It's been a LONG time since I posted any type of build log but since this isn't your average swap and the reasoning behind the swap is the only driving force for this in the first place I figured I'd put this up on the off chance someone else decided to do this and it saves them a lot of time figuring every thing out.

The victim is a 2002 Jeep Liberty Sport 4wd with the 3.7 V6 and an automatic transmission.....







Before tearing it down for the swap I got some measurements from a Jeep at work that I was putting a new engine it........Yup that's gonna work

 

looks like a neat project, subed...

 

The original 3.7 was a low mileage reman engine that had cracked a lifter boss in the head and the previous owner found out the warranty on the engine was non-transferable. So they cut there loss and moved on. Lucky for me the engine hadn't been out that long ago so every thing came apart with out an issue.




Of course the trans has to go too.....




While I was at it figured I'd might as well ditch some dead weight and lighten this beast up. I was going for a quick and cheap swap and keeping the 4wd wasn't part of the plan from the start.

 

NOW THAT'S A LOT OF ROOM TO WORK WITH ! ! !

 

Looks like it is gonna clean up nicely !!

 

Now I know what your thinking......you saw an SBC sitting next to the Jeep and just assumed that was going in this. Don't lie....you know the thought crossed your mind

I spent about 6 months searching for other people that have done this swap or one similar and came up surprisingly sort on results. I found 3 Liberty's that have had a GM engine swapped in, one was the same body style as this one, the other 2 were both newer and done on factory 2wd versions so they were only loosely comparable. The one that was done on this body style was....well it must have been very short lived because there isn't much info on it and it was never finished.

So let the let fitting and mock up begin.....

 

As I moved the engine around it just felt like it was sitting too high in the engine bay. I mean the hood shut just fine and every thing cleared but I didn't like the way it looked. I was building this for a couple of very specfic reasons so I wanted this to look like it belonged under the hood and with the engine sitting so high it just didn't feel natural. Now given the amount of oil pan options for the LS engine family I figured if I mocked it up with out an oil pan and just used a little bit of common sense I'd still be able to find an oil pan that would fit with out needing to build my own. While cost of the build was a concern so was the amount of time it was going to take since I was only able to work on this for a couple of hours on Sundays at my buddies shop so time mattered just as much as money.

So off came the oil pan and I started mocking up a new placement with the engine sitting lower in the chassis.

There are a couple of things I wasn't going to be able to change due to cost and drive accessories were one of those things. Car brackets just aren't in the budget and they still aren't so I needed to make truck brackets fit. I'm not very tolerant of the heat at my age and I like my AC but I also didn't have money in the budget for aftermarket AC brackets/Compresses etc so I was going to have to make the truck AC setup work as well making it much harder to get the engine sitting lower in the chassis.


Ding.....Ding.....Round 2

 

So engine placement was sorted out, next was figuring out the best way to mount it. Roaming off topic slightly....while the Jeep was in the air I took a look at the suspension and brakes to see what they were like. Of course the rear arm bushings on the back axle were rotted out(It's a jeep thing LOL) and it needed some other work..... but the rear trailing arms(lower rear control arms) are what's important here. They gave me the inspiration for motor mounts unlike anything I have seen done.

What's about to follow...... is strictly based on my own opinion of what is going to be acceptable and may not be a good fit for every one. The reasons I'm putting a pretext on this is becasue what I came up with would work on.....well most all Chrysler products. It requires ZERO cutting or welding on the vehicle to build these mounts. I have never seen this done and I have no idea how good(or bad) or an idea this is but it was cheap and easy to build. I already needed rear control arms so this technically didn't cost anything for those.

 

So......mounts turned out to be a LOT simpler then I was expecting. I'm actually not sure why I've never seen this done on other swaps before since it ended up being so easy and cheap to do.

 

Once I had the mounts tacked in place good enough that I wasn't worried the engine would fall if I removed the 2x4's under it I wanted to make sure I could get an oil pan that was going to clear the rack and pinion AND the rear cross member.

 

Next was figuring out what manifolds would work and that actually proved to be a lot harder then I was expecting. When I started working on this I had a couple different car manifolds lined up to borrow from a friend to test fit various combos and see what worked the best. The guy buys them from speed shops and just lists them on Ebay, in the last 2 years I don't think he'd ever had less then 3 or 4 sets of various types. Fbody, GTO, Corvette, Etc.......well as fate would have it he was actually flat out of stock on every single type. So my range of avaible manifolds for test fitting was a lot slimmer then I was hoping for. It was down to stock Silverado truck manifolds and I had a set of V8 Trailblazer manifolds to try.

On the drivers the the Truck Manifold wasn't going to work with out some SERIOUS love on the fire wall right near where the gas pedal would mount and since I already had the engine mocked up where it looked right I decided to give the Trail Blazer manifold a shot. Driver side it fit like a dream. I mean it cleared not only the fire wall by a mile but cleared EVERY THING on the drivers side perfectly.

