[Acies]

So I'm looking to purchase a car, and I've settled on a CRX. In my area (los angeles) there don't seem to be a lot of HF's in good condition, but I have located a shell that looks good. Right now I'm fairly mechanically inclined and looking to become more so, so my plan is to keep the car maintained myself, and I have about a month of free time right now that I could spend getting it into shape, after which repairs and maintenance will probably be restricted to the weekends. So since there seems to be a shell available, one of my options would be getting a transmission and engine and putting them in. Otherwise I can keep looking until a complete car shows up.

So my first question is whether I ought to only be considering the engine/transmission the car is designed for, or whether there are other good candidates out there. I know that I've heard about a number of CRX's with mid 90's civic engines swapped, but I don't know which engines in particular are good candidates (in terms of both efficiency and being easy to install, I don't want to be making things any trickier than they probably will already be on my first time), or whether or in what cases I should switch the transmission as well. I've been lurking here for a while, and I figured that this forum would probably have an idea of what would be appropriate here.

Second, I'm open to any and all advice on the project itself. I've done a fair amount of research online concerning swaps and spent a fair amount of time working on more minor projects on my last car, a corolla, so I figure that with a month to figure things out I ought to be able to do this, but any advice that simplifies it would be much appreciated.

Thanks, everyone.