George Hsieh, HCP Engineering’s founder, developed the world’s first bolt-in Honda engine
That you’ve never heard of HCP Engineering, the first company to manufacture and sell Honda-specific engine swap mounts or George Hsieh, its founder, doesn’t change history. At a time when engine swap experts were few, personal computers remained luxuries of early adopters, and original owners took delivery of Honda’s remaining CRXs, Hsieh sought to simplify the engine swap process…for himself, at least. Uncharted territory by most accounts, the B-series swap was complex, lengthy, ubiquitous. In an effort to ease his own B-series transplant, Hsieh constructed a series of brackets that changed the rules forever. No longer would cutting and welding be requisite to the dual-overhead-cam-shoehorned ’88–’91 Civic. Hsieh sought to simplify the engine swap process for himself. Instead, he helped spawn an engine swap revolution.
HT: When did you realize there was a need for Honda engine swap mounts?
GH: Well, before the mount kit was mass-produced, everybody was cutting and welding their swaps into place. I got the idea to sell the prototype kit I made when I went down to Speed Garage. They were doing a shitload of motor swaps at the time. It was more like an assembly plant than a shop. One guy would just sit there and cut off all of the mounts, and the other guy would weld on these mounts that were all crooked, and then the next guy would just drop in the motor. That kind of gave me the idea: “Oh, shoot, why don’t I just sell something where, you know, it would allow this whole thing to bolt in?” Structure-wise, Integras and Civics are pretty similar, so if I could somehow reuse the original mounts, that would basically allow people to do it themselves and really drive down the cost. It could make it a fun project.
HT: What year was that?
GH: That was 1996, but I made my first bolt-in kit for my own swap in 1991.
HT: Were you doing swaps for other people or had you just done your own?
GH: You know, this whole thing kind of came about from my own needs. I was trying to do a motor swap in my own garage but I didn’t have any welding equipment or anything that had to do with cutting out the mounts. Basically, I bought a salvaged ’89 CRX and had the whole thing stripped down to the bare shell, sitting in my garage, trying to do the swap.
HT: That car was still fairly new and you’d already pulled the engine out?
GH: Yeah, it’s hard to believe it’s been 20-some years, but it was still a pretty new car.
HT: What happened next?
GH: I got an Integra motor from a buddy of mine. I set the motor inside the engine bay, put a few wood blocks underneath it, and everything just pretty much lined up. It wasn’t a project that I completed in just one day, though. It took more like two months for me to go back and forth, coming up with ideas to basically bolt the motor into the car without any kind of cutting or welding. The original mount kit idea came about when I tried to set the stock Integra mount into the driver-side bracket. I used a pry bar to try to open up the bracket and squeeze it in there.
HT: That didn’t work, though, did it?
GH: No. That was crazy [laughs]. I ended up shaving down the mount’s metal spacers on each side to get it to fit into the bracket. On the passenger side, I kept the stock Civic EF bracket and I fabricated a special bracket with a stud, which allowed the transmission to bolt up to the factory Civic mount.
HCP Engineering’s most popular mounts—its all-steel EF18 kit—as shown in a Honda Tuning ma
HT: That was neither a transmission bracket nor a mount. It was more like an intermediary bracket that sandwiched in between the Integra transmission bracket and the Civic passenger-side mount, right?
GH: Yeah, that was how this whole thing started. And for the rear transmission mount, I kept the factory EF mount. I just made an L bracket that allowed me to keep the factory Civic mount on the subframe and that weird-looking horseshoe mount with the three bolts up top. That horseshoe mount hooked up to the L bracket, which attached to the Integra transmission.
HT: Did you sell those or were they just for you?
GH: Yeah, I sold them. That’s basically how the business got started. Speed Garage started distributing them later on, and I was also selling them locally. It was really, really grassroots. I was selling mount kits out of the back of my car.
HT: Was HCP a full-time business for you yet?
GH: No, I was working as an accountant for a manufacturing company. I was using their fabrication facility after hours, and that’s how I came up with the prototype.
HT: You offered these mounts pretty early on, but a lot people continued to weld their swaps into place. Why was that?
GH: Some were just totally against these bolt-in kits. There were a lot of people who were nonbelievers. There are always people with different opinions. I just tried to show them this was cool and this was safe. But, to be honest with you, the original mounts, they weren’t all that good anyway. In order to run those—going back to the rear mount—there was no way to use the Integra’s VSS (Vehicle Speed Sensor). That was my main obstacle in getting those mounts made. I couldn’t find a way to get the VSS to fit. So, I figured out that I could pull the Civic one out and use it. Luckily, they had the same sprocket, same gear, and same mount, so I’d be able to use the one out of a Civic or CRX. Until then, I had the hardest time trying to fabricate a rear bracket to work with that funny-looking horseshoe mount. From that point on, it was problem solved.