Nissan 240SX LS V8 Engine Swap Guide Part 2: Let’s Get started

Adapting heater hoses from the LS to S13 wasn’t difficult but again required some adapters and odd shaped hoses to make it work seamlessly.

Here’s the routing path that I decided to use. It looks like the hoses are really close to the manifold but in reality they aren’t.

I was able to use a Mishimoto GTO radiator hose with some trimming and surprisingly, it fit really well onto the KA rad.

The lower Mishimoto hose (also for a GTO) needed a bit of splicing and a plastic adapter so to position it the right way. Nevertheless, this hose has been leak free so I don’t see any downside to hacking it up to work with your application.

LS engines have these so called steam ports (look two photos up and you’ll see a metal pipe capped off with a red nipple) and what they do is bleed off trapped hot air in the cooling cavities of the cylinder heads. However, the port needs to be plumbed into the cooling system and that means a bit custom fabrication work on the radiator. I bought an aluminum bung and drilled a hole into the topside of the Mishimoto radiator.

A buddy fired up the TIG welder and proceeded to lay some proper beads down welding the bung onto the rad.

And here’s the finished product with a barb fitting in place, ready to accept the steam port line.

Make sure to use some good quality hose for this line since it’s in an area that will see a lot of heat and cheap hose could degrade quickly.

I’ll end this post off with the charcoal canister placement. Most of you wont care about this but if for some reason you’re looking to run an emissions legal setup like I am then you’ll either need to use the GM one or I simply stayed with the OE Nissan unit and tucked it into the wheel well and ran the vacuum lines to their appropriate connections.

For Part 3 click here: Nissan LS V8 Swap Guide Part 3: It’s all in the Details