Six years ago we purchased the first 86, the venerable Sprintex 335 equipped BRZ, as seen here: http://www.ft86club.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1280588It ran for 50k miles by the time it was traded in, and a leak down after the fact showed perfectly good numbers and scoping the bores showed very little wear. The car had a supercharger for at least 35k of those miles, probably more. Lots of track days and it was a blast until the end. The time has come for a rebirth, and we wanted to do a project to see how affordable we can make performance on the platform. So what could be better than when a salvage titled FR-S popped up on craigstlist--enter the #lowbuckfrs, aka "The People's FR-S". Plan is to get it running and then choose a FI platform that will get about 400 hp or so. We're not shooting for CD009 swaps but are going to work around the factory transmission--for now. 

Pulling the VIN and running it through the database we find out that the car actually has 70k something miles, and was a flood car in Houston as well. Was driven for a couple of years, then crashed as above. So at least we know the flood damage was fixed, whatever it might have been. And given the price it was an easy decision. We do know the motor is knocking, but being that it runs at least we get an idea as to what the damage might be. Once we got it inside we can see the car definitely looks like it went for a swim. Headlights are pretty beat as are the tails, not something we're worried about at this point. The important things all work, and running it briefly on and off the trailer there is a hint of rod knock past 3k rpm. At least it has not blown yet so the case halves and heads should be salvageable. First order of business is to take it apart and see what we need.

The teardown came next, not surprisingly we found a bad couple of bearings. Further disassembly revealed a mostly intact motor, but the crank was in bad shape, and the case halves were also a very worn with a 0.25mm out of round measurement where the piston was pushing against the bore. Looking at the condition of the hardware it looks as if this car had had the exhaust and header messed with before, and the injector clips looked to have plier marks on them. This leads me to suspect that it had some kind of FI on there in the past...or at least some major service.

After a few weeks of getting all the parts figured out, we got the case halves back from our machinist. Case halves were bored 0.5mm over, precision honed, and decked.