doin ure own swap, how many of you guys have done ure own? Options

[lx130]

I'm sure a good number of u guys have done your own swaps, but curiosity keeps me thinking... did u guys have any previous knowledge or experience in doing the swap? im assuming you guys already knew about how a car runs an what not, just generally what did you know about teh swap, specially 3sgte swap...

[thespacepanda]

Funny how I get to work and this topic is bumped to the top. I was driving to work and I took a turn a bit hard and my battery came off the tray and fell on my distributor, breaking the lead off. The wire is fine, but I was running on 3 cylinders for a while, and it sounded awful. </story>
Well for the time that it was riding rough I started thinking:
I want to do a 4A blacktop swap. I'm thinking about pulling a loan out and not only buying the engine/tranny but also a beater car for daily driving (gotta get to work), maybe an aw11 or a 5th gen, I dunno. I found a site online that will sell a blacktop with tranny, ecu, harness, etc. for 900 plus shipping. Question is, is this a decent price for a blacktop and if i pull a 4K loan and get the beater for 1k, will 3K cover the cost of the engine and all the things necessary for the swap? It's not turbo so I assume it's going to be a little less work/money to get everything right. Any opinions?