttle conversions

- Other kit cars that has the Honda K-series motors in them

I have to say that the KPro is one of the best ECUs available when it comes to controlling the K or F series engines from Hondas.  Why so?  Simply because it rides on the factory Honda’s ECU which would definitely had numerous hours of R&D put into it to have it cater to all the hundreds of thousands Honda vehicles running these engines plying our streets.

Here is an example of a customer giving us props for our good work…

You can view a larger and clearer picture here.

You can also view the thread in clubrsx.com here.

Now with the additional support that we are providing to the US customers, I hope we can keep up with our good work we have been doing all this while to our other customers.

This article is contributed by FD2 Type R customer, Ken. 

Having driven the old Honda B series engine before, K series was just the natural way for me to go when it came to choosing my new ride. Thus I settle for the Civic Type R FD2R.

Of course, like any other motorhead, stock simply wasn’t just good enough for me. Yet I am not an avid racer neither do I need insane 350 BHP NA cars to pacify me before I sleep at night. All I want is a smooth and comfortable drive, a little faster than stock, and most of all, I do not want my fuel consumption to be affected too much.

When this car was first launched, there were no ECU management solutions at all! It was so frustrating! Solutions then were restricted to units that have to splice our wire harness ( definitely a NO NO since I have been accustomed to Hondata’s Plug and Play S300 for my old Honda civic.) Or replacing the entire ECU with a Super Expensive Standalone with a big modification to the wire harness and/or to the e-throttle to convert it into a cable throttle.

Sighs, all options were exhausted and I reduced myself to just being contented with some simple bolt on mods like intake, headers, and exhaust.

However, the people at Hondata had heard the prayers of the FD2 Type R & FN2 Type R community. They have came up with the FlashPro!

I was prepared to pay the price I did for my old Hondata S300 but the chaps at Hondata surprised me even further! Since it’s a reflashing solution, its price is greatly reduced to an economical $1200* installed with tuning!

* Edit: This is only available as a special promo price and only for the few early bird customers.

I jumped at the idea immediately and did a pre-order with Joel from Driven.

Now I would like to write a field report for the dyno tuning session we did at Uber Mainline Roller Dyno machine.

It was Sunday and the quiet neighbourhood at Red hill is about to be awaken by the roar of the K20A Vtec on the dyno!

All shapes and sizes and colours of CTRs turned up promptly. Everyone was very patient while Joel treated us to drinks and pizza.

After a short wait, my car eagerly hopped up onto the roller dyno and awaited Joel’s magic touch to its ECU via the FlashPro.

Joel took care and time to slowly tune my car, ensuring that power is achieved while ensuring that the driver get as “stock” a feel as possible., treating every of his customers’ cars as his own. Its an amazing feat considering he spent almost his whole day swimming in exhaust gases.

Below are the figures that I have attained with my mods.

I drove my car right after the dyno session, and it was an immediate feel of nirvana. I had struggled with the stock maps for my bolt on mods for so long and finally, everything seemed to have fallen into place.

Absolutely no regrets. It was good money spent. Now I can enjoy my ride till I get ideas for my next project.

Definitely I will aim for something more adventurous since we now have the FlashPro.

The Honda S2000 needs no introduction. Flagged as one of the most perfect and balanced cars ever produced, Honda has spent much R&D into producing this wonderful machine that enthusiasts all over the world either love it, or love to hate it. To some, it seemed totally unfair to race with such a perfect weapon, forged in the deepest Honda mountain in Japan.

However, the S2000 is very much still a mass produced car. While bystanders marvel at its amazing built, let us gain more insight into the cars capabilities from a owner’s point of view.

We have an example of a S2000, with the owner pursuing a route, often less travelled. First of all, we all agreed that the F22C is already very well built from factory, thus we would like to see what kind of power we can extract from this engine just with the basic mods: Intakes, exhaust and ECU.

When this car went onto the dyno initially, it had these mods strapped on.

- Gruppe M intake
- J’s racing LTA* approved header
- J’s racing LTA* approved 70mm titanium twin exhaust
- Hondata Intake Manifold Gasket for F22C
- Hondata Dual ECU setup for DBW AP2s

LTA is Singapore’s authority on vehicular modifications.  Similar to CARB and TUV to a certain extent.

Here is the dyno chart.

Not very successful with the high end power. Honda has simply done too good a job for us to improve on it so easily. However, we did noticed that just by shifting Vtec engagement point lower, we are able to gain a huge juicy chunk of mid range torque and power. The mods and the tuning did bring more grunt to everyday driving. Slurpps!

