'04 IS300 - Project (Not Really) Nice Daily

[ScottyB]

OTOH, I'm definitely feeling the idea of a stock-suspended car with ~85-100 more horses and torques, V8 noises and a smooth 6 speed done to hammer-reliable factory standards for a relative financial pittance compared to a LS.  That sounds like a total ball.

thats the direction that would make sense to me too. sure, a 450hp corvette-engined IS sounds great on paper, but like you said, its going to mean you need to essentially upgrade every single thing downsteam to cope with having x2 the intended horsepower...and the swap is $$$ to start with.

as Rex and i said, you're looking at like 260-300hp stock from a 1UZ and to my mind, that's enough to have a TON of fun in an otherwise stock-tire IS, and you can certainly gain a little more power from a tune/intake/exhaust too. it would basically be close to the equivalent of M3 speed with toyota truck reliability, and parts are a wrecking yard away without the "LS tax"

and should you ever get completely stupid later on, from what i understand, these engines eat up boost like an animal since they were so overbuilt.

assuming you can get it wired, seems like a cool way to keep a fully Toyota'd IS that is different and fun while not getting into "i could have just bought a new car for this" territory.

The 2ZZ needs a space in here somewhere as well, but I'm not sure how reliable they were.

they're good. have oil starvation issues but if that's corrected they're easily as good as the B-series hondas. crappy gearing/tuning from the factory made them choked from the factory.