Thread: P38 HSE: Powered by Ford

Leftlanetrucking on the RangeRovers.net forum did a 6 litre conversion to his P38A some year back. He might have some useful info for you.

Yeah, I've been following his thread for a while. Hopefully I wont hit as many hurdles as he did.

Promised photos of the adapter I designed and got a great mate to machine up for me:

Torque converter side. The gold ring is a reinforcing washer that sits on top of the standard LR flex plate.



Crankshaft side of the adapter:



Still waiting for my goodies to arrive but have material to now knock up some engine mounts.

Ok. Made some more progress on the P38. I made some engine mounts out of 5mm mild steel plate.



Also, back to the adapter between the flexplates, here are a couple of photos of how they sit





I snapped up some great roller rockers last week. The problem now is that they wont fit under the stock rocker covers. I bought some new rocker covers that fit over the roller rockers but now the upper inlet wont fit



Even with a 16mm piece of aluminium between the upper and lower inlet tracts, the upper manifold still fouls on the rocker cover.



However, I found a CAD file sharing website that has a drawing of the part I need, a spacer between the two tracts. Saves me lots of time drawing this myself.



I've got a good mate who converted his milling machine to CNC so he can knock this up in no time at all!!

Doh!!! That last picture is from a CAD file sharing website that I use. That CAD drawing is out to buggery so my good mate Matt and I started from my sketch and drew a new CAD. Progress now being made on the spacer.

Good news is my big box of goodies has arrived so now can assemble the engine minus the pushrods. Should be a matter of a couple of weeks now......

I've made some progress. Regarding the GT40 spacer, my good mate and I drew some plans on CAD and then he got machining on his CNC mill.



This here is a cardboard template for mounting the Land Rover V8 bracket for the air con and power steering pumps to the Ford V8. I needed to bring the bracket out 40mm from the Ford cylinder head.



While I still had the inlet manifold off, I drilled and tapped some threads into each port as I'll be fitting vapor injected LPG to the Rangie later in the year.



Now because I'm mounting the Land Rover accessory bracket onto the Ford, the coil packs will not fit there as the air con compressor will be in the way. Given that my engine sits about 20mm further forward than the Land Rover V8 plus the generous firewall shape, I had plenty of room at the back of the engine to mount the coil packs, just like Land Rover did to the Thor and GEMS V8. Much tidier too. I had to pick apart the wiring loom to re-route the coil wires to suit.



Here are a couple of shots of the completed accessory bracket bracket. 2x 20mm thick aluminum plate bolted together onto the Ford cylinder head with 3x 3/8 holes for the bracket bolts. The added thickness will bring all pullies inline with each other. The Ford has 6pk belts and the Land Rover has 7pk but everything should line up.





Bracket attached. Happy days.





Unfortunately I discovered some bad parts of my build. The roller rockers I bought have cracks in them. This was after I setup the valvetrain to suit these rockers. Still waiting on a reply from Howards Cams regarding their unlimited lifetime warranty.



I've been busy with all of the little things too like wiring in additional thermo fans, standalone relays and fuses for the Ford ECU, making battery cables, fixing the EAS drier to the Ford airbox, fuel lines etc.

Also tested my wiring out but plugging in the starter motor and battery. Turned the key and fuel started pouring out of the feed line which was good as its controlled by the Ford ECU. The starter also engaged when switched so that was a good thing too.

Hopefully will have the engine in the car on the weekend and ready to start next week.

Hi,

Nice work there.

Did you think of getting a torque convertor custom built?

I had a similar issue when mating a Ritters Ford C9 auto to a 350 that previously had a LT95 behind it. Had to be longer, with Chev flex plate holes one end and C9 input splined sleeve at the rear.

Jason at Autoflite made it, perfect fit, any stall speed I wanted...........$480.

cheers, DL

Nice thread! Reading with interest- keep it up!