Camaro Forums - Chevy Camaro Enthusiast Forum

Careful, dude...

I did something similar and it cost me a lot more than expected and was a lot harder.

I bought a loaded 94 for $800 in August of 2008. The car had 130k miles on it and had a bad engine. Head gasket gone on the RH bank.

To minimize down time I planned to swap in a used 3.4 and be done with it. It didn't turn out that way.

First of all, do you know how the engine comes out in a 4th gen F-body? I didn't and what I learned came as a very unpleasant surprise.

The only 3.4s I could find had a ton of miles on them so I held out for 6 months until I found one with less than 70k on it. The seller turned out to be a liar and that engine turned out to be junk so that was a waste of some money.

The front suspension and steering components had 130k on them and it seemed crazy to have everything apart and not replace bushings and balljoints.

I ended up rebuilding the original engine, which turned out to have a cracked RH head. At least I could use the one from the used engine I bought.

My cheap, quick project turned out to be a $4000, year-and-a-half monster that I could ill afford at the time.

On the positive side, the car went into service in August of 2010 and I've had absolutely no problems since then. Well the power steering pressure hose seeps and bit and all the Freon leaked out of the a/c system. Not too bad, though, considering how many things I had apart and how long they were apart.