hi my ant has a 1992 rs tbi 305 5 spd, with 82,000 on it, just this weekend she got a new mustang , and she was goin to trade in her car, but they were only goin to give her 1500, so now im thinkin about buying it, the car is in great shape, but i would like to convert it to tpi, what would i need and how invalved is it? also about how much am i lookin at spending on just the stock tpi swap and parts? i know she babys it and takes good care of it, so i think there should still be some good years left in her, with only 82,000 on it. what do you all think? and how much is she worth?


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is this swap iven worth the money and performance gains? what is the performance gain? how much of a pain is it to do?

 

It would be a total waste of resources to do it to the motor that's there; might even slow the car down.

You've got swirl-port heads, the tiniest cam GM ever put in a SBC, and a drinking-straw exhaust, every single piece of which, all the way from the heads to the street, would choke a 4-cylinder. Those things are where the majority of the HP difference between TPI and TBI comes from; not the TPI.

Additionally, the gears in that car suck. You can pick up quite a bit by getting the grocery-cart ratio out of there, and putting 3.42s or some such in it. Once again, that's one of the reasons the TPI cars are often faster, not because of the TPI, but rather because the CAR is set up better to begin with. You won't fix that by swapping a TPI on it; or by doing anything else under the hood for that matter.

Fix the underlying flaws in your existing motor FIRST. That would consist of putting on a set of 87-up LG4/L69/LB9 heads, a better cam, and a set of chassis-specific headers with a high-flow cat and a complete cat-back. Then put a set of decent gears in it. You might find that just by doing that, you'll be leaving 305 TPI cars in the dust; and you won't even want it any more.

 

The list above sums it up. Slap a 3.42 rear end from a V6 in and get a new performance exhuast system from the heads back and you will gain more power then any stock TPI setup.

 

See also https://www.thirdgen.org/techbb2/sho...09#post2257709