Welcome noob, love to have new guys who are into our beloved cars! What are your goals with the car? What will you be using it for mostly, there are so many directions to go, if you have an end goal in mind you will get much better help here.
If you are staying NA, you could switch to a VX, A, B or T cam. A decent exhaust will help free up some power. Your compression isn't high enough to use a ton of camshaft.
If you are turbocharging it, there are tons of options from mild to wild.
For suspension, the next step would be Ben Kaplan's stuff.
In the end, it depends upon your goals. If you want a nice driver, one of the above cams would bump the power a little bit. The car would at least pull a hill in high gear on the highway. Converting to a manual makes these cars more fun to drive as well.
If you want to run 9's, you have to do a lot more work.
Thank you for your response have to admit there is a massive learning curve when it comes to altering an engine. I am trying to keep my goals very realistic since engine mods can spiral out of control without a good plan.
Goals:
* Something reliable enough to use as a daily driver vehicle.
* I would like to focus on keeping fuel economy at a reasonable level.
* I would like to have any modifications reversible or easily replaceable if for some reason down the road I needed to change it back.
* I do not want to add anything that will stress the engine to unsafe levels (from what I have read the b230ft is a stronger block than the b230f however I plan to overbuild or strengthen anything that might be too weak for the modifications).
* Of course budget is always on the list but since I am in the early stages of this project I don't really know enough to consider what would be too expensive.
Options I am floating:
option #1: Keep the engine NA, switch to a VX, A, B or T cam and add an exhaust (This might be the best option but I wouldn't mind going a little further).
option #2: 16v n/a conversion no turbo - I think this is a really cool idea but I am thinking it may become a chore to maintain and the cost of parts may start to add up quick (this would be my choice if money and practicality were no object but this realistically seems like it would be hard to pull off for a newbie in addition I have no clue how it effects the fuel economy).
option #3: Add a stock turbo or something very similar to the stock turbo and strengthen any weak elements of the b230f (not 100% sure what that might be?) so that it could handle the turbo. This would be the b230f +t option I guess.
option #4: Find a b230ft and switch the entire engine. I'm not sure what the cost would be to do that but I would imagine it's pretty expensive.
I would love to hear what you guys suggest and thanks again for giving me advice on my ideas.