help with engine swap to 8BA engine

[Tony Wheeler]

Originally Posted by Jason Linders

is their anything that i should keep an eye out for on the chassis

As Keith says, just find one that's not too badly butchered, ie. side rail ends chopped off, reinforcement plates welded on, heavy bumper bar mounts welded to the chassis, etc. All this stuff can be repaired but it's a helluva lot of work, and such chassis will generally have fatigue cracks anyway.

Fortunately most SWB chassis are quite good as they rarely got put to work like the 3 tonners, the exception of course being the FGT, for the sole reason that it had a winch. Without that winch they never would have wound up as yard cranes in sawmills etc, they would have had an easy life as delivery vans like the Sigvans did, and the bodies would never have been chopped.

Anyway good luck with the chassis this week Jason, you'll start making good progress once you have a decent chassis to work with. First step will be to convert it from F15A to FGT, which will be much easier with a FGT chassis to compare. The various differences are covered in post #39 here:

http://www.mapleleafup.net/forums/sh...?t=1929&page=2

Hopefully you can re-use the winch crossmember, in which case you'll just need another rear crossmember and a set of FGT fishplates. I'm planning to get a batch of these made up so if you like I can include you in and send them up.