This crazy idea we had aka developing the plan

We had been talking about the possibility of starting on a car related project for a while but it wasn’t until mom came home one day complaining about how incredibly slow the 2.5L Jeep was that we knew what the project would be.  At first we were looking at putting a turbo on the 2.5L but that engine wasn’t built to handle it and it would have been more hassle and expense than it was worth.  Swapping in a small block Chevy was a popular option for previous pioneers on the same journey but after a little discussion we decided that for the money we could make more power with a turbo charged 4 cylinder.  With the intention of making the Jeep a summer daily driver, we also considered the fuel economy benefits of the fuel sipping 4 cylinder with a stomp on it turbo power option (This whole gas sipping thing was a great theory but not a reality when you live at WOT, yeah dad I am talking about you!).  Another of the added benefits of the turbo route was the 4 cylinder setup would be a few hundred pounds lighter.  With Nick’s prior experience with the Neon\SRT4 platform it didn’t take long before we were online looking for a PT Cruiser GT or SRT4 donor vehicle.  The one drawback to our plan was that we would be sacrificing some torque down low but with a higher stall converter and the smaller SRT4 turbo we were betting that it wouldn’t be a problem for what we wanted to do.

When looking for a donor one of the important things we settled on was making sure we could get the complete vehicle.  We didn’t want to have to keep looking for small bits and pieces as we need them and in hind sight this was a decision that saved us a lot of money. There were countless times during the project that we were able to leverage pieces from the donor that would have otherwise halted progress while waiting on parts.

Once the platform and engine setup were determined the last big piece of the drivetrain to figure out was the transmission but that deserves a post of its own.