what are the difficulties in swapping a 5.0 n/a engine from a 2012 xj to a super charged 2011 xj?---------thanks in advance

 

Mark, the physical swap is pretty straight forward. You would need to swap over most of the top of the engine since you do have different cooling paths and other things like that. But, the block is fairly common. BUt, this is where your problem is going to lie. The internals of the block are different between the NA and supercharged versions. Different crank, different pistons (supercharged is less compression)., etc. So, if you take a NA block and put the supercharger on it, you are likely to at a minimum have an engine that is going to run rough. Potentially you can damage a block.

If you are saying that you are taking the whole engine and swapping that in, like I mentioned above, you are going to need to convert over a lot of the cooling piping and whatnot. Then your issue comes in that you will then need to get the ECU reprogrammed to handle a non-supercharged engine. You can't just swap the ECU as there are numbers inside the ECU that the car checks every time you start the car to verify that the car is not being stripped of parts and sold.

So, can it be done. Yes. But, it is not going to be a simple engine swap though either. You are going to have to swap a lot of things over.

 

The cost associated with this is astronomical compared to just selling the car and buying an XJ S/C. You're about to throw a ton of money out the window as well as suffer a lot of significant installation and tuning issues. Sell the car and buy an S/C. Take the money you would've spent on the swap and use that for mods.

 

That is correct for the 4.2 litre engine but is it for the 5 litre? My mechanic has taken a block from a Range Rover and fitted it to a 5 litre XKR. Some of the bolt on items have to be changed but the basic block is the same.

 

What Thermo stated in post #4 is absolutely correct. The internals as well as the ECU etc are VERY different between the 5.0 NA engine and the 5.0 SC engine.

The SC engine has a compression ratio of 9.5 whereas the NA engine has an 11.5 compression ratio. Which obviously means something is different internally between these two engine types.

Looking at my workshop manual the bore and stroke is exactly the same for the SC and NA engines so would presume the crank is the same.