There have been a number of engine swaps done on 1800's over the years; I heard that a 318 c.i. V8 was installed, and there is (or was) a Ford V8 running around in Finland.

However, the only "practical" swap I know of is a B23E (non-turbo) with the CIS injection. Even this requires significant engineering as the cross-member needs to be modified, engine mounts, exhaust, and cooling system need to be fabricated or adapted to the 1800. Any engine swap will require some amount of fabrication, no matter how similar the new engine is to the original. There are no "kits" that you can buy for this purpose.

I'm in the middle of swapping a B230T into my 1800, and its a huge amount of work to make everything fit. I'm probably half way finished, and I have hundreds of hours invested already.

If your car is otherwise in decent shape, your least invasive option is to do a performance rebuild on your existing engine. I'm doing the engine swap on my 1800 as a challenge just to see if it can be done.

This gets discussed quite a bit. Talk to Phil Singher or John Parker (both on this board) about making the existing engine more powerful. You can make a B20 run like crazy if you do your homework. Trying to fit a different engine in the engine bay falls into the realm of 'custom fabrication' which can be 'really expensive' depending on what work you can do yourself. You know the B20 will fit between the fenders.

That said - if you have enough money you can do just about anything.

steve

How about an engine from a 240 or 740 Turbo? It doesn't bolt right in, but neither does anything else. And while bone stock Turbo's don't have staggering amounts of HP, they are fairly easy to tweak.
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I'm JohnMc, and I approved this message.