I’m happy to report that the motivation continued to flow in my garage last weekend. On Saturday Morning Hattie and I lifted the new SR20 onto the engine stand and got it secured. All of my daughters show some interest in car projects, but Hattie really seems to like using tools and learning about working on cars. She loses interest of course (she’s only 4 after all) but I always enjoy when my kids want to hang out with me in the garage. I do very little to push them into liking cars because I want them to do their own thing in life, but I try to include them if they show some interest.

I decided to take a short break from removing items from the donor chassis and work on tearing down and inspecting the SR20 drivetrain that will eventually end up in my coupe build. I spent a few hours removing everything from the engine to repair it for a refresh. It’s really nice working on an engine I am familiar with (probably the only one I am very familiar with honestly) because it makes things move a lot more smoothly. Before long I had the engine torn down as far as I’d like to take it.

My plan for this engine is very simple and more or less identical to the process I used to refresh the other SR in my hatch. I’m planning to install a full gasket kit and other maintenance items like a fresh water pump and thermostat. Everything will be thoroughly cleaned up and I’ll replace all of the rubber hoses located under the intake manifold. I’ve elected to install a stock turbo manifold and oil pan in place of the Megan and Tomei units that came on the engine as it makes the most sense for what I plan to do with the car- cruise around town. I’ll get into more detail about the engine refresh in a future post and try to include some part numbers that people might find useful for their own SR20 overhaul.

Some of the things I found when taking the engine apart were fairly comical. Nearly every portion of the exhaust side was missing 25-50% of the bolts needed to secure everything. Again, I am very thankful I made it home in this car without breaking down. The engine seems to be in relatively good shape from what I can tell though- it just seems like things either weren’t maintained all that well or were installed without a lot of attention to detail. In any case I’ll be sure to get everything fixed up before installing this engine into my coupe shell.

After the engine was torn down, I finished removing the remaining items from the donor chassis to get it ready to be sold. I’ve sold about 50% of the parts from the car that I don’t need, but things have slowed down a bit due to the holidays. I am hoping to move out the rest of my inventory in the new year. Thankfully the weather has been mild and we haven’t had much snow to speak of so that leaving my wife’s van outside for a couple weeks hasn’t been a problem.

Today is the first day of my time off for the holidays, so my plan was to travel out to Tim’s house to hang out and possibly help him with the SR20 for his own build (not that he needs much help as he is a mechanic by trade.) I also need to remove the stock wheels and suspension from my coupe chassis to install on the donor car in order to get it ready to be sold. Once I have those items, I should be able to throw them on the car and hopefully get it out of my garage ASAP. However, my oldest daughter woke up with the flu, so that plan has been put on hold for a week or so until I’ve got time to try again. I’ll likely continue to clean up my SR in the mean time when I have a minute next week during the holidays.

Well, that’s all for today- a relatively quick update, but I am sure everyone else is just as busy with the holidays as I am. I’m really happy with the progress I have made so far on this project though! I’m looking forward to continuing the momentum into 2019.

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas next week! Thank you as always for stopping by. Take care!

Damon