Deegee

iTrader: (1)

Sup CL,

I've purchased a 2JZGTE from an Aristo, which came complete with, engine, auto tranny, ecu, and aristo harness and should be here in a few days to a week. My original plans for this project car was to swap this into a Nissan 240sx that needs a lot of body and interior work. I also happen to have an IS250 which happens to be another beater but has flawless interior and body which got me thinking - Why not attempt to swap this into the IS?

So I've been searching here on CL and My.IS and have read the countless outdated threads about how difficult this swap was, and how much time was invested in swapping the 2J into the 2nd Gen IS which is understandable for trying to maintain all the original OE functionality inside the cabin. Which doesn't interest me to the slightest. My project car isn't going to include AC, radio, navigation, or any of the bells and whistles that you come to find in any daily driven car. This project car is purely going to be on the drift track and that's it. It won't hardly see the streets and will most likely be seen on the back of a pickup truck being dragged around from event to event which brings me to my question.

Realistically, why haven't more people installed this prestige motor into our 2nd gen IS? I'm mechanically inclined to do the swap myself and have all the tools to begin pulling and placing the motor in the chassis but when it comes to custom work like welding, or electrical wiring I'd take that to a professional. Keep in mind, I don't plan on even using the OE dash or gauge cluster and will use a third party stand alone kit to manage the MPH, RPM, Temp, etc. Does this swap sound like it can be done in a poor mans garage? I'm not interested in paying a shop to do any swap labor with the exception of custom welding (exhaust, maybe motor mounts?), or oil pan and the electrical wiring to the ECU.

The 240sx has been out for far longer than our 2nd Gen, I realize there are kits that you can buy to make this swap less of a headache. But I'm more interested in the uniqueness the 2nd Gen brings to the table and that my IS has been maintained much nicer than the 240. There are tons of people that have swapped this exact motor into their first gen without any issues and are pushing 1000+ HP, but hardly anything on the second gen. Why is this?

o7iS250

iTrader: (1)

the main difficulties of this swap (from what I've read and spoke to a few lexus techs about) is the wiring and getting all of the factory utilities to work as well without having your whole dash lit up. Swapping an engine is nothing when it's just putting it into the mounts, it's all about the labor hours and miscellaneous parts that need to be acquired, also toyomoto here in Florida put one in their is250. but never released a build thread or ANYTHING on how to do it, he pretty much just went with it and took years and years to build. Research the thread for more info, but if you don't care about the stock utilities, dash, etc then I would say just go for it... it's a project car so time shouldn't be a problem for you.