This is the Build Thread for The DSM problem. Reply below.

So, the last time I posted a build thread I stated I was stepping away from DSMs. Let's be real, no one actually ever gets away from DSMs, there is something special about these cars that just keeps us coming back. So, this time around I am starting a build thread that instead of covering a specific project I have will instead cover my journeys with all of the DSMs I pick up, restore, hate and flip. I love a one stop shop to journal about each and every DSM I pick up. If you're interested, follow along.

Catching Up:

#1) So, to kick this off I figured I'd briefly talk about each of the cars I have picked up over the past few years. DSM fever hit me back in high school and my friends and I went through a handful before joining the military and getting married yada yada. Wish I had pictures from those days, but I don't sadly. Looking back through my pictures it looks to have all started back up in late 2018 when a black GST showed up on craigslist not but 5 mins down the road from me. I spent a LOT of time on this car. Ended up buying a "freshly" built engine from a member here on tuners and he ended up scamming me. Lesson learned but at the time it ruined this car for me, so I sold it.


#2) I then picked up a 99 GSX for 500$. It was rotted to hell and later I found out the previous owner timed the engine incorrectly and sheared a handful of valves off. I was/am an idiot and had no clue what the hell I really wanted to do so I sold it. Had a full minty black interior and was overall fairly clean. But it had holes the size of softballs in each wheel well and rocker sections. As per usual...I sold it.


#3) Next up was the favorite of all my family and friends. The BANNAN car. Man-o-man, the person I bought this thing from was on a trip. Waaay out there. It was a good car, and I poured a lot of blood sweat, and tears into it. But at the end of the day, it needed so much paint and bodywork I just didn't want to spend the money to get it where it needed to be. So, I parted ways after manual swapping it and pretty much replacing everything OEM from bushings to hardware. I kind of regret this one honestly. KIND OF.


#4) Not long after or before the BANNA car, I really can't remember, I drove to Illinois to pick up a GST Spyder. It turned out to be rusted to crap and needed lots of engine work. I picked it up for like 400$ and drove it home. Overheated on the way, stopped and ate Hardees, and then drove the rest of the way. I remember pulling into my driveway and the car just completely dying. Stopped just inches from my garage door and when I got out the car sounded like a pot of boiling water. Putting my hand on the hood I could feel the coolant/water boiling/vibrating inside the engine. This is the only Spyder I have bought, I'd love to get a clean one eventually as I really like them. I did NOT sell this car. I scraped it


There is much more but this is a good place to stop for now. More to come...

Nice! Keep as many out of the salvage yard as possible!

Getting Everyone (mostly) Up-To-Date:

#5) Alright, let's do this. Shortly after the banana car I had a blue 1G (I believe it was a 92) AWD Talon pop up about 30 mins from my house. Drove over and traded a set of new BC camshafts I had purchased a couple of years earlier for the car. It was mostly torn down and came with boxes of parts but was actually quite clean. This one didn't last long as I really prefer the 1Gs with the popup headlights so I sold it off shortly after acquiring it. I also can't seem to find any pictures of it anywhere so I found one on the interwebs that closely (much nicer of course) matched.


#6) This next one I made a bit of a boo-boo as the car was further away than I like to drive so I opted to have a company go pick it up for me. Luckily after selling the car off I came out roughly even but lessons learned. It was a, I believe another 92 but this time it was a GSX, not a Talon. More complete than the blue one before and I think the plan was to put them both together and make a running car. Sounded like a good plan at the time but a lot of work I didn't have time for it, unfortunately. So it had to go. I could only find one picture of this one...


#7) 95 Eagle Talon was picked up not long after my stint with the 1Gs. At first, when I saw the ad on Facebook the guy was parting the car out, reached out to him to see if he would sell the whole car. I paid way too much for the car considering it was rotted to hell and back. But didn't accept that fact until I had already put far too much time and effort into cleaning, doing interior work, installing and buying Sparco seats (still to this day I'd love to install some form of Recaro, Corbeau, or Evo seats in one of these) and buying rocker sections with the intent on restoring the rotted sections. Ugh, so much of my profits were wasted on my ambitions. Will I ever learn!?


