Motor Swap Pictures Page 3

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Continued from page 2

3800 motor Heads off
This was the motor before we went to town on it, and by going to town I mean installing my fresh parts on it. The heads have been stripped off at this point
3800 v6 motor installed
Remember that open space in the engine bay when we pulled the motor. This is what it looks like now as we are bolting in block. As you can see only the basic pieces of the motor have been put back on, the oil pan, front cover and electric water pump. We didn’t fully assemble the block and drop it in due to the space needed to slide the motor under the cowl while still attached to the engine hoist
3800 Heads Port and Polished
A bit of a fuzzy picture, but these are the heads (well one of them) that has been resurfaced and cleaned up with a new valvejob. These heads are fully port and polished with 1.9 intake and 1.57 manley exhaust valves.
3800 Driver Head
Driver side head installed on the motor as we buttoned up all our loose ends. As you can also see we have also put our lower intake manifold pieces in place as we are getting ready to bolt that on now.
3.8L Heads Installed
Now we’re talking. Both Heads on and almost ready to go. The rest is a cake walk. At this point the cam has been degreed and we have checked the piston to valve clearance. These numbers were a tad low at .040 clearance. Lower than I’d like to see and just means that there is no room for valve float in this motor. The Lower intake manifold plasic pieces are being RTV’d just after this point and we’re ready to bolt on the manifold
3.8L motor almost complete
Almost done, just a few more pieces… Upper and lower intake manifolds have been bolted on and left to set overnight
Complete 3800 motor
Completed, well, everything except for the new battery it needed. Runs beautifully. The cam is so violent it threw the bolts out of the power steering unit within the first month on the road. I had to blue loctite a number of bolts on the car to prevent pieces from being rattled loose. Overall I can’t complain

The swap has been completed and the car was ran at the end of this season at the track and pulled a best of 13.4 in the 1/4 mile. Not quite what we were expecting out of it, but there are a number of things to tweak, including adding more fuel in the top end as the car leaned out in 3rd gear.

The video of this run can be found in our videos section. Stay tuned as we’ll nail that 12 second pass this next season.

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What's your thoughts?