The ND2 Engine Conversion Journey

It all started with one goal, boost. I wanted to build an engine that could reliably handle the 1.5L turbo kit I inherited with the car. The previous owner had tried and failed twice, leaving me with a collection of broken parts.

However, I quickly hit a wall. Looking for forged internals for the 1.5L engine had no leads, they simply do not exist as off the shelf parts. This led me to a radical thought, if i couldn't build the 1.5L, why not move up to the 2.0L? Specifically, the ND2 version, which not only had better factory performance with more aggressive cams and larger porting, but also a market for off the shelf forged internals.

This finally left one big question, could I run a 2.0L ND2 engine on the standard 1.5L ND1 electronics? The engines ran different sensors and used a completely different harness and ecu. Many told me it wouldn't work, so I decided to find out for myself.

In October, I finally managed to get my hands on a wrecking ND2 2.0L engine. The first thing I did was pull the rocker cover. I needed to know if the camshaft lobe positions and keying matched the 1.5L. If the ND1 ECU was going to have any hope of controlling this engine, the timing signals had to be identical.

To my relief, they were. The cam positions were identical, just with the longer profile expected for the 2.0L engine.