However, nirvana was not to be attained so easily. After driving the grunted S2000 for awhile, the owner, having a taste of the automotive poison known as power, wanted more of it. This request was not one that was made without a bench mark too. He had taken his S2000 for a few good track sessions at Sepang International Circuit and decided that he would like more power.

Just like at the end of every rainbow, there is a pot of gold, ask any NA purist and they will tell you that at the end of the Naturally Aspirated rainbow, there is always a set of Jenvey Individual Throttle Bodies. From my experience with Honda engines, I know that this pot of “gold” will bring about a metamorphic change in the characteristics of the engine.
But firstly, some pictures

Throttle Bodies

Manifold to suit F22C’s head

Complete components

The assembly was put together before we installed everything on the engine. Throttle Bodies mated to the Manifold. Air Horns then bolted on to the Throttle Bodies. As the Air Horns selected for this set up is rather large and tapered. The edges of the bodies actually had to be machined down so that we do not have overlapping Air Horns and uneven air flow. While we are at it, we also gave the manifold a good polishing job; to smoothening out any imperfections in the casting to rid it of power-robbing unevenness.

The assembly was rather straight-forward as we simply remove the standard DBW hardware and attached the supplied Jenvey Throttle cable to the pedal. Instantly, we got the car to be driven by cable and the DBW lag is non-existent anymore.

As this was a street car, we also machined out an vacuum tank so that we are able to run an idle valve and give the MAP sensor a more balanced and stable reading. The idle valve definitely did heaps to the idle quality of the car with the A/C switched on or off. We could basically almost have the idle at a fixed RPM and the Hondata KPro did all the work to cope with the for A/C cutting in and out.

With this setup, the S2000 runs like a stock car!! This is very much to the contrary belief that quad throttles are very difficult to tune and have problems idling.

Vacuum Tank

Hondata Intake Manifold Gasket

Standard unported cylinder head

Finished product

Dyno Chart

The dyno graph shows a big jump in power anywhere after 4,000rpm. The lower power is NOT a power curve of the stock car. In fact, it is a graph with the bolt on mods as mentioned in the first dyno chart but running on the standard ECU.

The higher HP graph had only 1 variable compared to the other. It had the Jenvey ITBs in place of the GruppeM intake (and with the right tuning to suit). If we can gain 40hp here over an already fantastic intake kit (GruppeM)… And since most intake kit makes about 10hp over the stock air filter… Can we say that we are getting 50hp over the stock setup??? Can that even be true? Just an induction setup change (along with the exhaust and ECU of course) and we are getting 50hp!?!

I feel dizzy just thinking about it. Or is the dizziness a result of the heavenly orchestra of the Quad Throttles.

Now that I have seen these results and the cost involved in producing them, I begin to wonder why Honda did not make these a standard issue for all the S2000s. Hmmmm….Maybe the Perfect just got more Perfected.

The product all the 2006-2009 Honda Civic owners have been waiting for.  The FLASHPRO!

 This allows full tunability over the stock ECU, much like the KPro in the previous generation Hondas.  Even stock Hondas will benefit from this; at the very basic level, it allows a removal of the stock speed cut at 180km/h and allows a speedometer reading in excess of 200km/h.  A few other nice options that the stock vehicle could employ would be a lower VTEC engagement RPM, VTEC window for long high speed drives so that VTEC does not keep cutting in and out at a particular RPM.  There are a myriad of functions in there that could be done.  Send me emails with queries at joel@driven.com.sg if you need more information.

Also NEW:  Hondata by Driven Tags

Notice the bottom right corner of the metal tag at the bottom.  It has “BY: DRIVEN PERFORMANCE” hidden in there with the binary codes.  This metal tag is included with all Hondata purchases from us.  This is to authenticate the product we sell and provide an identification of our products that we proudly stand by.

KPro identity & verification

It has come to our knowledge that there are stolen KPros that are floating in the used parts market in this region.  To put a stop to such deplorable behavior, please do ensure that your KPro has a proper tag as in the picture.  Every KPro will  have a serial number printed and its unique number is identifiable through the KManager software.  If you suspect yours might be a dubious unit, or worse, stolen, do update me and I will update my list and notify you if I come across any.  I guess I would be the best bet to finding your lost KPro since I tune so many of them.

All KPros sold from 2009 should also spot a number that is larger than “05006000″.  This will have the latest firmware update and chipset.

