Topic: Great idea? Or greatest idea?
Hello, all. Yet another over-excited newbie here. A friend of mine has been telling me about Lemons for a while now, and I finally started looking into it seriously. Luckily, it seems that most of my circle of amateur gearhead friends is now out of college and making enough money to actually try something this expensive/stupid/awesome/fun/dangerous. From what I've read on these forums, it sounds like these races are a blast no matter how few laps you car actually drives before dying.
So I started looking around in the obvious place and found this 1977 Porsche 924 with no engine for $500.
http://houston.craigslist.org/cto/3036606264.html
Quite a problem for a bunch of young guys who don't know what the hell they're doing, but it turns out that the 924 forums have an entire section dedicated to engine swaps:
http://www.924board.org/viewforum.php?f … 5f47eda4c2
The first thing I noticed was that more than one member of that board had (apparently successfully) swapped a Chevy 350 V8 into this car. 350s can be found everywhere, but in decent shape it would still break the budget.
Luckily, there's another option. I know a guy with a Chevy Astro who performed a V8 swap a few years back. The guys on astrosafari.com do this all the time, as the original 4.3L V6 is considered by some to be terribly underpowered. As I understand it, the 4.3 is basically a 350 with the front two cylinders chopped off, so the swap requires no modification to the drivetrain.
What I'm thinking is, if people on astrosafari are frequently putting V8s in their vans, we might be able to pick up a well-used 4.3L V6 for dirt cheap, then install it in this 924 using similar methods to those that were used for the 350.
Okay, so in all honesty, after typing that up it sounds like a project that is too complicated for a first-time team. What do you guys think? Should we take the easy way out and just strip out my friend's old Civic?