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No offense, but it seems like a lot of your ideas surrounding your car are pretty common ones that are typically bad ideas... piggy back chips, eBay turbos, JDM motors. There are a lot of reasons why these things aren't great ideas for our cars, so if you search around you'll find a lot of discussion surrounding these things. To be brief, on the topic of JDM motors (from Nagano, or Tiger Japanese, or anywhere), here are a few things you might not know:
-They're almost universally over 40k miles. It's very common for importers to roll back odometers on cars, and they're still 20 years old.
-If you do happen to get one with exceptionally low miles (there's no way of verifying it), that doesn't say much to how it's treated. JDM motors are typically abused. For various reasons regarding Japanese automotive laws, owners expect to replace their cars ever few years, after which the car is sold at an auction house. Because of this, it's common to get JDM motors which have had very little maintenance done. Plus, owners beat the crap out of their cars, knowing they'll be replaced.
-Virtually all importers guarantee perfect compression and some even have videos to prove it. However, good compression isn't going to mean much if you throw a rod through the oil pan a week after your 30 day warranty expires--and you can put money on a good portion of them failing to honor their warranties anyways. Besides, even if they include a video of a compression test, it's often difficult to prove that it's the same motor, and it's impossible to prove that the tester didn't just pour a teaspoon of oil into a cylinder to raise the compression numbers.124k is nothing for a VG30 as long the compression is good, and you can get tons of power out of a stock motor (and turbos) if you know what you're doing. It may seem compelling to get a "whole new motor" for the same price as maintenance/repairs for your current motor, but that motor is still going to be 20 years old and used, and it's still going to need the same TLC as yours, if not more. It will still need a timing belt job (I wouldn't trust it even if it had the sticker), still need new turbos (most JDM motors come with blown turbos if any at all), and still need a new clutch. If your motor is actually BAD (ie bad compression), a basic rebuild won't cost much more and it will guarantee a good motor--not just sticking in a used motor and hoping for the best. If you want to run higher boost, you need a new ECU and boost jets, or some other method to raise boost (an electronic boost controller is best). You should also have some supporting mods in place--injectors require an ECU upgrade, and stock injectors are a huge limiting factor, so that's a good time to do them, and you'll generally want some basic BPU parts like intake/exhaust. Remember, just because an option/part is the cheapest doesn't necessarily mean it's the best. On the topic of Z32s, usually the opposite is true. Cheap parts will ruin these cars, on multiple levels.
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21:19:39 11/14/11
