What No One Tells You About Engine Swaps! Best Engine To Pick?

welcome to the shop I'm Jared and this is the questionable garage and today we're talking engine swaps you've been considering doing a V8 swap to whatever you're driving and well I've got a lot of experience with swapping the three big modern V8s into a car so we're going to talk about it today I want to try to help educate you a little bit of the history of each of the big 3's popular V8s that are used in engine swaps some of the pros and some of the cons of each one and uh I'll let you know which one I liked best uh spoiler it's not the one in the car right now now if the voice sounds a little bit off as we are going through all of this and you may say Jared why aren't you working on cars well I had surgery recently it was actually surgery I had been needing for quite a while uh that I kept putting off uh so we could finish up the Triple Crown first so we are doing well on the recovery side of things it's just a lot of weird uh weird voices and sounds and fluids still coming out but we're doing good there um but I'm actually really looking forward to this episode because in the comment sections a lot of times you guys kind of ask what engine should you swap into your car and we're going to be able to go over just a little bit of all of it there are three go-to engines when it comes to the swaps the ls the Gen 3 Hammy the coyote today sponsor fact that's right factor is back once again and it's got to be one of my favorite ad reads because well it means I'm eating really good for launch here in the shop now if you're not familiar with what factor is factor is a meal delivery service that makes meeting your nutrition goals easier than ever by delivering fresh never Frozen ready to heat and eat meals right to your doorstep with a wife who works a full-time job and me that works an absolute crazy schedule around the shop and sometimes on the road getting good quality meals is sometimes difficult and we end up relying on on meal order delivery services way too much and 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whenever you sit down and eat plus the menu is updated all the time by their Gourmet chefs and you get fun seasonal favorites like apple Dijon pork chops and cranberry Pecan Chicken now if you're ready to make less questionable choices in your meal platting head on over to factor 75 or click that link in the description box below use code questionable 50 and you're going to save 50% off your first meal boox again head on over to factor75.com click that link in the description box below enter code questionable 50 save 50% off your first Meal box what are you waiting for I absolutely love it they're hit every time I have them in the shop it's easier to get help in here because they're going to get really good food you can get really good food at home too now save 50% link down below questionable 50 save that 50% now before we get too much into the specifics of what it takes to swap each of these engines cuz again I've done all three in one car let's talk about some of the history and how they all came to be the ls came into the world in 1997 first debuted in the Corvette as a 5.7 L all aluminum V8 engine it was an answer to the demands of needing to have a cleaner running more efficient engine to meet emission standards as well as the general public of wanting more horsepower with better efficiency and while a lot of the basic structure is somewhat similar to the older small blocks there's really nothing interchangeable from an old small block into any of the ls or vortek family engines aside from the bell housing bolt pattern except for one the LS4 which will only bolt to a 4T yeah 4t6 4t6 L you know the 4L60E 4t6 there you go the transverse engine and the Malibus and other V8 front-wheel drive cars that is its kind of own little thing the LS4 good for you Fiero swap guys things like that but if you're shopping for a swap do not buy an LS4 thinking you can put it in a rewh drive car you're going to have a bad time pretty much everything else Under the Umbrella Works in 1998 you started to to see the LS1 in the Camaro as well and it just grew from there you got 6.2 variants the LS3 variant you've got the LSA variants with superchargers it went crazy and you've also then got the vortek truck engines which are basically iron block ls's there are some small differences but for our performance applications and swapping applications they're effectively the same engine now one other reason we're going to say these things are so incredibly popular for swaps is just of the ls families the aluminum families there's estimated to be a 100 million of these engines made so when you have lots and lots of them they become affordable and that is also why the small block back in the day was such a popular engine for swapping there are just so stinking many of them you can put them in just about everything another big part of what lends in LS to being a very swappable engine is its small size it is a traditional cam in Block design meaning it has push rods that goes up to your rockers and valves above the cam shaft by doing that you're able to have smaller cylinder heads and a much more compact platform you can see exactly how narrow this engine is and we can look at the picture of it in the engine bay how much room is around this engine in the engine bay because it's relative small size and capability to produce absolute Mammoth amounts of horsepower it's a pretty solid choice but we got two more engines to talk about let's go over to our friend the Gen 3 hammy hey that thing got a hammy I'm sure most of you well I hope most of you some of you may be too young to remember in the early 2000s the return of that catchphrase hey that thing got to hear me yeah sweet the king of muscle cars