Rebuild or swap?

[Cliffy15]

Hey all,

Little new to auto performance so I'm quite a newbie at auto mechanics (the FSM confuses me and I'll probably have to start with the Chilton's guide).

I have a '92 S13 w/ KA24DE. The motor has 103K miles on it. Runs very nicely (although I have no compression figures for you), still. I like the N/A performance and probably won't ever be doing a swap to SR20DET that has become so popular, here.

My question is, in order to keep the car running well, when should I be thinking about rebuilder or swapping motors?

Low mileage motors aren't especially easy to come by so I'm thinking I may be better off getting a full rebuild?

Thanks in advance!

[240Kupe]

Well, here is the deal. It all depends on how much money you have and how much power you want.

1) Just rebuilding the motor probably won't help you much.2) You could do some simple bolt ons that would help some(cams, intake, header, exhaust, ecu, etc.) This would provide mediocre power gains at mediocre prices.3)turbo the KA is pricey with some reliability issues, but will provide the most bang for the buck. The down side is that it will take some professional tuning to ever get it to run well.4) The reason the SR swap is so common is because it is more or less do it yourself, where you can get good HP in a do-it-yourself manner. Everything for the swap is pretty much bolt-on. Once again, lots of people have problems with these swaps and if you don't like to work on your car all the time this could be frustrating.

This can be a confusing topic and I know I didn't even break the ice on the details of these options, but it just depends on how far you want to go with it.