1986 Nissan 200sx

The Story

Before the pandemic I was dead set on looking for a project car. I was looking at corvettes, civics, z3 BMW roadster, Volkswagens golfs and cabriolets, Mazda's like a Miata or rx8, mustangs, Nissan pulsars and so on. A couple of month's of going through craigslist, Facebook market place, and eBay i found this 1986 Nissan 200sx. Was it my first pick of the cars I listed? Absolutely not. Did it look like an Ae86? Absolutely. Was I kinda pressured into buying it? Yes, yes I was but it started to grow on me and with the idea of having a car that wasn't really in anyone's radar it lived rent free in the back of my mind. It was 2020 around the beginning of the pandemic, with a stimulus check and money from unemployment, I decided to treat my self to a birthday gift. So around June and July I messaged the person who was selling it and so began the 8 hour trek to bring this puppy home from San Luis Obispo back to LA, not before its brakes go out on the 405 highway (don't worry they luckily came back shortly afterwards) the last 30 minutes before getting home. Got it registered to my name and took it out to some car meets as one would. After a year the problems began. Car started to over heat over and over again, ordered a radiator and a thermostat and it fixed the over heating issue. It was smooth sailing until the engine started to stall out, sputter like crazy and overall not wanting to run well. So it sat for 1 year and a half. Thought I made some headway with it but engine still didn't want to work. Looked at forums and they sort of helped, only thing I could think of was to engine swap it with something easy(easier said than done). Read in the forums that I could easily drop in a ka24e/de with ease and there was talk about other engines too. Again I'm going for something that wont give me too many headaches so I decided to go with the ka swap. Up to current time and after some looking around, the Ka24de's weren't too budget friendly so I ended up buying a ka24e from a friend which is chilling in my backyard at the moment. I'm currently trying to find a transmission for it and it will be ready replace the old ca20e engine it originally comes with.