I bought this truck in September of 16' and it was more or less original. It handled like crap, poor road manners, awful brakes, decent power but frightening fuel mileage (25L/100) from the 352FE. So it was a perfectly normal old for truck, nice to look at but not much fun to drive.
I changed all that over the winter, it now has a crown vic front suspension, power rack, 11.5" disks, power brakes and a big sway bar. I installed a VW turbo diesel along with a bunch of performance parts to get 190hp and 325lb/ft from the 116 cubic inch engine. It now gets about 9L/100 or 26mpg average. I've put about 1500km on it so far this spring and it's working really well.
Nice conversion, super clean and looks to ride like a dream. Have been a fan of the Crown front end for a while now and you can't go wrong with a diesel.
Great looking swap and really unusual. I am interested in the engine to Toyota transmission adaptation. Did you use a commercially available adaptor, build it yourself or have a machinist build the adaptor. I have a VW turbo diesel engine available and have wondered how to use it in a longitudinal project I have in mind.
A friend of mine made my adapter, and had the Toyota flywheel drilled to match the vw crank. If you search google for "TDI Toyota adapter" or "TDI jeep adapter" you'll find lots of information. The TDICLUB forum has lots of info as well.
If you plan on using a TDI I would plan on spending a couple thousand on a turbo and tune to get big power out of it. Mine is about double the stock Jetta hp and torque. 190hp and 300-325 lb/ft as you can see it moves along just fine and gets a solid 27mpg in mixed driving.
Thanks. I would be using the engine in a much lighter car than you did ( early MG) so probably don't need quite that much power but it is good information for the future.
