Quote:
Originally Posted by Miller88
Excellent! One thing I hate about living in NY is these diesel swaps are nearly impossible on vehicles that have not rusted into oblivion.
Very neat that you are pushing 30MPG with it. Wonder if the fuel mileage will get better with the more powerful 617 swap. I know the 617 are somewhat popular in the Jeep community.
I thought the Astros were a unibody / "uniframe" design similar to the unibody Cherokees / Grand Cherokees? Clearly it's not as you did a body lift and the body is completely removed in the one picture.
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Yeah, in your area depending on EPA rules, you really need to find a cherry car thats still 25 years old, a lot harder to do up there. I lucked out with this van, it has some repairable rust holes, but I wouldn't call it rotten.
Ironically I started with a Rochester astro, but it was too rusty to swap.
I think technically you are right in that these are classified as unibody vans, but they have a removable 6 bolt subframe/engine cradle, so its possible to drop the important bits out of the unibody by removing the subframe. Its kinda half and half in my view. I think a lot of unibody vehicles are built like that though.
Here are some videos of the test starts of the new motor-
first one with big air pocket-
second one runs well. I also got to try out out an open vac shutoff I read about that I now love-