Hey guys, after searching through tons of threads and googling myself to death, I finally decided it was time to throw in the towel and ask for help.

I own a 1998 Civic hatch with everything stock on it, except for an AEM intake that came with the car, and it has 70k on it. My goal is to get to somewhere in the 180-200whp range, because this is my daily and I just want something with more oomph in it. It being my daily, I'm kinda hell bent on keeping ac and ps because I'm a wimp. I have ~3k to spend.

From what I have gathered, I can 1. Swap, 2. Turbo, or 3. Supercharge. N/A seems too costly to reach those numbers, unless I'm mistaken?

I don't really want to swap because my engine is on the lower side of miles, and I don't exactly want to rip it out just yet. Maybe I could look into a b-series on hmotors in a bit, but I really want to know if there is a reasonable alternative before going full swap.

The problem I've been running into with turbo and supercharging is finding a decent kit still in production. All of the threads I've read reference getting a greddy turbo or JRSC but they're no longer made for my car from what I found; again, am I mistaken? I live in Southern California, and haven't been able to find anything used.

That leaves me with piecing together a turbo kit from ebay right? From what I gather, the cheapo "kits" on there seem a little sketchy in terms of reliability and part quality; I've heard plenty of stories of plastic oil lines failing etc. And my fear with piecing together a kit is getting the wrong parts/things that aren't exactly compatible.

I really just want to know what options I have at the moment, and the price entailed with each of those. I'm pretty noobish to the whole boosting scene, though I've been wrenching on cars for a while and reading as much as I can on here. Any advice would be great, thanks.

 

You live in California. You're basically fucked. You can either boost it and ride dirty, or swap it, go through BAR and Carb, and be fine.

 

I guess that's exactly what I expected, thanks though ahaha.

 

cant you find like the edelbrock turbo kit for that isnt that carb legal?

 

I tried finding he edelbrock kit, but I couldn't. The closest I got were a few error pages on edelbrocks website ahaha.