lil_Blue_Ford
Well-Known Member
TRS Forum Moderator
Supporting Member
V8 Engine Swap
TRS 20th Anniversary
TRS Event Participant
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2007
- Messages
- 8,320
- Reaction score
- 6,130
- Points
- 113
- Location
- Butler, PA, USSA
- Vehicle Year
- 95
- Make / Model
- Ford
- Engine Size
- 4.9L
- Transmission
- Manual
The older trucks are where it gets ugly. I know because I tried going down that road. My 88 Eddie Bauer had a 2.9 that ate a valve around 110k miles and I had the "bright" idea at the time of swapping in a 4.0 to replace the "ticking time bomb." Well... Fitting it in and bolting it up wasn't much of an issue. Wiring it up to work, was. I was not able to come up with good wiring diagrams for my truck and for the harness I had and I was not able to get an extra set of hands to help me trace stuff. Arguably, I was also a bit more inexperienced with working in vehicle harnesses. Long story short, it sat uncompleted for a long time.Thinking about doing the 4.0 too...i have 80,000 on my 2.9 though and am wondering if it would be worth all the work? What do you think?
Sent from my SM-N920P using Tapatalk
Putting the 4.0 in an 89 or newer turns out to be a LOT easier, especially if you can get a donor harness from an early 90's Ranger. I only had to splice a handful of wires and I was actually able to build an adapter plug set with ease. So I yanked the 4.0 out of the 88, and put it in my 89, where I needed it. The 2.9 from the 89 is getting some mods (headers, free floating rocker arm assembly, port matching, MAF, etc) and going in the 88, for simplicity sake. I don't plan to do any substantial lifting to my 88, it's mostly going to be a slightly modified toy to run around town in, so I have no need for any more power that a somewhat modified 2.9 will put out, so it works for me.
Now, that said, if you really want to do the swap in your 86 and don't want to have to splice every wire in the harness on the drivers side, there is another potential solution. It involves pulling the dash, but it can be done. The solution is to either swap the entire dash and wiring harness out of an 89-92 RBV, or to pull the dash apart and swap just the dash wiring harness. This gives you the correct plugs (if you take the dash harness from the donor truck with the 4.0), or a nearly correct set of plugs. It's more work than I had to do on my choptop, but for a lifted truck like yours (which sounds pretty similar to my choptop), IMHO, it's well worth it. To get more performance out of your truck, your other options are to mod the 2.9, change the gear ratio to something deeper (4.88 or 5.13), or to do a 5.0 swap (easiest for the older trucks without getting into major wiring is to go with a carbed motor).