What Now?!?!?

[85CHRGRon17"]

I'm new here so I'm not sure if this is the right place for this but....
I inherited a 1985 dodge charger from my grandfather with 57000 mile on in it. I've had the car for about two years now, used as my summer car. I haven't done any serious mods...just: wheels, tires, exhaust, and a system.

I'm at the point where I either want to start building this motor or just do a straight up swap?!?!? I've done a lot of reading online and recently on this forum. What do you think would be the best place to start for increasing horsepower? It seems as though there is no aftermarket for these cars so I'm looking some opinions and options?

[freebienova]

Well depends on what you like , do you want to turbo it ? do you want to leave it n/a ? Lots can be done if you dont turbo , some porting work , cam swap, mill the head to up the compression and a few others . If you turbo it you have lots of options , the sky is the limit (oh and dont forget money!) horsepower can be made easy with a turbo , the other thing to consider is reliability , my biggest opinion (because every one has one!) if you drive it everyday , be conservative , and if its your first one, know a 2.2's limits. Guys in my town thrash the crap out of there cars and then go "Oh why did it break again" , lots of options , tell us a direction and the advice will be more than you can handle , my two cents Bill in s.a.

[turbokid]

N/a builds are not as much fun IMO. N/a builds tend to be just as much work, parts seem to be harder to find if you want real performance, and they just dont net you what I would want for the amount of work.
There are a couple things you can do performance wise.
Find yourself a shelby charger parts car. Motor, trans, computers, wiring harness. THen switch it over to a t2 set up (I know you have read about this.) Then body wise you can you can grab the front, hood, GFX and have a bad ass shelby charger clone.
You visited Donovan's Dodge Garage ?

[85CHRGRon17"]

I guess I'm still kind of indeterminate on what I want to do. This past spring I had a friend of mine that has a shop remove the emission and egr system on my car because it was causing some problems...We checked a lot of things and just did a general tune up plugs wires and usual stuff. We checked the compression and it came up low but consistent among all the cylinders. He also said that the turbos tended to decrease the life of these engines greatly.

So to start at this point I think I would like to do an N/A build...So where would be the best place to start? I like the simplicity of the carb, I have a lot of experience with motorcycles. So can i re-jet the carb like on a motorcycle or bump up to a larger carb? Or should I start with the motor?