back in the the day was the Mopar Hemi engine it revolutionized engine design with the hemispherical cylinder head by its design it quickly became the king of cylinder head flow and it left the other two manufacturers playing katchup well that engine design and engine name I believe left around 19 early' 70s um the Hemi name went away along with its design and marketing and let's just say dodge it kind of went through a dark period uh you know you have the beauties of our 70 duster the 70 Road Runner the 70 Charger you know then it they they lost their way you know the 80s charger like I they had some dark times but Genius of marketing and well just good engine design around 2003 we saw the return of the Gen 3 Hemi in the Ram pickup trucks looking to expand and improve the Magnum V8 that they were running through the 9s they were looking for something to improve emissions and power it's funny how often improving emissions results in Horsepower because again at the end of the day the most powerful combustion is generally the most efficient combustion us you know race car builders like our cars to run well and actually tend not produce that much tailpipe emissions we're chasing the wrong people go after the guys rolling coal not us uh E85 tuners but anyway I digress 2003 saw the return of the Hy and that classic commercials coming back of people rolling up next to Ram pickup trucks and asking hey that thing got a hamy and it performed incredibly well then 2009 something happened and this is my personal preference if you're swapping a gen 3 and you're doing a 57 it needs to be a 2009 or newer hands down 2009 variable timing was introduced that was an okay change the biggest change were the eagle cylinder heads that they launched on the 2009 and newer 57s when it comes to cylinder head flow there are few Factory cylinder heads that can compete with the eagle hems now this is the 61 Hemi in theory if you've watched the series you know this was a junkyard surprise 7 L fully Forge stroker we're going to talk about this being a 61 some of the biggest differences in a 61 versus the 57s or the 62s and 64s these did not get variable timing and they have their own cylinder head which actually is a very good flowing head comparable to the eagle another thing is I believe pretty much all of the 61s 62s and 64 engines got a forged crankshaft where the previous ones got a nodular iron which is good to about 700 horsepower or so the 61's are known to have slightly soft connecting rods that if you wanted to go crazy boost you're sometimes better starting with a 57 unless you wanted to do some building like this one overall it's just a really good solid package there's several different variants of it of course the Hellcat the hellephant so it goes to show how absolutely incredible an engine this is now one thing I do want to touch on unlike the LS which is an aluminum engine and then there's of course the iron variants you only have an option of an iron block in a gen 3 Hemi which sets you back 140 to 200 lb more than an LS you will likely feel that weight of the engine on the nose of the car I did driving the duster but to me it's it's a sacrifice that's worth making well that's the introduction of the Gen 3 Let's Talk k coyote real quick all right we got ourselves the traditional 5 coyote motor now if we go and start talking about the coyote and where its history started you can actually Trace pretty much its entire lineage through the entire mod Motor family unlike the ls and lq and even the Gen 3 which had a relatively fresh design despite essentially being a new engine in 2011 it does share a lot of its core Roots all the way back to the original Mod motor which started development in like 1980 and I think was first launched in the town cars in like ' 84 that's not to say this thing is out of date of all three of our main swap engines the coyote is the most complicated now if you're not familiar with the Mustang history the significance of the 50 all through the 80s the Mustang Fox body to have came with a 5 L V8 the 5.0 so much so that the term 5 in the sports car Muscle Car World generally is referencing a fox body Mustang but once you went away from the fox body I don't remember all the s codes for the the chassis but I 93 the mod Motor was introduced into the Mustang you lost your 5.0 and you went to a 4.6 it was cam over valve what that means is your cam shafts no longer live in the middle of the engine in the the engine block they sit on top of the valve it comes at a packaging premium because you now have moved all of that space up to your cylinder heads versus it being compact in the center of the engine so going through the dark times of the 9s into the early 2000s uh where your Mustangs had the 46s the 54s sometimes supercharged the mod Motor is not a terrible motor at all they have some bad reps not necessarily welld deserved but we went into the 2000s they launched the retro kind of styled Mustang along with the Challenger return and the Camaro's retro design but they still had a 4.6 in it so 2011 came out where they got the 5 L V8 back into them and it's quickly proven to be a very capable engine the coyote puts out a lot of power out of relatively small displacement but unfortunately it comes at a very large form factor because you now have four camshafts sitting on top of the cylinder heads it sits at a relatively wide V and it just takes up a lot of space in the engine bay which you can kind of tell here especially if we compare it to an LS or the Hemi in this exact same engine bay now if you are shopping coyotes you can get them out of trucks you can get them out of Cars one benefit of getting them out of the truck one of the best swap manifolds available you can buy from Ford Racing it's a little under $300 are basically just the F-150 truck