I see this as my last chance to sell the car and get a decent amount of money out of it .. cuz it's pushing on to being 5 years old, has 53K miles, and is still in relatively excellent condition on the outside as well. Once it hits 5+ years, I'll have probably around 65-70K miles on it and I won't be able to get more than $6-7000 for it.

On the other hand if I keep it, I just don't know how much longer it's gonna keep going without any major problems. So far it's been an excellent little machine, but I'm just not so sure in the quality of work I've done to it so far. Which is also the main reason why I'm not sure about whether or not to install the turbo kit ..

 

Modding is an extension of ones self, if we stopped to think about it as investment we would be driving Vespas. Turbo it and another sole just like yourself will be waiting inline to buy it when that day comes.

 

I'm not gonna lie, I love modding my car. Every little thing I add onto it makes me feel better and better when driving it .. it's just starting to get outta hand in relation to my budget.

As far as the turbo is concerned, I already bought it so it's not about the money anymore ... I just don't want my car to become high maintenance all of a sudden because of it. If it was manual and I could use the MSP ECU I would feel a lot better about it, but using the FM O2 clamp and the BEGi RRFPR instead just doesn't make me feel right. I'm a n00b when it comes to FI of any sort, and I don't wanna kill my daily driver. Hope that makes sense.

 

Totally makes sense. I'm glad the ECU was the least of my worries (the easiest part of the install by far).

And yeah, the car will be a little bit more 'high maintenance'. You gotta let it warm up before driving it more than ever, you need to let it cool down a bit before shutting down, especially if you romped on it. You have to monitor your oil pressure, your air/fuel ratio.. and you must beware of any sudden unexpected rush of power.

You'll consume a little oil (**** gets hot lol.. definitely use an oil cooler of some sort), have shorter oil change intervals (and need to deeefinitely keep on top of them), need to use premium fuel, will get awful gas mileage if you do a lot of autocrossing or road course racing, will have all sorts of new sounds and surges and other less 'refined' things going on.

it's so much fun though

if you were closer I'd offer to let you drive my car to see if it's what you want. Honestly, I probably wouldn't have gone through the work had I known the outcome (it really isn't that much faster, and it's quite a bit of work and money --for me, I really don't like the way a highly turboed car drives.. the lack of down low power, jarring surge of power at the midrange, etc.. I think a supercharger would please me a lot more). I don't regret it though, because it was (and still is) an AWESOME learning experience.

plus it gave me something to do during my winter break :P

 

^^ Yup that makes sense KF.