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Alright so... the story behind this Talon is that it was owned by the SAME person that I bought my first Talon (the 1994) from. My '94 Talon I bought from him was actually really intended to just be a 'parts' car.

This car (the '92 Talon) was his baby - it's the real one, with all the performance parts: The turbo, the exhaust, ECMLink v3, speed density, front mount intercooler, Aeromotive FPR, Walbro 255 pump, AN lines running to the fuel tank, coilovers, boost controller, digital AFR gauges, the works. The frame on this car has almost zero rust. The paint is a bit faded on one side and the interior is pretty rough, but other than that the car is beautiful. You can tell how much effort was put into it over the years.

For whatever reason his plans for this car never panned out and he sold both cars. The 'parts' car he sold to me, and I spent most of 2025 trying, unsuccessfully, to make that first Talon drive. I replaced a ton of stuff - including the transmission. I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes, and eventually put it away for the winter.

Well... now I've got my hands on the baby. I ended up buying this car as a 'roller' from @Dsm_canadian_mike - so no engine or trans, but I got EVERYTHING else, and the rest of the car is mint.

So now that I have inherited his project, it's time for me to finish it. My plan is to pull the engine and trans from the 1994 Talon, and install it into this 1992 Talon. In the meantime, I'm going to tear all the interior out of this car, go over it with a fine tooth comb. Any rust I find I'll address. And I'll transplant all the nicer interior pieces from the other Talon. The plan is to do a frankenstein merge all the best pieces of both cars until I have one amazing car

Wish me luck!

Initial pics from when I bought it

Starting to take apart the interior!





Alright, so here's what I'm dealing with rust-wise!

It's December and 0 Degrees C out... gotta keep warm

Cleaning the absolute ever loving hell out of the interior. This is after almost a week of wire-wheeling the rust, wiping everything down with de-greaser, vacuuming, more washing and wiping, and finally applying metal etching / metal prep for some POR15 that I'm going to put down on the floor pan. Goddamn that was a lot of work

Grd1043 said:

Initial pics from when I bought it

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Those are OEM 2gb talon wheels. AWD only. Fairly rare OEM wheel.

I also chose the route of buying someone else’s parts car for a DSM build a lot of work to tear these things apart and fix them right! That blue looks great

This is my favorite color and trim combo for a DSM. I prefer pop-ups don't get me wrong, but my first love was a 1GB Blue Talon. Please tell me you're gonna keep this a street car and it isn't gonna turn into another gutted tin-can caged racecar!

CrackedDSM said:

This is my favorite color and trim combo for a DSM. I prefer pop-ups don't get me wrong, but my first love was a 1GB Blue Talon. Please tell me you're gonna keep this a street car and it isn't gonna turn into another gutted tin-can caged racecar!

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Oh ya absolutely, it's staying a street car. I'm gonna put all the interior back in once I'm done cleaning it up . I've got some plans for a nice sound system, sound deadening/acoustic insulation, and repairing any rattling plastic bits / missing fasteners and clips and stuff like that too while I have it all apart. It'll be really clean and nice by the time I'm done I hope!

Looks like my mine except the color

Same color as mine!

Waiting for the weather to get a little nicer before I try and tackle the engine swap. But in the meantime, I've been doing lots of little stuff to the interior


POR15 is down to stop the rust


I scraped off most of the factory sound deadening when I did the POR15, so this is the replacement now




New speakers in the door cards


And since I'm in here, I thought I'd try and install a trunk latch actuator that I'm gonna hook up to a key fob

Does anyone have any pics of what the floor of the trunk is normally supposed to look like? Both of my Talons didn't have a floor in the trunk just the carpet that was draped over the hump where the spare tire used to be.

I'm eventually going to need fabricate some kind of 'raised floor' in the trunk I think

You can use the factory "surround" pieces and its framing to make it flat. I need to check my cars and see if I have one i haven't removed that from, for a picture.

Pressure washed the carpets, I think they turned out pretty good!




I've been putting 3M Thinsulate SM600L on the floor and doors and behind the various trim pieces. It's supposed to be good for sound absorption. I have no idea how much of a difference it'll make but I guess I'll find out.

I thought it would be hard to put the carpet back on over top of it but actually it went on totally fine!

Just working now on getting all the other trim pieces and stuff back onto the car. Interior's slowly coming back together!

Nice I used kilmat to enhance my sound system.

The doner engine from the other 94 talon has been extracted!

Got the engine on the stand and we've gotten to work!

So right now the plan is to do the timing belt, idler pulleys, balance belt etc. maintenance I can do while it's out, replace the exhaust/intake manifold studs, and then put the aftermarket exhaust manifold / turbo / intake manifold / injectors / valve cover, etc. onto it.



However... we put a boroscope into the cylinders to take a look. The pistons look pretty clean, but my friend saw some 'pitting' and piston wash or something on the cylinder walls that he thinks might be concerning. I'm really hesitant to take the head off because I don't know if I want to go that deep into the engine, but also don't want to do all this work and then have to be pulling the engine again later because I didn't take care of an issue.

I'm wondering if this is something I need to be concerned about? Any advice?

Do a compression test and if you aren't happy do the leak down test. Post the results if you do.

I did a compression test before we pulled the engine, I was seeing about 140PSI on all four cylinders, plus or minus about 3-5 psi

..... I'm guessing the pistons aren't supposed to look like that

Grd1043 said:

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..... I'm guessing the pistons aren't supposed to look like that

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That damage is old.