cast manifolds didn't work in my application here but if you get it out of a truck you're going to have to run into other problems with accessories and things like that we're going to get into that a little bit later mainly your biggest change came first in 2015 when they went to the Gen 2 which introduced slightly better valve timing control and then they also added in a intake variable Runner length control which for most swap applications actually needs to get removed and delet it off the back of the intake manifold because it adds about 5 in on the back of the intake manifold which we didn't have any room for so some of that gets blocked away the other thing you really need to watch for if you plan to run some aftermarket controllers 2018 they went to a direct injection fuel injector where the injector is inside the combustion chamber really good for power and efficiency but it creates problems when you're looking to tune and modify all right so now you know our players we've got the ls the hammy and the coyote and now it's time to kind of talk about what engine is going to be right for you and the swap you're doing now if I was witty I would have some fun acronym for us right now or it's you know all the points we're going to talk about I can just put up on the the board here but I don't have a witty acronym we're just going to talk about it one of the biggest factors when it comes time to making an engine swap is what engine do you want it may seem really silly but sometimes you may have a brand loyalty you have a Chevy and it's got to have a Chevy engine Mopar people you dare not put anything other than a Mopar engine in a Mopar let me tell you but that's a big factor that you need to decide do you care what other people think do you want to particular engine performance do you want you know the relative ease of the swap do you want something challenging do you want something with lots of off-the-shelf support do you mind having to fabricate and make some brackets and that that really is a big part of it as well Parts availability how easy can you get things to fix it especially if you ever a road trip in your vehicle and you're broke down somewhere is it common enough that you can get parts and for the most part all three of these engines are very well supported through all of our part houses you can pretty much walk into any O'Reilly and get just about whatever you need for these engines so that becomes a little bit smaller of a factor but how easy is it to work on once it's in the car that becomes a big factor of it where the coyote is just being frank kind of the hardest to do and of course there's factors like how does it sound uh how much performance do you get out of it and what is it going to cost you so maybe all those factors Dwayne can maybe they make some word here the first letter of each one I I don't know it'd just kind of be consonant gibberish I think but let's go through and talk about and kind of rank these engines for each of the factors now first I I guess we would talk about picking the engine you want well I can't do that for you that's decide what you really want what if you care about people being upset that's up to you so let's talk about ease of swapping these three engines technically I will say the Hemi was easiest in my duster because I have a qa1 front suspension kit and K member set with bolt-in brackets and the American powertrain bolt-in transmission kit for the transmission so literally for me in this application the Gen 3 Hemi bolted directly in and the factory 61 manifolds did fit and clear all of my steering parts so theoretically technically it was a bolt-in swap for me now if you're fabricating from scratch the ls and the Gen 3 Hemi really kind of land about the same in the sense that they're very easy to make motor mount brackets for you're able to readily order motor mount plates if you want the ls is cheaper again because there's so many of them and both of them fit well with stock exhaust manifolds now for the coyote and its exhaust manifolds because the cylinder heads are so wide we are touching the passenger side strut Tower it is that wide exhaust became a big problem I went had and purchased the Ford Racing swap manifolds which are off the F-150 way too wide couldn't use them so while Ford Racing manifolds are affordable on an option what we ended up going with were the Holly flow Tech turbo Ford they're meant to flip forward and run turbo chargers but we flipped them left to right and we able to make them work and they are an affordable option but depending on your engine bay the uh difficulty of getting exhaust manifolds in will be a thing thing that you're going to have to work around also when it comes to building and swapping things in the belt drive on the coyote is very difficult as well we ran into that pretty substantially whereas on the ls and on our Hemi we had no real problem fitting everything we needed to in the engine bay we did need to swap the power steering pump to a lower pressure power steering pump for the Hemi but on the coyote alternator could not fit it's a low Mount alternator was is an option it is an electric power steering car so if you want power steering we ended up running a Toyota mrss electric steering pump so we could have our hydraulic power steering and then sha from schwey Speed Shop built a reverse Mount alternator for me also another big key factor when you're looking at your Swap and ease of swap are the availability of swap pans the ls there's a million one out there and the Hemi has a lot of support the coyote is getting more support but there is not as many of them out there just yet so that is something that could be a difficult thing for you you may have to make your own oil pan to fit your coyote so again relative ease the coyoty ranks last