Picking a Good Oil Pan for your LS Swapped Discovery

The oil pans that are the best option for your LS Disco.

The F-Body Oil Pan – A good option for an LS Discovery

The LS has a plethora of oil pan options. It can sometimes be daunting which pan to pick. Along with the oil pan, you also need to consider the dipstick tube, windage tray, and oil pickup tube. We have two oil pan choices that we typically recommend for use with our LS Discovery swaps.

First is the LS Muscle Car Oil Pan Kit. This is a GM Performance factory part that is available typically from Jegs or Summit for around $250. Its expensive, but everything you need comes with the kit. It includes a low profile oil pan (the one used originally on the H3 Hummer V8, I believe), the associated dipstick tube, windage tray, pickup tube, and all the fasteners, gaskets, and bolts you need. This is a great all-in-one option, especially if you are using the LM4 from the Envoy XL, which has a funky front-sump oil pan that will not work with the swap. This oil pan has good clearance from the front differential, which adds to its positive attributes. This is our go-to option for Disco LS Swaps. See it here.

Second is the F-body oil pan. A few years ago a bunch of off-market F-body oil pans started showing up on Amazon and eBay for around $100. Most of them are knockoffs, but they still often tend to work well. The F-body pan is actually slightly shallower than the muscle car oil pan, so you have a little better clearance from the front differential. However, all of the other parts are not included, so you have to piece together a dipstick and pickup tube separately. I have also heard of people modifying the truck windage tray to work, but I don't have any experience with that. Depending on what you can find, this can be cheaper than the muscle car pan kit, but you also have to piece the different parts together yourself.

Another angle of the F-body pan. The oil level sensor hole will need to be plugged.

Those are the oil pans that we recommend. Some people have also used the factory Silverado truck oil pan. There are a couple of issues with this, which is why I don't recommend it. The truck oil pan has a deep sump in the back. This gets close to the front differential. Specifically, there is a couple of bosses on the side for the oil level sensor. The sensor needs to be removed and the hole plugged. The bosses around the sensor need to be clearanced off with a grinder. If you are going to use this oil pan, I would highly recommend checking your front differential clearance once the engine is installed and figuring out what your truck's limits are with this pan.

A used LS truck oil pan.

Another angle of the LS truck pan. Note the shiny aluminum where the boss around the sensor hole was removed.

Overall, that's our recommendations! For more information on parts used in our Discovery 2 LS swap kit, see the sample parts list.