How many of you guys have done one? I have been thinking of the pros and cons of one and I was reading an article online and it had a great point about abuse levels of a 4 vs an 8 cylinder car. What do you guys think is a good choice, redo the 4 cylinder and drive it until I find a GT or lx 5.0 or swap the motors?
5.0 Swap
- Thread starter 1990_LX
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swap motors, its not that complicated and if you really need to you can drive it with the 4 cyl suspension until you get the $ to upgrade, It will be slammed but it will be driveable. When my buddy owned my car he daily drove it with a 302 and t5 on stock 4 cyl suspension for two years. The only thing we did was swap in an 8.8 rear
I swapped a 351 into my 4 cyl car. the only difference between the 5.0 car and the 4cyl car besides the most obvious(motor,trans,rear,) is the brakes and the springs. the body and chassis is identical.Most people opt to use the 4 cyl springs anyway.I reccomend starting off with a 4cyl b/c the torque boxes are nice and straight. most 5.0 cars that had manual trans in them have the torque boxes all twisted up. I left the stock brakes in my car too! these are light cars and don't require tremendous stopping power at all. so no don't worry about that unless you plan on removing the booster and switching to manual brakes then I would upgrade to bigger rotors and calipers.
anyone else
A few other differences to keep in mind when doing the swap is the tranny crossmember and the rear brake line. You will have to get a "double hump" crossmember for the tranny so you can run duals and the brake line running underneath the car to the rear end is routed differently in the v8 cars than the 4 cyl due to the the path of the exaust. the 4 cyl car only had exaust on one side of the car so they used the spot where there would be a hanger for a second exaust for the brake line on the 4cyl car.
yessir, stock 4 cyl brakes werent really that bad the car is light anyway. The onyl difference bewteen 4 cyl and v8 brakes are the front rotors and calipers. the rears are the same. The only reason I recently changed over to v8 spindles and brakes is because im going 5 lug, we had the 4 cyl rear brake line on it as well and dumped the exhaust before the rear
I did a 4 cly to V8 swap. I had a notch that I ended up wrecking. My friend had a 4cly hatch that I got for 300 bucks. So I pulled this car into the drive way right behind the wrecked car, and just started swapping parts. One thing I did not realize was that the harness were pretty much the same. Both 87 lX's, But I ended up swapping out the harness also when I didn't need to. All that would have needed to be done was the motor harness. But I swapped everything over. It was fun and a good learning experience for me. I was about 21 or 22 at the time. So if you have the time to do it. I say go for it. You don't really need the know how. I had no clue at the time. I just looked at what I was going to do for the day and then figure it out the best way to do.