I Swapped My Chrysler 318 And Now The Oil Filter Doesn’t Fit?
In most of our Tech Tips we discuss the benefits of adding lube oil capacity to an industrial engine. See for example Tech Tip #74, 8 Reasons To Remote Mount Your Perkins Or Deutz Oil Filter and Tech Tip #23, Oil Filters: Capacity Counts.
Both larger filters and well as larger lube oil systems are good. After all, cool oil is happy oil. This Tech Tip is different.
The Chrysler LH318 industrial engine has been around for a long time and was used in many industrial applications. We’ve seen them in Clark and Silent Hoist forklifts, Lull rough terrain material handlers, Marine Travelifts, wood chippers and many other applications. The 318 Chrysler industrial engine was popular so it was swapped into a variety of different applications, but now it is old and parts can be expensive and/or hard to come by.
One problem that people ran into when swapping these engines was that the Chrysler 318 exhaust manifolds varied quite a bit sometimes causing clearance issues. If you swapped a Chrysler 318 exhaust manifolds from one engine to another and realized afterward that you can’t get the stock oil filter to fit, we have seen on solution that, while not optimal, may help clear the exhaust manifold. We have seen people use an oil filter from a 2.4L engine in a 1990 Toyota pickup; it may just work for you too!