Now the Pass side was a bit of a different story. The Silverado manifold fit the pass side a fair bit better then the Trail Blazer did however the design of the runners in the manifold was significantly different from each other. With out having flow bench numbers to compare the flow rates I fell back on hp gains that people found when switching from manifolds on the Silverado's and Trail Blazers to see how "close" they would be in terms of performance gains when going to headfers just to get an idea if the design was going to matter.

Based on header tests...THE DESIGN MATTERS ! ! ! This is the part of the build that sucks because now I know I'm not just leaving free hp on the table between 2 different sets of manifolds I also can see how potential power I'm loosing. In the end better/safer judgment make my decision and I opted to run the Trail Blazer manifolds even though the pass side didn't fit nearly as well. I was more concerned with the quality of the runnability/fuel economy then I was over a couple of hp and I didn't want to see what was going to happen if I mismatched the manifolds. Best case it wouldn't have mattered but I've also seen some things with exhaust over the years that have taught me to be wary of mismatched manifolds/headers that have created so unusual issues that you'd have never though were exhaust related.

 

Now the trans mount looks like hell here but it's not as bad as it looks. Torch was VERY low on gas so it wasn't cutting well and I was out of Argon in the welder and had to switch to flux core to finish mocking the mount up. That night it was like every thing that could have gone wrong did go wrong.....the Jeep was getting angry that things had been going so well.

The mount was actually pretty simple to build, The section bolted on the trans is in part of a stock 4l60E mount with the rubber removed. I then cut off the rear(tail shaft side) of the steel shell from the mount and only kept the part that bolts to the trans and the front side(pan side) of the steel shell. The rest of the mount is the stock Jeep trans mount. Setting the now cut down 4l60E mount on top of the jeep mount gave it a pretty good amount of surface area to weld to and put the engine on a pitch I was happy with. I'll deal with the drive shaft angle when it's done if I need to.......people are already taking bets how long the stock upper control arm ball joint is going to last so it's very likely it'll be getting some adjustable arms on the rear diff shortly after it's on the road and I can correct the pinion angle that way if I need to.

You'll also notice the size of the drive shaft tunnel in relation to the trans/engine height. When I moved the engine lower in the chassis things really opened up in the tunnel area. The biggest advantage here is it's moved the center of gravity lower in the chassis this way and if you've ever driven one of these jeeps you'd know how much of a help that's going to be.

 

So where does that leave us......well we still need to get the Silverado AC to fit by any means necessary......

He raised his grinder in one hand and a welder in the other to the sky and cried.......
By the power of these tool I will have AC at no additional cost ! ! ! !
And a large notch suddenly appeared in the sub-frame.......almost exactly the size of the Ac compressor only slightly larger.

 

This is where the project derailed and went horribly off course like they usually do at some point when your in a rush to do something and are working on a budget you've set for your self to keep things reasonable.

I had a moderate mileage LM7 that I bought last winter for another project but hadn't gotten around to that yet and I figured I'd just use that in the Jeep since it was still almost a 50% increase in power over the stock engine with tons more low end torque to boot and would be a blast to drive. Well the engine was a grease ball and I figured I'd at least clean it up a bit before dropping it in. That's where I made the mistake, sometimes your better off just leaving something alone especially when your working with limited funds for a project. It turns out the LM7 was one of those engines that ran so smooth, was extremely quite and had such good oil pressure it was almost too good to be true. Well it was......turns out that an LS can look like something threw up inside of it and then died with out affecting how it runs. My 140K mile motor looked like it may have had 3.....possibly 4 oil changes in the last 15 years and they must have used Pennzoil in from day one. Now how this thing made no noise is beyond me, 11 out of the 16 rocker arms and push rods were absolutely TRASHED. Pulled the timing cover and the cam/crank gears looks like they were from a 1970 something SBC with the aluminium cam gear. It's the first time I've seen one of these motors that had actually worn the teeth down on the sprockets. The timing chain was about 2-3x looser then normal, like you could almost make the chain touch between the gears it was worn do badly.

They say not to look at the cam bearings or there going to be bad......well if the rod bearings had looked like your average LS cam bearing I'd have been happy.........none of the rods were loose but they had worn though the top layer of the bearing and almost though the copper layer in spots. The only thing I can think of is the oil was so sludged up and there was such a build up of wax and carbon that it had been keeping every thing tight. If I hadn't heard this thing run with my own ears I'd say it was a bunch of BS but like I said....it ran so smooth and quite it almost seemed too good to be true......and it turns out it was.