More TBD...

I quit...

#8) Man, this next one hurts to talk about. Watching my son play Playstation one night a 1997 Eagle Talon TSi AWD popped up on my FB feed for 1400$. I sent the guy a message but the guy responded that he had a guy coming to look at the car the following day. There were hardly any details but it ran, drove, and looked completely stock. The biggest question was rust. But the gentleman was an older guy that wanted nothing to do with 20 questions so I did what any self-respecting DSM enthusiast would do...I told him I'd buy the car sight unseen right then and there. Long story short, I PayPal'd the guy 20% down and by the next night, a flatbed delivered the car to my driveway. Details on this one are in my build thread for it if you'd want to know more but I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves...







Day she was taken from me (oh I make it sound like it wasn't voluntary...it absolutely was)


And that's it! I quit DSMs after this girl. Or did I?

I love this build thread idea. The full DSM journey! Looking forward to following along.

I would’ve had to keep that one

Wasn't gone for long...

So after the last car was sold I went through a purge. I had collected a decent amount of spare parts over the years and since I had decided to move on from DSMs I decided to sell off a lot of stuff I had acquired. Not only that but we had also decided to sell our house and make a move which also contributed to me wanting to not have to move all the crap I had. So hop skip and jump and boom 90% of the parts I had sold off or scrapped and I was done with DSMs...

House for sale and sold within a weekend.


The last picture I have of the house is right after our last winter storm. I'll miss this home but the new house has WAY more room for certain car storing buildings (AKA garage).


#9) Until about two weeks before we were slotted to move a car I recognized popped up locally. It was a green 1996 Eagle Talon TSi AWD, I knew the car as the person I bought the blue 1G Talon from owned it but was now being sold by someone else. The current owner stripped the thing down, spent a crap ton of money on parts, and lost interest. I knew it was 99% rust-free but needed a LOT of work. I picked it up with the full intention of doing the work and flipping it for a decent profit being a low-millage (72k miles) rust-free AWD DSM. But it was just too much paired with moving and renovating our old/new house. I actually just recently sold this one but ended up coming out a bit on top.

Getting there:

Let's cover non DSM related things first. So we sold our house and ended up buying a home with about 8 acres and a three-car garage. It needed lots of work but had lots of potential mainly from the perspective of having room to add a place for me to do car-related things. So let's get to it...

Pretty much everything you see (land/property wise) is ours.


Within a month or so we started on this...


Which led to this...



#10) OK OK OK I'll give you all some DSM related content. So right around Christmas of last year (2021), I started up a conversation with a guy selling a 1990 GSX, after all this time we finally synced up our times and I bought the car. He ended up delivering it to me which was nice. It used to be a pretty spectacular vehicle in its time and has lots of go-fast now old parts. Mostly rust-free aside from surface rust and corrosion from sitting for so long. This car I have NOT sold and I am on the fence on whether I should restore it (which would take a lot of time and money). Right now it sits tucked away in my new garage waiting its turn. On a side note, this car holds a pretty nice spot in my heart because my first DSM was a red 90 GST. I love pop-up headlights and this car reminds me of being 16 and feeling boost for the first time. I am quite torn on this car so we will see.

#11) While sitting at home browsing through Facebook Marketplace a 1997 Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX showed up in my feed. It looked rough in the pictures but it was only 1400$. Quickly looking through the pictures I could see the whole drivetrain was still intact but the interior was mostly gutted. Had parts strewn all throughout the car, had a cheap body kit, and had some nice-looking wheels with new tires on them. Figured why not? I could definitely get some parts I need and resell some things to more than make up for the cost. After haggling, I got the car for 1200$ AND the guy would bring it to me, gotta love it!

