Chino's Swap, 5sfe to 3sgte Options

[Chinosan89]

Hey guys so before I get all into the swap I'll give a little background info about my celica life. Got my first 6gc after high school, it was a GT (5sfe) and it was automatic. At the time I wanted a car just to get me places with a little swag so that did the trick. After a little while I started looking into body kits and just fun stuff I could do to the car. You'll see my silver car on my profile. Ended up doing a C-ONE bumper, rear lip, painted my hood, new rims, just pretty much all cosmetics. After awhile of researching parts for my car I discovered the gt-four, 3sgte and this forum. After seeing all that I saw, I made no hesitation to act like a baby and just say, "I want, I want, I want".After some continuing research I realized ALL that I would have to do to get that motor into my GT. Auto to manual swap was do-able but didn't have the money for that, the motor, and all other components.

In conclusion I decided to buy a shell that was a manual, shopped around for a good while took about a year to come up with money and found the ride of my dreams. April 2012 I found a manual GT with 264000 miles on it. I bought it without hesitation, I spent $1800 on it. Which some of you think, maybe its a little much to spend that much on a shell, however it was driveable until i bought the motor, but what made this a KILLER deal is that it had the GT FOUR bumper AND hood already on it! So minus the hood and bumper, I spent about $1000 on the car. I bought this car from Dave, he has a black st204 swapped with awd. Met him on this forum and luckily he lived within 50 miles of my location. Talk about a stroke of luck right?!




So now I shop for the motor. I was in school at the time so shopping wasn't too easy as I was constantly overwhelmed with school work. But for some reason at the end of every semester, I find a good deal on something, this was god's way of telling me good job here you go. Last semester I found some konig rims and tires for $250 so yeah. This time, I found a GT FOUR clip for 3200, which is pretty good because it came with the HOOD and BUMPER which were in near mint condition, this clip has a TRD air filter and it is in pristine condition, almost looked like whoever had it just got it impounded or something, no accident marks. Sold the hood and bumper for $800 and threw in a paint job to make them look brand new, all in all knocked about $1000 dollars off the price of the clip.










As far as the clip is coming along now, my buddy trevor is helping me with the swap, some of you might know him, he has a 5th gen and he's known as tjdouble07 on some of the forums.
the motor has been pulled, the harness as been sent out to tweak and ordering some aftermarket parts for the motor!

[dliverance]

Very nice! Kinda jealous