2005 Hybrid Engine and IMA rebuild
 

Hello. I have a 2005 Hybrid with the 1.3l engine. I bought it a couple years ago and the first time I drove it after brining it home the engine overheated severely and blew the head gasket (maybe not in that order). I like the car and would like to have the engine rebuilt. What should I know about this before diving headfirst? I’ve never rebuilt an engine but have the confidence I could pull it off (I watched my brother teach himself to rebuild a 302).

With that the IMA battery will likely need restoring or replacing as it has sat for about 2 years since it got it. Is there a way I could swap bad cells myself? I know it will be dangerous working with something like that, so I wouldn’t be past just fully replacing it or having someone qualified to do it.

Any and all help is appreciated

Re: 2005 Hybrid Engine and IMA rebuild
 

I've never dealt with replacing cells as it always seemed dodgy at best. Perhaps if yours was in good condition when you parked it they may be able to be reconditioned. Are you taking the engine out of the bay or removing the head with it in the bay? Timing might be a bitch with it in the bay as there is not much space to do the work.

If you do end up removing the engine from the bay hit the torx bolts holding on the cover over the IMA cable terminals attached to the engine with penetrating oil as early as you can. I did and I still broke a bolt there that I had to extract. Luckily the engine is very easy to work on. It's the first engine I've worked on and it has been very unintimidating.

I will highly recommend getting the factory Civic Hybrid Service manual on ebay. I got mine for $70 and it has been a life saver since there is little in the way of documentation on working on these cars online, at least compared to other models of cars. I can't recommend much else without knowing more about the car, such as the transmission or even the mileage.

Re: 2005 Hybrid Engine and IMA rebuild
 

Didn’t even cross my mind to get a service manual, definitely going to get one. It has a 5speed manual trans, with nearly 300k miles. This is it’s second engine I believe and to the best of my knowledge the front end has new suspension and steering components. The engine overheated pretty bad so I figured I’d take the whole engine out and have it machined. I can’t imagine it’s all that heavy.

Re: 2005 Hybrid Engine and IMA rebuild
 

It is not that heavy, I used a harbor freight engine crane and I was able to pull it on the 500lb setting. Since you're taking out the engine I would also recommend taking out the transmission and replacing the main shaft bearing. Of the two hybrids (one at 140k mi and the other at 240k mi) I've had both main shaft bearings were bad when I got them. I suspect due to the extra load of regenerative breaking plus the fact this generation of manual transmission has weak main shaft bearings. The transmission is the same as the normal civic, but I think it's flipped around. You can watch any main shaft bearing on a 7th gen civic and see how hard it is/isn't to replace this bearing. Good luck! It's the only production manual transmission hybrid sedan sold in the US! (as far as I know)