Thread: Thor in a classic

We are about to embark on a an engine swap in friends 1990 classic. It has too many problems that we cant be bothered fixing so he has got all enthusiastic and bought a 4.0 thor motor for it. He has secured an engine with all ancilliaries, ecu, gearbox, exhaust manifolds, etc. Now we need to get it in and going. Nuts and bolts will be straight forward enough even though we will be keeping the current auto box.

Its the electrics that are at this point an unknown. Can the engine be got going with the motronic ecu and what needs to be done, or will we have to resort to an aftermarket one. We have access to the rover testbook via the dealer who is going to help with the computing side of things. He wants to put a gems 4.6motor in his range rover chassis-ed series II and is keen to use us a guinea pig but he has never done this before so its guess work for him too.

We have thought of swapping the injection and computer from his old motor and running it that way but we would prefer to keep it all together to save changing the front cover etc etc.

We will first endeavor to run the engine out of the car just in case its a no go.

Has anyone done this swap, Any help will be much appreciated.
cheers

Thanks guys, certainly a few more bugs in the ointment than I first anticipated, next up is to get the engine running out side the car. I might even email Bell or JE as they have managed to get the new generation Jag stuff going in defenders. There has gotta be a way.

My personal reservation about switching to the 14cux and distributor is that I feel the the present engine has a fault in there somewhere and it would mean either getting a whole new injection system or, I know, we could find the issue.

It starts and goes well under light throttle but when you put you foot down it does virtually nothing and in high gears it offers no change in engine note acceleration or anything. If you floor it will accelerate and rev out but its guttless. It does NOT use excessive amounts of fuel. Ie more than you would expect from a good motor. If you hold the gear and slowly add more throttle it does seem to get quicker and change the note but basically still a sack. Besides it has a knock in the bottom end and figured lets just get it out of there. It has had. cam, lifters, tps, maf, ecu, temp sens, a new cam factory grind, set up with gauges not dot to dot, exhaust. My personal theory is in the tps and throttle body area but the order has been given to flag it and start anew. If this fault is in the system that needs to be carried over then we have not achieved much.

I think the guy who supplied the motor still has the donor car so we will get th key off him if poss. He said we could whatever we needed. He had the same idea but binned the idea as too hard. The donor is a 2002 d2.

We will be doing this over the next few months so will let you know how we go and no doubt be asking for more advice.

cheers