28 Years of Grime

I have found a very effective method for removing the congealed juices that have accumulated where the engine was once located.  A Five Year Old and a spray bottle of Purple Power:

Why would you do that to a Porsche?

First let me tell you that bastardizing a Porsche was not my first choice.

I went through a lot of work searching for the right platform.  Should I pick up a 1st or 2nd gen DSM? Do I stick with the turbo4? Maybe a v6 Mustang...

Being a member/lurker on NewEngDSM, I have grown a strong appreciation for rear wheel drive applications of the 4G63 Engine out of the 90-99 DSMs.  In our club there are many such applications from an 8.2sec RWD Talon to MightyMaxs to a TR7 to a Fiero and an S2000.

I began researching for MY rwd donor.  Maybe a C3 Corvette? Those can be had for short money.  Alas I live in New England, and trying to find a Vette without frame rot is like trying to find a C3 owner without a mullet. How about an FC RX7?  Those have withstood all kinds of swaps in the past.  And then I thought what about those wierd front engine Porsches?  The ones that the Porsche community barely recognizes because they are cooled by, gasp, water.  There are a few folks who have stuffed a Chevy 350 engine under the hood of a 944.

So after a bit of hunting I found an interesting specimen.  The previous owner had bought it for a parts car.  The guy before him had wrinkled a fender, and as we all know, if you wrinkle a fender the car might as well be scrapped...  Another benefit of using a Porsche as a platform is that Porsche owners are afraid of rain and never see the snow, and almost never rust.

This is what followed me home.  A 1985.5 944 with 102,000 miles.

Backstory

Hi I am Dan, and I am going to bastardize a Porsche.

Let me give you a back story, I will keep it brief.

As a commuter to college, I thought it would be a great idea to drive 50 miles each day to school in a fast AWD car.  So I put together a few bucks and bought myself a 95 Eagle Talon TSI AWD.  What a bad idea that was.  I modified the car with upgraded turbos, and intercoolers, and exhaust, and fuel pumps and on and on.  After all of this work I had a really fast car that was aweful in the snow and was suprising reliable.

After school I did all the family stuff (job house kids). On my way home from work one day the car left me stranded for the last time (crankwalked and took out the cam sensor).  AAA to the rescue and the car was pushed off the driveway and left there.  A new engine was sourced and put on the engine stand.

That was 5 years ago.

Since then mother nature has been really mean to the Talon.  Rust in all of the wrong places has been the worst of it.

I decided that the Talon is now beyond saving, and I have began looking for a new "fun" vehicle.