it just it takes the most to fit into an engine bay and required the absolute most amount of Custom Fabrication in my application the Hemi again was easiest to bolt in but really I'm going to call it a tie between the Hemi and the ls for ease of swapping in they both have tremendous amounts of aftermarket support and the ls is slightly smaller the Hemi does not get so large that it becomes difficult to fit into an engine bay so uh 1 Point each for these I guess so covering ease of swapping next let's move on to price point uh this could be a really big factor maybe you just want a good modern V8 as cheap as you possibly can I will say on the computer side of things all three engines we ran on a holly Terminator X Max the reason we had to run a holly Terminator X Max was was because the coyote it is the most complicated to run electronically so we just got one Holly Terminator and we swapped between each engine just the engine harnesses and kept the same computer for all of them that said with a manual transmission you can run both of the Gen 3 and the ls on a holly Terminator you can get your most basic entry kit just over $1,000 to run an LS on a holly Terminator or I think it's about $1,700 for the Gen 3 Hemi versus nearly $3,000 for the coyote so just on the computer side of things you're running a lot there now other things you can consider when doing a swap if you didn't want to go Standalone you can reflash factory computers and most likely your motor set is going to come with the harness and everything you need and that puts you in a position to where you can either repin and rewire your engine harness or I know on the ls you can jump on the jungle websites and get a imported wiring harness for less than like1 $60 that will plug into a stock LS computer um I know someone who's run them and have had good luck it just scares the bebas out of me some just the sheer number of connectors like the ECU connector is nearly what they're charging for the entire wiring harness but then you can use a Diablo or HP tuners and Flash the factory computer um I know a lot of junkyards like the company we work with J&J Auto wrecking you're able to buy the swap from them with the security already removed from the stock computer so you would be able to potentially just buy that wiring harness do your own wiring and plug in and technically not have an Electronics cost my biggest thing is I love the Holly Terminator for how incredibly simple it is to use if you're not familiar with the duster I just ran all three Holly events racing each weekend and the entire weekend I was racing on the base map all I did was answer the questions on the handheld the engines fired right up and I raced all weekend long so if we're going to look at just the basic bare minimum cost of buying an engine and getting it running not not necessarily an LS they're more expensive in LS3 you're going to be5 $6,000 potentially 7500 but you can get I think what the 4.8 L you can do a lot of shopping and find the iron block Vortex for a couple hundred with an ECU you can buy a rusted rotted out Tahoe for $700 running and driving that's engine transmission everything you need and then you buy that harness and Flash so you're you're able to get everything ls-based for pennies outright cheapest you you cannot beat the ls family our gen 3 guys here they get a little more affordable you get them out of the trucks you get them out of the cars they range anywhere from 1,800 to 6,000 depending on what flavor you're going for unless we're talking about the Hellcat engines which you know they're they're a lot more good coyot you're 5,000 and up pretty much for a complete pull out the electronics are the most expensive hands down the coyote right now is still the most expensive to swap so uh two points one point zero point so LS is leading by one so yes each engine can get very expensive but you know it's not expensive free and uh that's something that's really cool coming up our friends J&J who worked with us so much on this entire project got all these engines out to us they're going to be doing a giveaway on an LS engine I don't know exactly which one yet we're still getting all the information together but it's going to be an LS and all you need to do is be subscribed to their YouTube channel and they're going to release more details soon so head over to the J&J Auto wrecking Channel keep an eye out and as soon as I get more information I'm going to share it with you as well but um to celebrate try hard on the Triple Crown they're giving one of you guys an LS engine to put in your project another big factor is sound we had the same exhaust on each of these engines uh in the same car so we have a really good clip uh Dwayne let's let's play you know just some of the exhaust notes of the ls the Hemy and the and the [Music] [Applause] [Music] coyote now when it's selecting for sound that is a very personal thing I can't tell you what sounds best you're going to tell me something sounds different that sounds best it's everyone's opinion there's all kinds of phrases turn a phrase of you know opinions are like different body parts at any rate to me the Hemi sounds best really with just about any exhaust the the Hemi sounds fantastic the ls comes in in a really strong second I I feel like it's just I'm going to hate on the the coyote here so 2 one and and oh we're we're kind of in a dead heat um all right then again the last big thing performance Now setting up this entire premise with this car initially we were going to have a pretty good you know platform we were going to have all the same racetracks the same driver to really compare how they did on one time between autocross drag racing and all of that function unfortunately I actually kind of went about trying to make the car better each weekend so it