This space is dedicated to documentation of the engine conversion project I performed on a 1971 FJ40 Toyota Land Cruiser. The in-line, six-cylinder motor had severe problems and instead of rebuilding it, I converted the truck to run with a late-model Mustang 5.0/302 V8 (also found in F150, Bronco and other vehicles) with a Ford transmission (transfer case/transmission adapter). The project was a tremendous success, and the vehicle was not only a great deal faster, but it was almost 200 lbs lighter.

The bulk of the documentation is on video and will be available as soon as I am able to edit the footage. It includes a detailed description of the finer points such as the carb rebuild and custom wiring harness. However, I have included below a handful of still images of the process.

This first image is of the enormous cavity created after removing the engine, transmission and transfer case. It was shocking and worrisome. Staring at it stirred serious doubts.

Below is Toyota\'s original factory image of the engine, transmission and transfer case as a single unit. I can only guess, but its total weight is probably close to a thousand pounds or more. This unit is what completely filled that hole in the image above. FYI, a transfer case sits immediately behind or after the transmission. The transmission takes the power generated by the engine and sets the engine rotation to wheel rotation ratio selected by the driver (first gear, second gear, etc.). The transfer case takes the power from the transmission and distributes it to either one or both the rear and front axles. If the operator wants to engage the four wheel drive system, they shift a lever that forces the transfer case to distribute the power to both axles.

This next photo below is of the engine from my Land Cruiser after it was removed. You can see by the fluid leak along the side that the head (the long orange part near the top of the motor) had a severe oiling problem. Among other things, it alloowed the valves to easily slip out of adjustment over a short period of time. This led to a lot of engine noise. My partner on this project, Gunnar Rosenberg, suggested that this oiling problem might have also contributed to the flattening or "mushrooming" of the tip of some of the push rods (the rods that get activated by the cam shaft to operate the valves on the head).

The entire project started when a friend found a similar Land Cruiser in a junkyard that had been converted. That conversion was a sloppily performed hack, but it had an important part it in it, an aluminum plate for joining the Toyota transfer case with the tail end of a Ford transmission. A new version of that plate costs close to $2,000 and I was able to get this junked Land Cruiser for $400. Below is an image of me towing the junker into the lot of the shop.

The conversion from the junk Cruiser wasn\'t a complete disaster. One good solution is how they re-engineered the clutch slave cylinder. In the factory-motor configuration, Toyota mounted this component to the engine mount (how were they supposed to know nuts like us would be pulling stunts like this?). This image shows the clutch slave cylinder mounted to the inner-left side of the frame. It\'s a great solution because it made it very easy to adjust. This image also demonstrates an example of hackery issues. Check out how that fuel line is fed into the frame. Extensive friction there might eventually cause a pretty big problem.

The following is a picture of the new motor. It is a standard Mustang 5.0 (Ford 302ci V8). The original Toyota motor has close to the same displacement, but it\'s much heavier and cannot produce nearly the same horsepower. In this photo, I had just installed the new intake manifold. When used in the Mustang, the motor is aspirated with electronic fuel injection, but without a means for controlling that, I converted it to run with a carburetor instead. Incidentally, I also used points instead of electronic ignition. It was simpler. We ended up using the oil filter from the truck version of the 302 because it is considerably shorter and didn\'t get in the way of the Toyota steering box.

At this next photo you can see how we used a dummy engine block mounted to an empty bellhousing (no clutch in it yet) to find the locations for new mounts. The Ford manual four-speed transmission had been rebuilt and it was mounted to the Toyota transfer case, so we set that and this dummy engine block in place with jack stands and marked where we needed to weld the new engine and transmission support mounts.

Here is a close up of the dummy block.

I will post the video as soon as I can. As I mentioned, it includes all the final details such as wiring and other modifcations we made like switching from 3-speed column shift to the floor-mounted design (linking to the Ford top-loader transmission).