Street Build Taiga my first car

[Stizzydrew]

Seems like its coming along nicely!

Thanks man! She’s far from done

 

[Stizzydrew]

Decided to just clean up the engine bay and restore the look a bit

 

[Stizzydrew]

Did a AC delete, powder coat valve cover, got some headers that I wrapped. Bored throttle body. MSD coil pack , NGK spark plugs and wires.

 

[Bland-Biscuit]

Looks great so far! Really digging the valve cover.

 

[Stizzydrew]

Installed a lower front brace bar (this was hard to find )

Did a dodge neon swap but somewhere along the line something went wrong… and blew up ! Not sure what went wrong but that happened.

 

[Stizzydrew]

While car was down for another round on dodge neon swap

I changed the carpet to new , went from bucket seats to recliners, installed the aluminum door handles!

Little cold start for a bonus

 

[Stizzydrew]

dodge neon swap was a success, this time it didn’t blow up
God these cars are beautiful

 

[Stizzydrew]

Well the motor for the GS blew… so now we’re motor swapping it with another 420a. This one is low mileage it’s around 117k miles? Hopefully this one will last another 100k miles. Old one gave out @227k miles. Bad compression on the old one (red valve cover)

 

[BLACK'98DSM]

Low compression and piston slap are the 2 main causes of failure for old and worn 420A. You're right on par with the mileage too. Though I've seen them die at 300k with good maintenance and mostly highway miles.

If you were to thoroughly and properly build an engine, it would last for a long time and take tons of abuse. Hopefully this gets you back on the road for a while though.

And hopefully there aren't any hidden gremlins that you weren't informed of. I recently bought and installed a 48k mile engine on a Honda. Was supposed to drop in and go with a 5 year 50k warranty. First drive I found that the VVT solenoid was not functional and the valve cover gasket was leaking. Luckily they reimbursed me for those parts.

 

[Stizzydrew]

Low compression and piston slap are the 2 main causes of failure for old and worn 420A. You're right on par with the mileage too. Though I've seen them die at 300k with good maintenance and mostly highway miles.

If you were to thoroughly and properly build an engine, it would last for a long time and take tons of abuse. Hopefully this gets you back on the road for a while though.

And hopefully there aren't any hidden gremlins that you weren't informed of. I recently bought and installed a 48k mile engine on a Honda. Was supposed to drop in and go with a 5 year 50k warranty. First drive I found that the VVT solenoid was not functional and the valve cover gasket was leaking. Luckily they reimbursed me for those parts.

Yeah that sounds right. I have seen around 300,000 as well. Yeah, hopefully I wasn’t sold the bad engine because that’ll be shitty. Also with the GST automatic transmission that I’m already having rebuild. My pockets are drained. All that’s left is sensors to be reconnected and axles to be put back in. I’m having a dilemma though because one of the axles is kind of thread crossed I’m not sure how that happened but I have to figure that out re-thread them with the tool or kind of file it or worse comes to worse get a new axle

 

[Stizzydrew]

The swap ended up going wrong. We got scammed buying this 420a motor. We were told it was low mileage and running but turns out the motor was blown. Held 90PSI compression.. after opening it up and inspecting the motor everything seems like the motor was 200k+ miles. It’s been a minute and I haven’t been active on her, so I will start to update more progress on this.

I decided to actually K-swap this chassis. I’m not throwing money anymore into these damn 420a. When they’re built it’s a cool motor but for me it ain’t it.

Ending up taking out everything that I’m not going to be needed. Cleaned and tried my best to degrease the entire engine. This is how she sits for now meanwhile I search for a K24, CRV transmission parts, subframes, axles, wiring harness, and lots of research to do. This is a project for sure , not a weekend project for me. Though it can be with the right amount of money on hand. Realistically I think the time frame for me will be about a year. That’s my goal. I’m doing most of the work my self to save as much as I can on labor costs.