Essex (Ford) V6 conversion

In South Africa the V6 conversion is very popular as the Essex V6 3 litre is made here and so is relatively cheap and spares are readily available. It is also a simple, rugged, motor with a good reputation for reliability and durability. It also has good low speed torque but can rev well on the freeway. My Series 3 S/W had a Landrover diesel motor, which was fine off-road but was hopelessly slow on the open road. Also, the thing that made me get rid of the diesel was that it would not start when the temperature dropped below 0 degrees centigrade. It was consequently useless in the mountains of Lesotho, for instance.

The Essex conversion calls for a bit of engineering. Firstly one needs an adaptor to connect the engine to the bell-housing. These are available more-or-less off the shelf here. They are either built up of welded ferrous metal or are cast in aluminium alloy. The spigot shaft bush needs modifying to take the Landrover spigot shaft end. When the spigot shaft end is seated in this bush, the bell housing is about two inches aft of the rear of the engine and the adaptor has to fill this gap. The next problem is that the engine in a Landrover is off-set to the left. This means that the fire-wall has to be cut away on the left side to accommodate the left exhaust manifold (I think you guys call it a "header"), and a cover fabricated. The left header is inverted so that it faces forward and up, instead of backwards and down; the exhaust pipe then fits in nicely under the left wheel arch. The left header also interferes with the bracket connecting the chassis to the firewall. Some fellows just remove this bracket, but I modified it to go around the header because it is part of a key triangulation that braces the firewall and hence the rest of the body. On the right-hand drive models that we have here the steering is on the right hand bracket, but I think you might have a real problem with a left-hand drive model, because the bracket I am talking about would mount the steering box on the left-hand drive.

Next, one has to cut the existing engine mount brackets off of the chassis, fabricate new ones and weld these in place. A new engine mount has to be fabricated to bolt onto the left side of the engine also; the right hand one can be re-used. I positioned the mounts so that the axis of the crackshaft lined up with the crank hole in the front bumper. Aligned in this way, only the top half of the fan arc sweeps the radiator and so I removed the fan and replaced it with an electric fan and cowl from an Opel Monza, with automatic and manual cut-in switches.

The oil filter is obstructed by the chassis on the left and I overcame this by using a shorter screw-on filter. I am not entirely happy about this though, because the filter area is reduced and I am thinking of re-engineering this bit. Finally, I had to re-do bits of the electrics to accommodate the transition from diesel to spark ignition.

Was it worth it? Yes, indeed! The vehicle has been transformed. It can now cruise on the freeway up and down hill at a comfortable 100 Kph. It can maintain 120 Kph, but the engine sounds too busy at that speed, so I am looking around for a good second-hand overdrive unit. Also it STARTS easily, regardless of the temperature - to my mind this is very important in a vehicle that one takes to out-of-the-way places.

I hope that you find this info. useful.

Clive Dennison