Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Varche]

It is coming up to MOT time for my Spanish reg car, 140k miles. It has all sorts of health issues, hopefully not too many that would fail an MOT. If I was in England I would scrap my car and get another one but here the costs of changing car ownership are truly ridiculous and so I am investigating possibilities.

One is to buy another similar UK Elite for spares and just swap the engine and gearbox complete into my car. Apart from having access to a serious tripod and hoist are there any issues with compatability of things like keys, ECUs, wiring harnesses etc. Do I have to for example look for a minifacelift car or will any 2.5 do the job.?

The health issues are wide and varied inc. Leaking ex manifold leftbank, long time gutlessness, uses water (head gasket? oil cooler?), small oil leak from above the oil filter, tatered oil drain plug. Putting aside the gutlessness which I have failed to cure despite the advice of the forum, I don't really fancy taking the heads off given the experience of other forum members. The car is our only form of transport.

Varche

[Andy H]

The big change was from cable throttle to DBW (drive by wire) for the 2.6/3.2 engines.

As long as you keep the same ECU and security (keys/fobs) in the car you should be able to swap the mechanical bits without any worries.

Because the engine management measures the amount of air going into the engine and then monitors the exhaust gases coming out it can tune itself for variations in engine performance so you don't have to try too hard to match the ECU to the engine.

DIS packs, cam sensors and crank sensors changed over time so you might need to swap them from your old engine to your new one. They all have different shaped plugs so if you have the engine out it becomes easy to spot a wrong un.

[Kevin Wood]

Changing the engine for an unknown second hand one is probably going to be about the same amount of work as fixing the current one, with less certainty that you will not have a recurrence of the problems, IMHO.

(unless you can find one that you know to have been looked after and have a low mileage).

I would certainly change the manifold gaskets, cam cover gaskets, etc. on a second hand engine anyway so it wouldn't save a huge amount of errort, IMHO.

Kevin

[I_want_an_Omega]

The engine and immobiliser ECUs are coded to the chips in the U shaped part of the key.

Its ESSENTIAL that they are swapped together or the car won't start. I also swapped ignition barrels and door locks to get the keys etc working.


I've done it this weekend. Your car will then have (to all intents) the same chassis number and immobiliser code number as the car that the ECUs came from when read from a tech 2 etc. It will also have any stored error codes from the donor car, although these go after 20 clear starts.

I'm not 100% sure about the auto gearbox ecu, but I swapped this at the same time so would suggest this.

Hope this makes sense.

Rob