GM HT4100 Transplant

Has anyone put a cadillac in a jeep

I was wondering if anyone has put a HT4100 Cadillac V8 in a 87 jeep cherokee and does the bell housing match up, it had a 2.5 liter engine in it.

Re: Has anyone put a cadillac in a jeep

I'm gonna say no.

If I were going to swap any Cadillac V8 into my XJ it would the 345 hp 6.0 litre Vortec's they put in the Escalades.

Re: Has anyone put a cadillac in a jeep

If you really want to put it in for some reason advanced adapters can help you.

You should post this to Modified board, this is the stock OEM board.

Re: Has anyone put a cadillac in a jeep

Unless you just had one laying around, were very bored, and have a pile of money to burn i don't see any reason for that swap. The ht4100 and the rest of that family of engines were not the most reliable or powerful engines out there. Just my .02, but if you want to do it by all means go for it, Advance adapters can probably help you with adapting it to the jeep bellhousing.

Re: Has anyone put a cadillac in a jeep

What he says, I'd go LS family, Hearse (472-500ci :evil, or Northstar if I was going to put a Caddy motor in anything.

If you had an AW4 in it (which you probably don't), you can use an Isuzu bell housing with the 60 deg. V-6 bolt pattern. A Northstar will bolt up to this bolt pattern with the only problem, IIRC, is that the starter ends up on the wrong side. Do some searching on the Isuzu forums for the possibilities.

I wouldn't use a ht4100 for anything other than a boat anchor.

If you insist on using the 4100 check out CHRFAB.com They offer a performance built 60 deg..700R4 and converter in a case with the Northstar bolt pattern or the GM metric patern. Both are addaptable

My DD is a nearly perfect 85 Cadillac Sedan DeVille with the original HT4100 engine. It's one of the two engines they used when they were trying to get high fuel economy before the science was well understood and take my word it for they are not very good engines. In fact they are often ranked as one of the worst engines in history, and there is even a book out there blaming Cadillac's demise on that engine. I wouldn't go that far, but they are not very good.

Just for starters the flat tappet cams are very soft and are notorious for wearing out very fast (they go flat and you have no power after ~60k miles). Oh and the blocks are aluminum but the heads are cast, so they have different heat-up properties which produced a massive number of head gasket failures in the high-load rear-wheel-drive caddies (they do better with the FWD models). There are many engineering defects as well.

The 4.5 that came immediately after the 4.1 is better but still not very good. The 4.9 that came after that was a very good motor that corrects almost all of the problems found in the earlier series (roller cams, better components, etc). The 4.9 is basically a 4.1 that has been ported and stroked with an MPFI injection manifold (instead of TBI) with better parts, so if you can fit the 4.1 you can fit a 4.9. I have no idea why you would want to do such a thing.

After that came the Northstar engines, and the first couple generations of that had some pretty bad problems too, but the later ones are really good.

ps--my ride, flexing at the beach for the ladies

I've heard stories of those 4100's leaking antifreeze on the showroom floors.

I should also have said that the HT4100 had factory output of approx 125 horsepower. On its best day you would only get 130-140 HP, but after the cams and other parts start wearing down you are getting 90-100 HP (this is the problem with mine at the moment--she's got very little power off the light).

By comparison the 4.0 HO will put out about 200 HP. On top of that it will easily go to 200k miles without any major problems unless outright neglect is involved.

There's really no good reason to put in an HT4100. If you've got one taking up floor space in your garage and you're the idle rich kind type then okay whatever, but otherwise you'd be way better off putting in another stocker.