Kia FE3 swap ITS DONE !!! ...almost

You sure have some great questions MazdaTweaker. Keep em rolling.

I can appreciate the 626 swap parts. They are readily available and cheap. I just hated the idea of having an 8 valve, SOHC engine even though it would be injected. There was no way I was keeping the F2 block. The Kia engines and SUVs for that matter are readily available also so I had to take the plunge.

The intake on the Kia FE3 is quite a pain in the ass. It is high profile and the idle control valve sticks up too high even for a B2600 bubble hood. I had to modify the wiring to the valve to clear the hood. A stock flat hood fits too. I am glad it is configured for RWD so I don't have to piece together a FWD manifold. That sure is an ugly mess like you said.

Check out what this Miata guy did to clear his hood on his FE3 powered Miata.

You could probably do something similar to a 626 manifold to make it look much better. That top half of a Miata manifold looks great. I will do that to mine some time down the road.

About the wiring... The engine harness was not that bad as long as it is kept simple. The ECU I have now sits in the stock location in the truck. I had to pull out my wire stretcher to get it there. Kidding. I had to lengthen one of the O2 sensor leads to get enough slack to route the harness into the cab. That cleaned up the engine bay a bunch.

And the crank sensor was not a problem. I was not looking forward to fabbing that but it was quite easy.

Any more questions just fire away. I will get more pics up soon.

Matt

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fixed it for ya ;-) too modest :-p

it should be mentioned that oddball was the first, and the inspiration to the rest of us :-)

btw, a significant amount of the info about the fe3 on the web is wrong. This was initially propagated by JayB who was either stupid or a liar. Randy spread some of that info around too.

I'm considering making a dedicated FE3 forum that doesn't care which platform you have it in, would anyone here be interested in joining/signing up/getting involved with that if I were to go ahead with it?

Fred.

I would

I'm seriously considering the fe3 swap.

I just dunno the engine code for a genuine mazda engine, and I need to figure out how I can cheat the emissions for engine swap...

FREDIO Can you PM me with info on this?!

The fe3 was never in the US as a Mazda so you would have to import it. The KIA's fe3 I think was built by Mazda for Kia

AFAIK KIA bought blueprints etc and built there own. same for the BP motor as used in other KIAs. I don't think mazda manufactured it at all. It is virtually identical though, so it doesn't matter much except for mounting and coolant plumbing/sensors/manifolds etc.

Thanks for your interest Pont, I'm hell busy with my new website etc, but when that quiets down a bit, I'm keen to do something FE3 related on a site of my own. Not quite sure what form it will take though. A dedicated forum would be nice though :-)

Fred.

Thanks for the info I stand corrected

Daewoo (i think) were doing the same thing with a different brands stuff. I forget what it was though. I think Hi and dry are there own deal, but early stuff may have been copied from out of date designs like kia did with mazda. not sure

There is a local business here that recieves imported engines straight from japan. Less than 30k miles on them.

So importing is not a problem, I just need the right engine code for the genuine mazda engine so I don't look like a tard when I ask the guy to get it for me.

madlowmazda enlightened me to the fact of coolant plumbing. Is the mazda engine configured right enough to use as RWD and have plumbed to the heater core and radiator?

What the heck is the BP engine?

I'm looking for the most recent engine code relating to the fe3 engine so I can get it at the most up to date build. Make sense?

...or just elaborate on what years each engine code was desiganted to?