wasn't a direct Apples to Apples comparison the first weekend out in the autocross with the ls we set some really good autocross times some decent 3s times drag racing wasn't very good because we had spring wrap the chassis wasn't working so the following weekend we made some improvements uh to the rear suspension with just some simple slapper bars which helped the Hemi become really good at drag racing but the extra weight on the nose of the car became extremely apparent the other problem I was having is this Hemi makes so much more torque down low than both the ls and the coyote that I just spun the tires it was hard to accelerate out cuz all it wanted to do was spin the tires and then for Ford Fest I went ahead and did a whole four link in the rear suspension we threw the leaf springs away so it ended up making on paper the coyote the best performing it it had the fastest drag ET it had the best autocross and the best 3s times that said if we went back and I could tell honestly just by how the way the car drove the whole time the ls would have been fastest this LS3 in the front of the car the difference in the weight between making the car push and its power delivery the ls would have been the best performing of them all what is really interesting is a way to generate and measure horsepower is your mile an hour in the quarter mile and all three of them basically mile hour identical meaning they had very similar power delivery Hemy had a lot of torque the coyote had tremendous high RPM horsepower and the LS3 came in with really good mid-range top end what did that mean with these three engines on the autocross well one thing I complained about in the Ford fest video is the coyote did not work well with the gearing I had in the car it really needs to be wound up like 3500 RPM and up it's really Happy on the particular autocross course you were under that a whole lot but I just I didn't have a first gear or second gear I needed like one and a half gear for the coyote to be happiest so it favored the torque delivery that both the ls and the Hemi gave us now granted both of these are bigger displacement engines and bigger displacement will generate better torque delivery just by their nature you're moving more air quicker now we're also going to talk performance in a broad spectrum for you guys when it comes time to modify them how easy is it to make a whole lot of horsepower out of them and unfortunately the the ls is King because there's hundreds of millions of them it is something you can go online and just click a couple buttons and get 300 horsepower packages delivered between heads and cams like it is a known formula the Gen 3 Hemi is getting there and kind of the Gen 3 you know 300 horsepower button is the hell the red eyes the superchargers they go incredibly well with Boost they're great along that aspect but when it comes to formula proven upgrades you cannot beat the performance of an LS right now the coyote is doing amazing things you watch what they're doing in Drag Racing you can make a lot of horsepower out of a coyote do not get me wrong but horsepower per dollar you cannot beat an LS right now so I guess that's three to we'll give the coyote one point I don't want the coyote to to strike out on everything ultimately I hope this you know helps you pick a little bit this is not meant to be a the ls's best um I've got ls's in the international I've got the ls and the drag car it's just good bang for buck so that may make you think okay the ls is going to go back in the in the duster right nope the Gen 3 is going back in it and we're actually going to put this LS in our International pickup truck and the coyote is going to go back to J&J Auto wrecking it's just a matter of preference for me each engine has a time and place I like the idea of the big seven lit Stroker and the duster it's a lot of fun to me I am not a each engine has to go in its family um it just it's working out that way for me that I'm putting the Gen 3 in this the sport satellite build I'm doing a classic vintage Mopar big block build we got ls's going in things the Ford engines that we're doing and the Ford projects we have on the channel I'm actually doing a a Ford 300 build it just to me the coyote is a great engine it's just not for me it might be right for you I hope this was helpful and you guys you know determining and learning a little bit more about the three most popular engine swaps what they can do and hopefully it's going to help lead you to not make a questionable Choice when it comes to your engine you're able to have a little bit more knowledge decide what is right for you and go out there and get your car swapped get it driving and get it out on the road running and enjoyable because the only thing worse than a project car is a project car you're not working on so hope you guys enjoyed this little bit of insight hopefully you are understanding while I'm still in a little bit of surgery recovery and uh getting back to 100% where I can uh get this back in there and uh we'll keep on going with some exciting stuff we've got a lot of really cool things coming before the end of the year and I can't wait to share it all with you I'm Jared reminding you guys to always make questionable choices except for when it comes to uh spending a whole lot of money on your engines do a little bit of research it's okay to make questionable choices but don't make stupid ones we'll see [Music] you [Music]

Channel: The Questionable Garage

Views: 375,820

Keywords: do, it, yourself, diy, wrench, every, day, everyday, vlog, daily, guys, flip, rebuild, jared, pink, muscle truck, international, LS Swap, GEN III Hemi, Hemi, Coyote, Engine swap, What engine to pick, Best engine

Id: zPBnFu9B5Hs

Length: 31min 38sec (1898 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023