Hi guys,
I'm starting the research for a 1994 Ford Explorer->TDI conversion and was wondering if anyone's seen a swap of this nature before? I'm going to go V8 with it first, but ultimately, want to put a diesel engine into it. Since I'm in Canada, the engines that seemed most available were actually Mercedes diesel or an engine from a Sprinter. I imagine the perfect fit would be a V6 TDI from Europe, but I'm curious what the import cost would be on something like that and what varieties I might be able to get.
Anyhoo. This won't be happening until at least next summer, but I figured I'd throw out a line and get some gray matter churning a bit.
Haven't seen any TDI's put into Fords.....there are adaptor plates available to mate a VW block to a Toyota tranny....the ones that were mated to the 22R motors. So there is people putting them in Toyota trucks now. I assume you could do the same with a 4-Runner if you wanted a SUV. That might be the next best thing to your Explorer. There are also adapter plates available to bolt a Mercedes 5 cyl diesel to Chevy auto trans. The possibilities for this combination into various vehicles would be almost endless. I love these VW diesels, but maybe a Merc 5 cyl would be a better match for the Explorer. Just my 2cents.
There's a guy who calls himself Lone Ranger over at tdiclub that did a 1.9 tdi alh in a Ranger which would be pretty much the same as the explorer. There's a sticky in the conversion section on all the different conversions and I found his build under "other".