Spinnin' Fours 4x4 Club of Southern California

My trucks V6 started to get a misfire a little while back which I believe is a burnt valve. So instead of spending money rebuilding it I decided that I would do a conversion to a V8 instead.

So a little background on my truck. It's a 1995 Ford Explorer XLT 4x4 that started off as my wifes daily driver shortly after my first daughter was born. It came with a 4.0 V6 that was rated at 160hp and 225tq. After my second daughter was born we bought a suburban and the Explorer became my offroad vehicle. My first mod was a torsion bar twist, home made rear springs with Warrior shackles and 31x10.5x15 tires. Some of you may remember me taking it out to TDS for it's first wheel trip and knocking the skirts off. I wheeled it like that for many years before I decided that I wanted to do a solid axle swap on it.

On to the donor truck. It used to be my nephew's 1997 Eddie Bauer edition 5.0 V8 AWD that he graciously gave to me when he just moved to FL. The v8 was rated at 211hp and 280tq. Quite a bit more than my V6. He bought the truck back when he lived in NY so that should give you an idea of what I was in store for.

So here are the trucks and the start of the engine/transmission/t-case removal. What should have only taken a couple hours took about 16 because everything was so rusted.









I'll post up more later today.

Next I pulled the engine from the '97.

Here are a couple more of the engine. Externally there was a lot of rust but internally it looked good. There was little wear on the cylinder walls and the valves look good. However I found out later that the cylinders needed to be bored.





I also decided to do some mild porting on the heads.

This is a stock exhaust.


I concentrated on the roof and pocket and didn't make the port much bigger. To my surprise the short side radius on both the exhaust and the intake didn't need to be touched.



Intake after blending.



Intake after shaping the valve guide. This is all that was done to the intake.

Short block being assembled.

Long block.

The next generation of Cooper wheelers helping out on the engine build.





















The next step was to start pulling the engine/trans/transfer case out of my truck.





After pulling the 4.0 I moved the throttle cable, cruise control and EVAP from the '97 to the '95. I also removed the complete engine/lighting wire harness from the '97. Next up was to remove the one from the '95 and then install the '97 harness into the '95.



I pulled the engine harness out of the '95 and found that the pins were different on the dash harnesses. So I pulled the dash harness out of the '97 and compared it to the one in the '95. The '97 had a lot more options on it so it had more connectors but I think I'm going to be able to use the one that's in the '95 and just add the OBDII connector along with a few additional things that it needs for the OBDII. I traced the wiring that goes back to the fuel pump/rear ABS/EVAP canister purge valve.

Here are some various pictures.

4.0 engine harness.






Next I traced down some of the wires that I don't have in the '95 that are in the '97 dash harness and moved them into the '95 dash harness. Here are a few pictures of the mess.







These are the wires that I had to add. I just added the wire to the factory connectors so that it was clean. These wires go under the drivers seat and then back to the fuel pump/EVAP purge/fuel tank pressure. There was one more wire that I connected but it is on the top side of the grey connector behind all the wires in the picture.



This is where I'm at as of today. I was able to pull all the needed wires from the OBDII connector and install them in my harness. It turned out that I only needed to add three wires because my truck has an OBDII connector under the dash and it had 4 of the 7 already. They were in a different location than they were on the '97 so I moved those as well. Here's what the connector looks like and the dash harness that I had to trace them in.



This is where I had to add the three to match the engine harness.

Awesome looking engine, but I like the Chevelle.

Thanks, I like the Chevelle too.

I got a little more done on the truck. First, I dropped the tank on mine, pulled the fuel pump and drained it. Then I removed the bracket for the EVAP canisters. I didn't want to use the one off the '97 because it was rusted so I modified mine to fit the canister off his.

Here's mine after I cut it in half.



Here's the one off the '97. As you can see the bracket is terrible.







This is what mine looked like after modifying it. I cut the end off the side I wasn't going to use and welded it on to the end of the side I used because I needed the canister rotated 90 degrees.





After I reinstalled my EVAP bracket I removed the old wiring harness for the fuel tank/ABS sensor and installed the one from the '97 because it had the extra wiring for the EVAP canister and fuel pressure sensor. After that I moved to the inside and started cutting/splicing the old harness with the new one.







I finished splicing in all the wires that I had in my old harness. Next up is to splice in the new ones that I had to add to my dash harness.

I got some more done today and tried to take a lot of pictures. Nomally i'm so busy that I just don't get to them but I did today. So I started by installing the harness that I spliced together yesterday and then spliced the remaining wires into the harness.

Here is the harness installed, it goes through the floor and down the frame to the back of the truck.



Here are the remaining wires that needed to be spliced together.



I tried to make it look as clean as possible.







Then I spliced them together and finished tucking them away.





After that I moved to the engine harness. Here's the one from the V8 that going in my truck.



And here's my empty engine bay.



I started with switching the computer over.



Then I dropped the V8 harness in. Doesn't that look fun?




Kylie wasn't much of a help today.




And here's some of it done. I still have a lot more to do but soon I'll be ready to see if the engine is going to clear my steering box.