'98 Vortec 350 - Good swap into a Jeep???

[Frederic Breitwieser]

If the Vortec 350 is a RWD engine, then its a great swap for a Jeep, YJ,
CJ, etc.  

Mechanical:
Advanced adaptors makes plates to shove between the engine and the jeep
tranny, though for strength purposes, I'd imagine swapping the entire
powertrain is probably a good idea, if you have the auto/manual tranny
that you like iwth the engine.  A friend of mine and I just finished
yesterday in fact, installing a 79 350 chevvy/turbo 350 combination into
his jeep, requiring only new motor mounts and the transfercase adaptor
from Advanced adaptors.  The tranny crossmember from the old tranny was
bent and reinforced with my handy dandy mig welder, after sand blasting
the piece of course.  

We didn't use the vortech EFI system, but the theory would apply to it
as well.  We used a TPI system off a camaro, basically moving all the
305 TPI parts that had wires or injectors and such over, and it fit
pretty close.  We had to have the intake decked slightly, and one bolt
hole wouldn't line up right, which was elongated with a dremel and a
larger washer put in.  Hey, he was happy with it, not my first choice. 
Anyway, when we leached the EFI system, we took the entire underdash
harness, the light harness, the underhood harness, everything. His 89
Wranger YJ by coincidence uses GM connectors on the steering column, so
the only splicing we had to do was for the heater & wipers, which is
about 5 wires, no big deal. Simple camaro wiring diagram made that
really easy.  All the taillights, everything, is now on the GM harness.
The only catch is that there is a 3' length of extra wire in the body
that we just coiled underneath the frame for now, until Mike wants to
bring it back to be cut and spliced.

After a basic test drive in the parking lot, the 4x4 mode low range even
worked fine and the ECM didn't seem confused in anyway.  Of course we
used older TPI stuff, and the tranny came iwth the engine, and whatever
sensors it had, were just plugged into the camaro harness.  Personally,
I think that's the easiest way of doing a swap of that magnitude.

I'm doing the same thing with my truck... will be using a TPI EFI setup
& EFI harness for my 431 mopar stroker, and I'm slowly converting the
entire truck's body harness to GM just to make things really easy down
the road.  Its a helluva lot easier to troubleshoot something that has
connectors and a wiring diagram, than some homebrew thing crimped to
death.  From complete scratch that's one thing, but a mix, just is more
complex than it needs to be.

If you swap the engine and tranny as-is with the efi stuff that's
mounted on it, you have no prgramming to do.  Just pretend its a camaro.
If you increase the tire diameter, change the ring/pinion gears front to
back to keep things about equal ratio to what the camaro was.  Good
performance, less hassle, and its generic enough that you can
troubleshoot down the road.

The only thing that truly sucked is his jeep's steering column doesn't
support VATs, and the camaro we raped did, so that had to be rewired,
converted, and fangled.  We had to use an external fuel pump also
because we wanted to retain the jeep tank because of where/how it fits,
and the camaro has an in-tank pump.  Also, retaining the jeep sender is
good cuz it matches the jeep fuel gauge.  Everything else just seemed to
work okay.  Jeep temp gauge is off a hair it looks like, displays higher
than I think it should, but he'll get used to it.  We didn't want to cut
the gauge area too much.

Hope taht helps.  Swap as a whole system if you can.

Oh, and we put the camaro speedo in the jeep dash.  Was off by 1/8", and
easily fixed by using my neighbor's planar machine.


-- 

Frederic Breitwieser
Xephic Technology
769 Sylvan Ave #9
Bridgeport CT 06606

Tele: (203) 372-2707
 Fax: (603) 372-1147
Web: http://xephic.dynip.com/