jarvis210

Ok I have never posted on this site but I wanted to share my fun journey of installing an 5.4L 113 engine into my c43. I have been wanting to do the swap for some time now but just havent had the time to invest to do it the way i wanted.

My C43 is White with black interior. It has 142k miles on it and i have pretty much rebuilt the entire car top to bottom and front to back including replacing complete transmission with factory rebuild which i actually pulled apart right away to shim everything up to the way i wanted.

The 55 project started by purchasing the motor from Patomic German Auto. The motor came out of a 2000 E55 with 97k miles on it. The motor arrived at my work and i quickly became excited to start the project so i mounted the motor up onto the engine stand and began the tear down of the engine. I pulled everything apart minus taking the bottom end apart(pistions and crank) I removed all the valves from the cylinder heads and throughly cleaned them to new condition. I took the heads to a friends house were we did very mild porting to the exhaust side of the cylinder head(intake had no room for improvment) well not much anyway. The following week i began to assemble the motor. I end up having to replace the front cover of the engine due to 2 broken bolts (they could have been extracted but i wanted to keep the project moving in the forward direction) i assembled the rest of the motor. I got the engine together most of the way. I got it to the point to were i needed my other motor out of my car to start swapping things over.

Work slowed down for the week so 2 weeks ago thursday i pulled the car into the shop and pulled the motor out. I then swapped over the intake manifold, and engine harness, i also swapped over all accessories including water pump and all other parts on front of engine. while the motor was out i went ahead and installed a new ac compressor (old one had been leaking for some time), i swapped the exhaust manifolds over, and then dropped the motor back into the car. i pulled the fuel pump relay to allow the engine to crank over a few times to build up some oil pressure before actually starting it. I installed the relay back in and the motor fired on first attempt. i topped off all the fluids and took it for a drive. Car drives great and power is excellent. I checked over everything the next day and have found that everything looks exactly how i wanted it.

The swap is very straight forward. The only thing that i had to do that was extra was add the coolant pipe to the back of the right cylinder head(the e55 does not use this) that was as easy as pulling a freeze plug out and installing the pipe.

this is a great swap that i am very happy with. I will keep this updated i will be doing a limited slip diff next and also upgrading the brakes( i think im going to do slk 55 brakes front and rear but not sure yet).

morganb

Nice little project for a first post!!!
Sounds great. Looking forward to seeing some pictures.

jarvis210

Thanks ill get some pictures up tomorrow forsure..... It was a fun project and well worth it ....

jarvis210

pictures added

Dziner82

awesome man. its great to keep hearing positive stories about how relatively easy this swap is, i can see myself doing this some day, maybe a few years from now.

PJmak

Awesome

I see these poping up more andmore lately

Can you please share some more driving impressions?

Dziner82

Agreed!
after going back through your posts it didnt seem like your enthusiasm about how the car felt after matched the effort that was needed to do the swap.

that has been my thoughts on the 55 swap, if im not mistaken its a approx 45hp gain right? but more like 80lb/ft which is a lot but a full engine swap gets mighty expensive, and or time consuming.

the 4.3 gets up to about 325hp with tune and filter/pulley swaps right?

still i think its an awesome mod, big thumbs up! would love to hear more about how much faster it is in the 1/4 mile or 0-60 from someone who has done the swap.

jarvis210

ok so driving impressions...... looking at the power numbers on paper the swap may seem to be to much work for what you are getting. Let me tell you. It is amazing how this car now feels. the response is amazing. The car drives like a totally different car. Now the million dollar question is was the swap worth the time and money, absolutely. i would do it all over again

jarvis210

The car has an interesting story behind it actually. When i bought this car it was actually my 3rd 202 amg i had 2 c36 before this. I was not actaully looking for a 43 i was just looking for a white/black 202 amg for along time. This thing popped up locally about 2 years ago so i picked it up and sold my c36. about a year later i started the hunt for a house so i had to sell my extra car(that was the 43) to help with cash for my down payment. I sold the car to a friend that is also a mb tech with no intentions to buy it back. About 7 months later i decided i would sell my daily which was a supercharged 2005 tacoma to help reduce my overhead. I bought the 43 back and decided i would now be keeping the car for some time because i now a mortgage to pay so i cant have multiple cars. I quickly got bored and decided that putting the work into the swap will tie me to the car alittle more. I got the motor on a thursday, tore it down, did the mild porting to the heads and had it back in the car the following thursday.

i got the car from a 2000 e55 which i believe has 349 hp and 391 tq. so i would say that it was well worth the power.

PJmak

I love 202 amgs and this is my second one. I also sold it to a friend but I ended up buying it back and I will do that swap sooner or later since I already have the e55 transmission in my car.

I can only imagine the response when you press on the pedal. The 43s were built to be cruisers as they are...not screamers that tear it up off the line. People that don't know will never understand the difference between a c36 and a c43 even tho they are neck to neck off the line. The c43 is almost effortless and its invincible in traffic. The power response and the awesome brakes will give you advantage over most cars out there in traffic.

I can only imagine this thing with 80-90+ more torques

jarvis210

Yea about 2 months after I first acquired my 43 I replaced the transmission with a factory one from the dealer. I then took the new trans apart and set the clutch packs up the way i wanted. So my car is pretty dialed now......

ProjectC55

I've been telling all these guys this over and over and over again. And plus you can get these engines(5.4l) for almost nothing right now. Nice job and continue to have fun with the BEAST!!!

jarvis210

yes this is by far the best mod you can do for this car in my opinion

silverjimm

Nice work!!

jarvis210

thanks it was fun project. i have already driven it 1500 miles since swap and no issues.

Capn

Great swap, so when you going to supercharge it?

ChampagneC

i seem to recall others having ongoing issues with this swap? is that isolated and it really is a do-able and driveable swap?

Dziner82

It seems from some of the threads that a few of the guys that had this swap did most of the work themselves. I couldn't tell from your post did you have the shop do the swap for you or do you work there or something so that you didnt really pay a full shop price for the swap?

I have a connection with a guy that has swapped out a few engines before and has the necessary tools and space in his garage, he has never worked on a mercedes but he is my only option if i want to avoid shop prices. Does anyone have an estimate or know what a engine swap like this would cost if done at t shop with approx $80/hr labor rate?
paying over $1200 or so in labor on top of the cost of the engine would be the only thing holding me back.

99CEEFOURTHREE

What did the shop charge you for swap complete..Looks like a nice indy shop!

jarvis210

Ok so i did the work myself..... the shop that you see is actually mercedes benz of long beach ....... i do not have a total on labor to do this swap. it would be really hard to put a price on the labor due to the fact that i did alot of things to the engine that most probably wouldnt do. I tore down a perfectly good engine apart just to clean it and reseal the whole thing. that right there added alot of labor to the project but luckly for me it was free cause i did it all.

jarvis210

ok so i have no plans on supercharging it.... if i was going to do this i would have gone the route of installing a factory supercharged engine but really couldnt afford the downtime involved with that swap because the car is my daily driver. but if i have the time one day i will do the 55k swap into this car.

99CEEFOURTHREE

Nice nice nice! Lucky you.I installed the supercharger on my 90 gt and swapped out heads n dialed in the cam..problem is i dont have the garage space to do the swap, just enought to get the car in and wrk around it.Im going to do this swap this upcoming summer.Great to hear of your sucess with the swap..and your satisfaction! Good luck with it.

jarvis210

go for it..... its a great swap

99CEEFOURTHREE

Other than the cooling tube its a direct plug n play with factory C43 ecu settings?

ProjectC55

Yes!