Thread: Bad news bears (1997 GTP). Engine replacement?

I posted a while back about my sisters GTP having a rough idle, which turned out to be a smashed spark plug. Well, it ran fine for a little while, then promptly ate the same spark plug 2 more times. My old man had a spark plug lying around with the same thread that was a little shorter, so that seems to have gotten the car running again, but apparently it's got a knock in it now. I looked the plugs over and they're all gouged up, which is pretty convincing evidence that there's metal of some kind flying around inside the cylinder. I'm thinking probably a ring/ring land gave way, but there's no way to know for certain what exactly happened without pulling the head. What is for certain is that the engine is toast, there's no possibility of this being something minor anymore. So my question is, what should we expect to pay for a replacement engine, and what years interchange?

do a compression check

I'm not worried about that anymore. I did do a compression check after it ate the first plug, it was slightly lower but nothing to worry about, however that plug wasn't chewed up either. It also wasn't knocking. When spark plugs are getting chewed up and the motor is knocking, there's no test in the world that's going to give a result I want to see

From what I can tell, any L67 should be a direct bolt in, correct?

Just talked to a guy locally who has one for about $1500 with taxes in, it's complete minus a couple accessories and has roughly 67,000 miles, is this worthwhile?

pulling the heads and checking for damage would be a lot cheaper. I know you have given up on that but you might be wrong there could be minimal or no damage.

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to keep looking for a cheaper engine alternative (odds are pretty good that the combustion chamber is chewed up too so we'll likely need heads as well). Time is a severely limiting factor unfortunately, she needs the car for work so it can't be down for more than a weekend. Otherwise I would do exactly that, I do prefer to have a positive diagnosis before diving into something like this. But if I pull the heads on a Saturday and the cylinder is as brutalized as I'm certain it is, there's no way I can then go and get an engine and swap it in within the rest of the weekend. And I can't think of any situation where there could be minimal to no damage, the spark plugs show that there is definitely metal flying around in the cylinder, and now that it's developed a knock it's pretty hard to believe there's nothing wrong.