10/10/2025
This is my personal project. Short story is I bought this 1994 Nissan 240sx s13 convertible as a shell, put a bmw motor in it with bad fabrication, drove it once and it's sat, it's back under the knife for the idea I had originally but the proper way.
Long story: about 2 years ago I bought this car from my boss at the time for $500. He bought it to take the front and rear subframes which is about all the car had. An s13 is my dream car from the time I was about 9 years old from watching drifting on YouTube back in the day and Adam LZ. When I saw the car I didn't know ASC converted a small number of s13 coupes into convertibles, which was always my only gripe about s-chassis being coupe and hatch only. No matter the condition I absolutely had to have it. I begged and begged Alan to sell me this car he wanted to just get rid of it, he knew if I he let me buy it, it would sit at his shop forever. Which is exactly what happened. At the time I had an 02 bmw e46 325i parts car which I pulled the subframes and motor out of to swap into my new s13. I spent months with the help of Alan and a few friends and of course my very supportive wife swapping and gabbing in the subframes from the bmw and the engine. Alan was a massive help on the wiring for this swap and essentially taught me how to build a standalone ecu off of the oem harness and ecu. The car finally ran and drove, so I (sketchilly) drove it 4 miles down the hill to my house. It was going to be a long road of fixing all the bad fab and making things like the trailing arm rear suspension work properly with good geometry, and I was ready. Then my closest friend at the time blew up the engine in his e46, and couldn't afford to buy an engine, so I made a deal he could borrow my m54 since I had to pull it out anyway. A few months go by and my wife decides to put a massive turbo on her bmw x3 but the awd transmission would fail under the power. The last thing she needed was a strong zf 5 speed to drive the car she spent months building, so of course I said I'm not using it right now, you take it and I'll buy a refreshed one. Over the course of about a year friends needed parts the s13 had and I kept procrastinating working on it so I kept letting people borrow or have parts off it until it was basically a shell again. I lost motivation for a few months as I realized what I had done and what the likely future of my cut chassis s13 vert would end up as, I almost sold it several times to someone who was going to cut it apart and use body panels, I had some people come look it at to try and restore, I'm so thankful things didn't line up right and I had atleast a night to think about it before any of these people could trailer it off my driveway the next day. (If you're seeing this I'm sorry, I'm attached to the car!) so the opportunity for what the car is going through now came to be from another friend who has an e46 being fully restored and built and he bought a no title parts car. He didn't need anything but a few body panels and the manual swap out of it, and so the door was obviously opened. I hopped on it and made him a deal with the chassis which he pretty much gave me (thank you so much Cayden, your literally a part of my dreams coming true). So I cut the floor out of my s13 and cut the body off the e46 and went to work with measurements and planning using the last 2 years of newly gained fab skill and knowledge. The final product of this car will be an e46 with s13 very body and that's exactly everything I want my dream s chassis to be! M54 is by far my favorite engine ever produced, the s13 coupe is my favorite car ever produced, and out of the hundreds of cars I've driven on and off track the e46 (for the price point) is my preferred suspension design, and I even get to keep the early 2000s crayon smell "drivers car" leather interior from the bmw.
