There's two routes you can go now.

One is paying more money to have your motor rebuilt, at which point it will probably break again without proper engine management. If you do rebuild the motor with forged internals and turn up the boost like I know you will(because high school student), you are going to need to upgrade a lot more expensive pieces to keep the car safe and reliable.

Route two is to find a running stock motor, buy a megasquirt for a little more than the cost of forged rods, tuning it and having a reliable 200-250 horsepower car which will be more than fast enough until you get a bigger budget.

I'm not saying this to discourage you, but I was in the same boat three years ago. I got a megasquirt first, and over the last three years I've seen many blown up engines on this site. Mine is still running.

Good luck either way.

+1 for finding running longblock and buying a megasquirt.

So, say I save up for mega squirt, I've never really messed with many electronics, how hard would it be for someone like me, to install it. Or should I pay the professionals?

Get a plug n play unit. Its in the name... Or any of the megaSquirt can be hooked up fairly easy.

This forum can teach you how to tune. There are a ton of things good threads. The best way is to start tuning and ask stupid questions. When you've shown that you're putting the effort in,we will help out because we all remember where we came from.

I was horrified of tuning my car when I started this. There were a lot of difficulties along the way but it taught me something I could not learn on my own...and there's also the accomplishment of tuning that car in your garage and returning the favor down the road.

looks good so far

So I finally decided on my actual build route.

Im going back to the ol' stocker bottom end, and Im going to order up a MegaSquirt system from Braineak when I get the bucks, which hopefully I can have by saving on buying OEM parts.

Going to do a little more research on MegaSquirt since it is all still foreign to me.

Anyone else have any ideas on routes and such?

I run my turbo(s) in series with the heater core return line. Nothing wrong with that if you also have a coolant reroute. If you don't have a reroute then the turbo would, IMHO, be too much of a restriction to the flow of coolant thru the rear of the engine.