You dont need some of those things, they were just what I would install to make a goodcar to drive daily. The last car I looked at, the guy had kept the stock rad, and said he had nothing but problems with the car overheating, so I would definatly reccomend upgrading the rad to an aluminum unit. I also forgot to mention you cant retain a mechanical fan either way you go, so you will ave to upgrade to an electric setup. The Greddy manifold is also not nescessary, you can retain the stock intake with the over the valvecover setup, and they make cheap intercooler kits for that setup as well. Theres also the wiring that needs to be taken care of. I think if you do it yourself you have to swap in the skyline instrument cluster whick takes some work. Wirings something I prefer to have done right once, and would rather pay to have it done, but if you have the skills and the patience, then I’d do it yourself.
So, if you have a donor car, I guess to do a bare minimum swap would require
Skyline front clip- Around $3000
Mckinney full swap kit- $1260
Quality aluminum rad- $500 (you could find cheaper, but consider this an investment)
Ebay intercooler kit- $300-$400 for the factory intake setup style
I’d also at least change the sparkplugs in the engine.
Forgot to mention replacing the clutch above too, much easier to do with everything out of the car than to pull the tranny back out.
I’m sure I’m missing a couple things…
On the KA engines, we pulled one apart at work to check out the insides and replace some stuff before going back into the car. With 230 000km on it, the factory hone marks were still visible on the cylinder walls and all the bearings had little to no wear on them. Cams also had minimal wear. rebuild parts were quite cheap, and I imagine you could rebuild a KA for probably a grand, maybe less if it dosent need much and you dont go too crazy.