So I threw better judgement out the window and dug out a motor I've had sitting in storage for the last couple of years..... It ended up in storage once I learned how many miles it had on it. I was kind of pissed at the time since I bought it to use at the time and planned on just "freshening it up a bit" until I found out it had 392,000 miles on it and suddenly lost interest in it even though I had already bought all the parts for it I wasn't too keen on using a motor with 400K on it. The ONLY thing that was even slightly redeeming about all of this was that I had let a guy try out a commercial parts washer on the engine right before it went into storage. It was an awesome blasting tank because it really did an amazing job cleaning parts up......if only it had done a better job getting the rust off the block.......

 

Started tearing the engine down the rest of the way, I had left the rotating assembly in the block for safe keeping on the off chance I used it someday.....and boy and I glad i did. It gave me a chance to cool down about it being a 400K mile motor and what I had to do to get it...... and the fact that I needed an engine like yesterday and I had every thing but a cam to rebuild this so it was well within my current budget for this build.

Picked up a fresh set of tips for my needle scaler and started cleaning the block up......I'm not gonna lie, I was really expecting to find a rust hole in it because it was that bad. It looked like someone had just beaten a pair of rotors off an Old ford truck by the time I was done cleaning the block up........and it was really surprising how well it cleaned up. I guess now I can say the blocks been "lightened" LOL.

Since I wasn't expecting a 400K mile motor every thing I had was std sizes.

Pulled the 1st rod cap off, looked at it, put it back on the rod and walked away from the engine. Asked a friend to go look at the bearing in the cap and see what they thought. They lifted the cap and had almost the same reaction, the bearings had ZERO signs of wear, the top layers didn't have any thing spots and there was no scoring visible on the bearings no matter how hard you looked at it. Pulled the rest of the bearings and they all looked absolutely perfect. If it wasn't for the fact I already had all the parts I'd have seriously thought about reusing them.

Next I pulled the cam....and despite my better judgement decided to look at not just the front cam bearing but all of them.......at this point things started looking up. They looked better then I was expecting and honestly are probably one of the better looking sets of bearings I've seen in one of these engines before. They had the noral copper look going on but they weren't torn up, scored or even pitted. All the oiling holes were still lined up correctly and none of them felt loose. At this point I'm starting to figure that something major has to be wrong given the mileage and exterior condition of the block.

So I started running a hard stone hone in the cylinders and almost went into shock......they were not out of round and had very little signs of wear other then none of the factory cross hatch being visible on the cylinder walls. But it didn't take much with the hone and the cross hatch came right back and looked amazing. At this point I decided to pull a ring and see how the original one's measured out, figured maybe I'd just leave the rings loose on the off chance I wanted to go turbo down the road. Now imagine my surprise when the stock rings were still with in the wear limits. Took out a new ring and measured it for comparison and it was only off by a couple of thousandths from the factory rings. Took a closer look at the pistons and even the skirts were still in reasonably good shape still and that's surprising given the noise these things were know for.

 

I just can't leave well enough alone it seems like........every time I pull a set of heads on an LS I look in the ports and find myself sitting at a table for the rest of the day........

 

So I blended the bowls on the heads so they match the valve seats and cleaned up all the casting seams, nothing major but they sure do feel a lot better now. Gave the valves a good old fashion lap job and they also look like they should seat in pretty good as well now. At this point I still didn't know what I was doing for a cam, no way I was putting a stock one back in after all this work and I already had a set of the GM beehive springs so I tossed them on while I was at it. Reused the stock locks/retainers......I've never had an issue with locks on ANY engine but the mileage that was on this thing is still almost scary to think what it's about to go though once this jeep is on the road.....

So I wonder if any one's been paying atten as they read though this that not once have I said what size engine this was. The only engine I've talked about a size on what what I used to mock it up and the engine that I bought and turned out to be trashed.........Hmmm I wonder what these heads might have come on and why someone would have kept a 400K mile engine in storage half torn down for two years

 

So....this is either going to be extremely short lived or I'm gonna go buy a lotto ticket once this things running.

Back in the days of flat tappet cams we used to use .050 as the rule of thumb for coil bind on the valve springs but you always had a little wiggle room on that that you could play with in a pinch. Well Gm's changed the "Rated" lift on these springs a couple of times now over the years and it;s hard to say if the springs them selves have actually changed or just what people ran and got away with so they became slightly more generous on the lift ratings.

I've seen the part number I used rated at .530, .550 and most recently .570 but the part number hasn't changed. So...........with out actually thinking what these springs were rated for when I bought them 2 years ago I went off the .570 rating and played in that wiggle room I was expecting to have.....now.......I'm not so sure it was a great idea.

 

It's amazing how well the engine turned out from a visual standpoint. It's actually pretty amazing how well the whole build has gone so far. It's been what...just over 3 hours? That must be some kind of record for a build like this
I'll update this a bit more tomorrow since it's still quite a bit further along then it looks like here

 

Those motor mounts are ingenious!