02 Civic tips for possible future builds

[Austin95]

So I recently got an 02 manual coupe and the dealer I bought it from claimed it was pristine, long story short it wasn't, it needed new spark plugs, muffler, thermostat, and has an electrical issue that comes and goes where all the lights and gauges in the instrument cluster turn off and I have no clue where to start with that. but I love the car cause it has some spunk despite the fact that we're pretty sure it has a head-gasket issue and since the car wasn't cared for it seems we're gonna just get a replacement engine to keep her going.

What I'm looking for is some ideas on a possible future build (most likely won't happen for at least 2 or 3 years depending on finances) what I want to do is do an engine swap with something that can handle a turbo and that can put out some power at the mid to high rpm range, also wanna do a full exhaust system but I don't want that super loud fart can sound, preferably something that has a kind of quiet rumble at idle and doesn't draw much attention if some of the things I'm saying sound dumb it's cause I'm very new to tuning and the like but I'm eager to learn

 

[Girl_in_tha_civic]

So I recently got an 02 manual coupe and the dealer I bought it from claimed it was pristine, long story short it wasn't, it needed new spark plugs, muffler, thermostat, and has an electrical issue that comes and goes where all the lights and gauges in the instrument cluster turn off and I have no clue where to start with that. but I love the car cause it has some spunk despite the fact that we're pretty sure it has a head-gasket issue and since the car wasn't cared for it seems we're gonna just get a replacement engine to keep her going.

What I'm looking for is some ideas on a possible future build (most likely won't happen for at least 2 or 3 years depending on finances) what I want to do is do an engine swap with something that can handle a turbo and that can put out some power at the mid to high rpm range, also wanna do a full exhaust system but I don't want that super loud fart can sound, preferably something that has a kind of quiet rumble at idle and doesn't draw much attention if some of the things I'm saying sound dumb it's cause I'm very new to tuning and the like but I'm eager to learn

I'm pretty new to this stuff too. I would say that if you are going to get a replacement engine to even keep it running, i would say upgrade there first. Because from there you can better judge what else needs to be done to the car to get it to the desired end result. my Civic was a salvage title. full engine swap straight across. so basically in technical terms, I'm still "bone stock". but my fist plan of action would be to do a cold air intake then work on making sure my engine doesn't suffocate. But for sure make sure that you can keep it running. Is it your daily driver or straight project car?

 

[HeX]

@Austin95, I believe you havent received any responses until now because this has been asked and covered many times and is still asked regularly. So please use our search function in order to make best use of this forum.

Your generation of Civic is not worth chsnging to another engine so only swap in the same engine unless you have alot of money to afford what it would cost to upgrade.

 

[XpL0d3r]

Yep, you picked the wrong generation Civic to mod, unfortunately. If you have a few thousand $ to play with you can look into K-series swaps. But at that cost, it's probably better to get a different gen model to work with altogether.