So, things are progressing fairly well with the Lexus V8 conversion. I thought it about time to start posting up some of the progress pics etc.
Bit of back ground. I recently acquired a 2001 SWB DiD with a sickly motor. The idea was to repair the motor and use the car as a diesel for day to day town driving etc. The car has done a high mileage, but is in good all round condition having spend lots of it's life commuting between JHB and the Cape.
Here's the object of our current ministrations ...

Once we had stripped the DiD motor and discovered the cracked piston we did the maths on repairing vs replacing and replacing came out strongly on top. I was slightly glad actually as I always thought the Gen3 SWB would make an awesome toy if fitted with a nice grunty V8.
Thus, we started on the V8 conversion. The shorty is a manual which makes things a bit easier, but did require a flywheel and adaptor plate to be made up. We CAD'ed up all the bits and pieces and sent them off to the engineering folks.
Last week these arrived.



We bolted all the bits up including the bell housing off the gearbox and hit the first slight snag. The flanges of the stock exhaust manifolds foul the side of the bell housing. Not a major, but requires a small amount of fabrication on the exhaust manifolds. We are trying to do this by changing as little as possible just to see if we can.

It was then time to do a test fit to see if any other issues arose. We fitted the engine into the bay without the sump (it definitely fouls the front axle) and any ancillaries. We then built the front of the engine up with the PS pump, air con and alternator. We opted to make use of the Lexus ancillaries. The idea it to keep all the Lexus stuff Lexus and the Paj stuff Mitsubishi where possible.

Things fit amazingly well. The drivers side header misses the steering column. All the ancillaries fit with no mods at all. The connections for the air con pump are even the same as the Lexus ones (although the one pipe is too short).
The only major item that fouled things was the oil filter so we are going to remote mount that which was the plan all along anyway.


We are now waiting for our rear bowl sump to arrive so that we can fabricate the engine mounts. The mounts line up to within 5mm!
Next up are the electrics, fuel system and rest of the thousand and one little jobs.
I'll post up as we progress.