The 2.3 is a pretty good 4 cylinder engine (if you can come up with the Australian heads ["cross flow" heads] which are hard to get around here).birddog1148 wrote: ↑Tue Apr 02, 2024 5:38 am Well now I bought a school bus to convert to a camper. But thinking about sticking a 2.3 from a 96 ranger in the Baja. I have a 3 rib I bought several years ago and never got installed.
I have gone a bit higher with my black buggy.
The drawbacks to some of the changes like this is weight on the trans mounts. You should weld both sides of the arms as the stock spotwelds probably will not be enough (weight and heavy throttle pedal for example). Also the trans mounts will need to have the extra supports at the ends to add to the support of the arms. All this leads to more changes to back up each of the other changes so be prepared
.Lee
For what it is worth, in the late 50s or early 60s a guy named Wayne and other guy designed and built crossflow heads for GMC 6-cylinder engines. They were different that the stock Chev and GMS heads being that they were crossflow heads meaning that 6 ports on the one side (intake for instance) and 6 port on the other side for exhaust. They worked very well and there were special cams for them too. The one 39 Chev I saw with the "Jimmy" engine had 5 (or 6 this was back in the late 50s) single port carbs on it plus dual exhaust (as I remember). One of my classmates had bought it but when his father discovered it... it was gone very quickly. Very powerful engines at the time.
The Australian, in-line 6 engine (from what I learned about) has a crossflow head design which breathes/works quite well. They were (and still hard as I understand it, to get here in the US but do work well if you can get a hold of them.
I decided to go with the 2.8 V-6 but the one I found was from a Merc "Bobcat" V-6 (same as the Ford
).Lee
