95 Talon ESi

[talonesi95t]

This is the Build Thread for 95 Talon ESi. Reply below.

 

[talonesi95t]

So over the winter of 2020 I got the crazy idea of buying a NT 2g dsm to-do a evo swap. Yes i got the motivation from Migueldsm with his build. I believe it was around that time he posted his build on YouTube. Now I realize its been 5 years since then and not much progress has been made in that direction. But ill post my progress since then and see how far I get this year.

My searched started out in OKC marketplace. I found the car i wanted . It was none running but the body looked good. My inlaws live in OKC so i had my Father in-law head over to look at it for me since im in WA. He said it looked good so i pulled the trigger for $500. This was on Dec 28 of 2020. But i had to wait to May to receive the car. They come visit us every year in May.

 

[talonesi95t]

May finally came around and a got to work on it the first night the day my in-laws arrived. While the car was back in OKC i had sent my father in-law some parts to see if it was a simple fix. I sent him a new fuel pump, fuel pressure regulator as he found it was not getting fuel, But it didnt help and told him i would mess with it when he got here. Well i dug into it and found the timing was off and the magnet for the cam sensor was missing. So I started to fix the timing and found the intake cam gear was spinning. It was missing the dowel pin to hold the cam gear in place with the camshaft. So the next day while i was at work Gustavo( aka my father in-law) went on a junkyard run to find the cam sensor magnet and bolt. He pulled it off a PT cruiser if i remember correctly. So that day after work i came home and installed the the magnet and replaced the camshaft with a spare i had in the parts bin.

 

[talonesi95t]

Now that the car ran I decided it was time to paint it. So off to my brother @GSTsiAWD house it went. This was around June 2020.

 

[talonesi95t]

Now the car was all painted. I did not paint the oem hood ( i would soon regret that) as i had found a good deal on a siebon carbon hood. And i aslo wanted to lower the car but couldnt justify some good coilovers. I had a set of ST lowering springs I bought on ebay back in 2018 maybe when they were clearnceing them off for $50. I paired them with a set of shorter then oem Mookeeh struts.

 

[talonesi95t]

Some side notes, In Oklahoma you need to have a title transfer notarized? Well i wasn't going to fly to okc for that. My in-law could have done it for me but I wanted to try out the vermont tiltle method. I sent them a just a bill of sale, vermont title application, a print out of the kbb market value and a check for the fees. And with in 3 weeks i had my shiny new green vermont plate. In september of 2020 my in-laws were back in town( they visit us twice a year) and just in time for a big cars n coffee coming up. BUT a week before i went out on a little test drive and I forgot to latch my hood pins. Well you can only guess what happened. Bye bye carbon hood and windshield. Called Safelite and got a new winshield and saturday came around off to the meet Gustavo, my brother @Idle_Serge in his J swapped accord and I went to the meet.

 

[talonesi95t]

So the car did have an issue with it smoking really bad on idle. After getting warmed up smoke was gone. I figured it had bad valve seals. Sometime in 2021 i bought the OHM plug n play wiring harness for the evo swap. But that was about it. As i decided to work on my starion project. In June of 2022 i bought the front eagle emblem for the bumper, and that was it for getting back to it. In 2023 I bought yet another project car a 96 talon TSi fwd. That also took my time from working on this. Also around this time it became alot more expensive to source evo engines, or any sort of parts. My second option was to go the kia/hyundia gcs4 route. But those 300$ engines in 2020 are now $800. It did not make since to me to pay that much for a near 200k engines. The 3g fwd trannys went up around the same $800 in my area. That unmovitated me to get back on this project.

 

[talonesi95t]

In 2024 I had a big shock as i was laid off from my job that a held for the past 16 years. I was unemployed from May till September. I started a new job late September but was not happy at all. But a different opportunity came along so i turned in my 2 weeks in late November. Now i didnt start my new job till December 16th. So I decided to use this time to finally get around to those valve seals. Valve seals cured the smoke problem, but now I had a major power steering link at the rack and pinion. Since the few evo swaps ive seen dont have power steering i thought , lets do a depowered rack. It is March now, hopefully this weekend i get my new tie rods to re install the rack and figure out how to keep the oem power steering pump pully as my AC still works on this ESi and route the belt as oem. Maybe pull the guts out the pump i was thinking. We will see.

This was from June of 2024 but this is how it looks as of now.