Benefits of a turbo over an engine swap. Options

[macavely]

Ok I was thinking about this for a while well over a year. First I was thinking about a 3SGTE swap then chose thought a 4AGZE swap would be more economical. Now I see that a turbo set up is the way to go (for me at least), because of price, availability.
Yea a lot of people might say that if I can take the 3g’s that I’m going to spend on a turbo setup and just do an engine swap. Yea I don’t think so. I’m taking a page out the playbook of those crazy corolla guys. For some reason the love the 7afe engine and I found out why. They have been boosting then 7afe to 280 hp on stock internals. I have found a few sites that have everything I need to do that too.
280 hp from a turbo


What do you some of ya’ll think about his?

[97sccelica]

well, i think the best thing about turboing the stock engine would be that i can go in my garage and 45 minutes later the car will be NA again

and please dont spend that much on a kit. dont forget that most likely the piping wont work and the exhaust stuff they give you will have to be modified.

also the turbo that comes with that kit is small and i highly doubt that they can get 280hp with it on a 7afe.

as of now im running 8psi on my setup and believe me, thats about all the power i want with a FWD car. i have gone to parking lots and going through a hard start with my hands off the wheel and the car wants to fly in a different direction everytime

you can have a good setup for about $2k if you take your time gathering the parts

the 7afe engine may not be all that strong but im sure it can reliably handle 200-220hp and last for quite a while but anything above that goes into really high boost levels.

with any engine, so long as you make sure it gets all the fuel it needs can be turboed to make a lot of power over stock HP and still be pretty reliable. the stress on the internals is not as bad as some of you think. it is more stress but the fact that the engine is making more power makes the engine handle the up and down motion of the pistons more easily due to greater momentum.

if maintained, and not driven hard all the time, a 7afte could make 200-220 hp reliably and last for atleast 75-100k miles depending on the condition of the engine before the turbo was installed(mine had 13k miles on a rebuild) and for most of my driving, i dont even hit boost.

an engine swap wil always yield better performance but at the cost of long down time, potential insurance problems, in my case more money, and emmissions problems.

and really, some of you guys shouldnt be so doubtful of something you havent tried