I believe I am pretty close to retiring the '92 LS400. My plan when I bought this car for $500 almost 5 years ago was to replace the timing belt and swap the drivetrain into a Volvo 242 for the GRM challenge and potentially daily driver duty. However, the car turned out to be really nice and everything worked great, and my wife liked it. Well - happy wife, happy life, so it became her daily driver. Now I've fixed up a Volvo 850 turbo wagon and hope to make it her daily driver, it's in the "test" phase right now. Which means the LS400 gets to either be sold on or fulfill it's initial destiny. Since it has a salvage title and some (mild) body damage, I can't imagine getting more than $1000 out of it, and I can get close to that if I part it out and keep the drivetrain. Certainly enough to get the drivetrain to "free."
I've been having some trouble deciding on the destination for this sweet ass v8. The drawback is that it's Automatic only without a lot of expense. My skill level is medium to advanced, I can weld, wrench, and own a bizarre swapped car - the Chevonda from past Challenges - and so am somewhat familiar with the risks. My goals with this swap could be: (1) Lemons, (2) GRM Challenge, or, the wildcard - (3) Tow vehicle.
Wait, what? That's right, I currently have a C2500hd that I tow with, gets 12mpg empty or 8mpg towing. I've been thinking about something smaller and/or cooler than can still tow ~6k pounds. One of my thoughts was to use the Lexus drivetrain to restomod an older pickup into a tow vehicle. That seems less likely since it would be outside this engine's forte.
What say ye? Where do you think I should put this engine/auto transmission? What use should I put it to?
