And now for something completely different...

I decided to take a short break from making my typical "pissed off guy with a keyboard" rants in order to spend some time posting about my car project.

As is probably obvious from a handful of my other posts, I like to drive (well I enjoy the driving part, sometimes the other people ruin it for me :P). At the beginning of the year I finally purchased a new car ('09 Yaris, which I spoke of in a prior post). One excellent benefit of this being that it allowed me to start work on my old car (the one which the Yaris replaced for "work car" duty). It's a 1989 Nissan 240SX, I purchased the car back in 2005 *top picture* for $1000, which at the time I thought was an amazing deal since drifting was really starting to get popular and even totally trashed 240's were "e-baying" for $2500+.



Over the years I used it as a work car I did a few modifications to it (suspension, wheels, exhaust, etc.) *pictured above in Aug. 2007*, but nothing really substantial, since it needed to be drivable for the next time I needed to get to work. However with the purchase of the Yaris, I now finally have the time to give it a proper build. Current plans for the car are to set it up for Autocross (SCCA), and possibly some drift events, while making it still reliable enough to drive to the race and back home in one piece.

I plan to rebuild the stock engine (a SOHC KA24E) to make somewhere in the neighborhood of 180-200HP, which combined with the cars current weight of ~2500lbs. should make for a pretty quick track car, without being so powerful that it's a pain in the ass to keep control over. The KA24 series motor gets a lot of shit for being a "truck motor", but I really think it holds a lot of potental, so I'm uninterested in swaping to any of the common replacements (SR20, RB20, CA18, etc.). Current plans are to change the motor from fuel injected to a dual Weber side draft carb setup (either 40 or 45 DCOE). Giving me basically all of the control as a ITB (individual throttle body) setup, without the hassle of having to modify the factory ECU, or buy a programable ECU to control the fuel injection, but I will have to make a custom intake to mount them. Plus it's not a setup I've seen very much at all, since basically everyone stays fuel injected, so that adds a little "cool factor" to it, when someone looks under the hood, besides the fact that velocity stacks look awesome :).

Hopefully this will become a segment of the blog I keep updated fairly often (1-2 a month) whenever I make any major steps in the projects completion. Plus it should make a nice change of pace from my usual angry rants to something a little more relaxing.

For those interested, here are a few shots of the projects current status...