Project Nissan 240SX: Day 1
04.13.08 - 01:29pm
I don’t often speak of it but I’m a huge car fan. To be more precise, I love small 2 seat rear wheel drive cars. The lighter and more powerful the better. In addition to those cars, I love the Japanese supercars from the 1990’s. In particular I’ve always loved the R33 Skyline, I feel it’s the ideal compromise of lightweight power like the R32 but with decent body sculpting and comfort like the R34. Since it’s damn near impossible to get an R33 in the US, I have been fixated upon the Nissan 240sx. On Friday I picked up my first 240sx and Project 240SX was officially started.
The Car
What I bought was essentially a rolling chassis. The car has 237,000 miles on the chassis and drive-train so I knew it was nearly dead. What I didn’t know was the engine would blow up on me after driving 14.1 miles. I was within half a mile of my house, I would have made it too except for the traffic. No worries though, I got the car towed home the last half mile and it now sits in my garage. Asides from the blown motor the car is in rather nice shape for being an 18 year old car.
The Plan
I have begun tearing down the motor with the goal of performing a minor engine swap to simply get the car running. I’ll be upgrading from the KA24E which was stock to the KA24DE which came with later 240’s. Asides from a few minor accessory placements, the only major difference is the head which was upgraded from single to dual overhead cams and went from 12 to 16 valves. The KA24DE will be a good base to start from with this project and it should easily let me hit my first goal of 200whp(wheel horsepower).
First up though before dreams of shredding rubber is carefully tearing the engine down and pulling the block and transmission. I have roughly 7 weeks to do the entire swap and rebuild the car as best I can so my posting me become erratic as I close in on completion. In the meantime I will also be finishing up the Cold Enough Cascade and breaking ground on the unnamed twin-evap autocascade I have in the works. A rough summer approaches with many curses but I relish the chance of rebuilding an entire vehicle.
Nice, looking forward to reading about this, I would like to do something like this but don’t have the time/money/skills etc.. Will this be a daily driver for you too?
Cool. I have a 1994 second generation Toyota MR2. From what you described, you would have loved the turbo version..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_MR2
I actually like the MR2 but it’s hard to find a cheap one here in Atlanta and I wanted to start with a simple front engine RWD platform. Beautiful car though.