You may have read my thread on picking up another car with my father... The current 2.2 engine needs work. We'll likely pull it to clean it up, but we want to use the wagon also, so a swap is in order. I've never done a swap, though I'm handy with wiring things. My father is an experienced big 3 musclecar tuner whos done motor and tranny installs. No foreign swap, tho. Other than another 2.2, what else is a good and comparatively simple swap?
You can just about anything in there. You could go to an jdm wrx, jdm sti, RS 2.5, wrx, sti, or legacy. Honestly for the amount of work you might as well just skip the RS swap and go with a wrx or higher. The wiring is just as difficult to do. If you dont feel comfortable doing the wiring you can send the 2 harnesses you need spliced to East Coast Swappers and they can merge them to be PnP for ~500.
Nope it's all still PnP except wiring. Nadauto and Jarco have a lot of jdm swaps for cheap. Easy 250whp for 2grand with tranny.
well, i'm not concerned with power. I'm concerned with response. We'll either build up the old 2.2 or just get an engine with the response we want. Trying to decide that still...
The jdm wrx's spool up quick. It'd be cheaper to go the swap because you can get a tranny that'll handle it as well.
i dont see any online for an acceptable price. This is a $600 budget tops. This isn't the performance swap, that comes later. This is a "get it running" swap.
Hmm i have a friend who has a 2.5rs block for sale. If you could do the work I'm sure he'd let it go for cheap.
thats the initial plan. but if you had a choice, what would you pull from? izzat a sohc or dohc? and when you say 'do the work,' meaning its still in a car?
Well it's just the shortblock. You just swap out the bottom end and reuse your heads. I meant that if you wanted to do the swap yourself. The block is out of the car.
ah, well, the point of this exercise is to have one whole engine out of the car to tune, while the car has a running engine in it. Sorry if i wasn't makin that clear. . . ;p
well if your trying to get it running cheaply and quickly just locate another one with the same engine. However you may want to look into finding a 2.2 turbo from the same era. I'm pretty sure that those have the enclosed deck 2.2l, which means they are nearly indestructible.
i've been reading up on the dohc EJ25D n/a. I think if there are no complications, that would be my target engine to drive around. I found a thread over on RS about a guy up in TN who absolutely beat the crap out of one of these engines up to 600whp. I won't be doing that; I just want something tough while we're building up the other engine.