TL;DR
Pros: Not too hard, huge aftermarket support, lots of knowledge and resources available, you’ll look very cool
Cons: Pricey, lots of discontinued OEM parts, older cars mean more problems you’ll have to address, you’ll have to give it more care than a modern car
Gonna try and ignore budget restraints for this question so you can have a different perspective.
On a scale 1-10 (10 being most difficult), I would rank it a 6 on the difficulty of working on it - just from personal experience. It’s honestly not too difficult of a car to work on, and the best part is that because so many people have worked on it, there’s a lot of information on how to do things and lots of people to ask questions for when you’re stuck on something. I definitely recommend you have prior experience working on cars (or a mechanic friend), not many places will work on S-chasses just because of the age, so you’ll have to do a lot of it yourself.
The downside is that these cars are old and you are guaranteed to put in work. There’s no avoiding the eventual degradation of many mechanical parts, most commonly the timing chain which is hell on earth to get to unless you’ve done it before. You’ll also need to stay on top of inspections because with older cars you can’t just wait until something breaks to replace it - if one thing breaks, I guarantee you something else will be broken with it and then you’ll be out of a car for up to a few weeks.
The other downside is that while it does have a very extensive aftermarket, many of its stock parts are discontinued… You will have to look very hard for parts that are not made by an aftermarket supporter. For example, door locks are discontinued, many hatch parts are discontinued, weatherstrips/insulation parts are discontinued… You have to be actively searching in places like Ebay, FB Marketplace, forum marketplaces, etc. And while I said I would ignore budget, I will say that it can get pricey. Be prepared to shell out $300+ for a necessary/required mechanical part. Definitely not horrible prices, but if you’re not financially stable with expendable income I wouldn’t recommend the S-chassis just yet.
For context, I used to have a 2001 Eclipse that I was working on as my project. There were so many issues, but the glaring issue is that it had no aftermarket support and a very small community. If you had questions, you were basically SOL a lot of the time. I also felt like it was just harder in general to work on - I’ve worked on a 2008 Focus, a 2010 Mazda3, and a 2006 Scion tC… All were very straight forward but had their own set of challenges, but nothing quite like the Eclipse. The Mazda was the most expensive, the Scion was the easiest, the Focus was the cheapest, and the Eclipse was the hardest.
The S13 is solid and straightforward to work on and I like that a lot. Even for me - someone with limited experience working on cars - I was able to figure out a lot of things (with occasional road bumps of course). There’s no weird parts or many special tools needed - simple hand tools will do the trick.
Final note… if you manage to find an S13 for a good price (these days, less than $8000; depends on what area you live in), more than likely you’ll need to do an engine rebuild if you want it running longer than a year (at best). Unless you have a way of doing it yourself, you’ll likely spend upwards of $2500+ on rebuilding it. You’ll probably think “I’ll just swap something else in” but if it’s not in top-notch condition you’ll probably need to rebuild that too… And even something in good condition like a good SR will be about $3500-$6000. What I’m trying to say is that you should have an extra $3K lying around before getting an S13 if you plan on actually driving it lol
That’s about it on my end. Remember, this is all from my experience - your mileage may vary. Hope this helps someone.