Last week, I was invited to a workshop in Sunway area in KL to tune some cars. Joshua from Millennium Motorsports, who incidentally is also one of my top re-seller for Hondata products arranged for the session.

Joshua who also sells a lot of Microtech products recently just completed his engine built for his race car, a CRX running a huge turbo.

This car made over 1,000 wheel HP on his conservative Dyno Dynamics dynamometer. It has a Honda 4 cylinder H22A motor in there, and to achieve those power numbers are awe-inspiring, to say the least. I was not there to witness the HP run, but I am sure it was done in Joshua’s typical non-dramatic fashion with just plenty of booooostt!!!

So there I was, on a Saturday afternoon and started hooking up the KPro and ECU into the car. Tested the ECU. Made sure I could load maps and make alterations. Confirmed the datalogging works. Wired up a couple of switches for some additional nice features. OK, everything was set, and the car was good to go on the dyno for its tune!

Once on the dyno, we did a base run on the stock ECU when the engine was still cool and not hot from many runs on the dyno. Normally, this would give one of the best horsepower readings assuming the stock ECU had the perfect set of parameters in there then. We normally do that to show the difference in HP we could gain before and after a ECU tune. In the case of the DC5s, we knew for sure the Hondata will make a big difference in power everywhere.

After the base run, it was time to start tuning. A quick switch of ECU from the stock to the KPro and I was sitting pretty with my laptop in the passenger seat with aplomb and going to start tuning the car just like how I did with the other 200 K series engines tunes I have done since 2004.

OK, so we did the first pull…. Hmmm, VTEC would not engage. Took a close look at the datalogs and judging from the logs, it seemed to work. OK, let me try again, maybe the filter was restrictive and we cannot hear the VTEC well since it was set rather low. Run 2; still no luck…

After this, I started to go through the wiring on the car to ensure that everything was correct, and while I was at it, might as well just remove the A’Pexi AFC Neo which was wired into the stock harness. The owner did not want it anymore and so, to eliminate any other causes that might result in a VTEC malfunction, we just removed it.

Now, with the AFC removed, and the wires nicely wrapped back together, it was time to give it another shot. But alas, we were greeted with the same result, still no VTEC!!

After this, we practically tried every trick in the book. Went out to my friend’s car to remove his ECU to test, in case it was a exceptional case where the VTEC driver within the ECU was shot. I have not heard of this happening before with a K Series ECU, but well… there could always be a first. After 30 mins, we got back and tested it out again, but nope, still no luck.

Some other tricks employed were, adjusting TPS settings in the software, shifting VTEC crossover points back and forth and occasionally in part throttle positions while we load the dyno, we are able to get VTEC. OK, at least some conclusions.

1. We can deduce that the ECU works fine.
2. We can also safely say that the hardware on the car was good, as VTEC works on the stock ECU.
3. Wiring is definitely top-notch, all connections were tested and continuous where needed.
4. All sensors related to the fuel injection system reads well, uniformly and correctly.
5. And most importantly, we were hungry.

1 hour later, and after a fulfilling dinner which had the wildest ideas about tuning (and possible solutions to the problems) strewn all over, and back and forth. We went back to the dyno, and to the car which had just got a full tank of gas.

Somehow, suddenly I had a voice that crept up to me and reminded me that I have updated the software about a week ago and had not had a chance to try it on any cars.  This definitely was not a problem with the car, could it be within the tuning application?? I never had any problems with new software releases from Hondata. In addition, why would the bug be such a simple one as to be unable to engage VTEC??? VTEC is what Hondas are about, and in that same light, what Hondata is about!

I quickly booted up my laptop again and had a look into the application (not the KManager program) and found something.  A quick tweak to the source code was effected and then, reloaded the base map into the car.  It all took me about 5 minutes. Started up the car, waited for the cam angles to start working, and did a new run on the dyno. EVERYTHING WORKS!! IT WAS MAGICAL!! After going through the whole agony of troubleshooting for the past couple of hours, the VTEC crossover pitch was definitely music to my ears!!

Let me share a dyno chart of this very car, before and after the tune.

As to the expressions on the owner’s face after he got back from having a crack at his new found power… I shall leave that to your imagination.

Now in Stock!!

Engines for Mitsubishi Colt Version R 

Beam Light for Championship White FD2s

Original Honda wheel lock nut.  Very Rare, highly unlikely for someone else to have the same kind.

 Type R Keychains

Type R stickers

 Honda Tshirts

Type R Caps

NOW… we are becoming Honda boutique…

Honda Maketh the Man.

The power of dreams…