I present what I call the Shit GSX (the day she arrived)


Swapped the wheels with some old RSX wheels and quickly pulled and inventoried everything I wanted or wanted to sell. Turned out to have some nice parts tucked deep inside the car. EPROM ECU, RC550s, Greddy 60mm gauge, fairly rare clear taillights (people were beating my door down for these), some really cool interior pieces I rarely find, Fluidyne aluminum radiator, engine mounts, and a few other odds and ends not to mention a good 4G63 long block with full tubular manifold, O2 housing, new eBay 16G and an AWD transmission and matching transfer case. Not too bad.


Within a week she was sold and picked up. This guy hand wenched this car up unto the trailer, it looked exhausting (I did help I am not that big of an ass)

#12) I actually picked this one up a while back but just haven't posted about it. This car has sort of meshed with me since day one of going to look at it. So far it's been the one DSM I have latched onto and wanted to keep and thus is still with me. It's in fantastic condition rust-wise...or the lack thereof, and still rough enough that If I were to build it I could actually enjoy it without freaking out every time some punk kid tails me or some grandma parks next to me (although that would never happen because I always park at the furthest spot anyways).

Anyways, this is my 99 GST Eclipse, I bought it from a guy who was selling it because it was his brother's many years before that, and his brother was the original one to modify it (Fast and the Furious era), but his brother passed away and left the car to his dad. Well, last year his dad passed away and left this car to him. He had no clue what to do with it and decided to sell it. The car has a bunch of period-correct mods done to it but was missing a manifold and turbo otherwise was completely whole. The guy had no clue if it ran (a bit of foreshadowing...it does ) but I took the chance anyways and towed it home. I'll be doing more posts on this car in the future as I have LOTs of mods and restorations that I'll be doing to it.

Well its been a bit since my last update and honestly I haven't really picked up any new DSMs in the past six to eight months. Not to say I haven't had the opportunity but as I get older (maybe smarter) I've started to be pickier on which ones I pull triggers on due to the market just not being what it was in terms of flipping parts/shells to help offset my build costs. I'm finding parts and bits continue to sit on my shelf not being sold and it's definitely deterred me from picking up anything lately. That being said I have three more DSMs to post to get me caught up to where I am now. After I post these Ill start updating this thread with my build process so far on my 99 GST/GSX.

#13) 1995 Eagle Talon AWD painted in a flat black. It was about a two hour drive and I primarily bought this car because my half brother "really wanted to get into DSMs". Needless to say after I got it home I pulled what I needed/wanted and ended up selling it to a local guy here in Illinois. It had some wiring issues so it didn't run or drive. Either way I got ECMLink V3, FP manifold and a handful of other parts I actually wanted for my other builds and it cost me nothing outside of the time to pull the parts.

GregoryRyan said:

Well its been a bit since my last update and honestly I haven't really picked up any new DSMs in the past six to eight months. Not to say I haven't had the opportunity but as I get older (maybe smarter) I've started to be pickier on which ones I pull triggers on due to the market just not being what it was in terms of flipping parts/shells to help offset my build costs. I'm finding parts and bits continue to sit on my shelf not being sold and it's definitely deterred me from picking up anything lately. That being said I have three more DSMs to post to get me caught up to where I am now. After I post these Ill start updating this thread with my build process so far on my 99 GST/GSX.

#13) 1995 Eagle Talon AWD painted in a flat black. It was about a two hour drive and I primarily bought this car because my half brother "really wanted to get into DSMs". Needless to say after I got it home I pulled what I needed/wanted and ended up selling it to a local guy here in Illinois. It had some wiring issues so it didn't run or drive. Either way I got ECMLink V3, FP manifold and a handful of other parts I actually wanted for my other builds and it cost me nothing outside of the time to pull the parts.
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Excellent find on the talon, what an awesome way to get someone into the DSM addiction, plus a free ECMlink v3!? I'm jealous. I've been learning as much as I can about them before i order one, i know practically nothing about computers.