I find side-by-sides to be just as fun and/or useful as the next guy, but golly, they’re expensive. I’ve tested a handful that cost more than $30,000, and the priciest one I’ve ever put to work is the $52,000 Polaris Ranger XD 1500. It was handy, no doubt, but something like this Chinese UTV with a Harbor Freight Predator engine swap is… uh… more in line with my budget.
Something like that could only be the work of Robot Cantina on YouTube, whose builds we’ve featured several times here on The Drive. The host, affectionately known as Jimbo, has engineered some wild projects—from a dual-engined, diesel-electric golf cart to a supercharged Kubota-powered Honda Insight. This experiment is another in that same vein, as it combines a Hisun UTV with a 420cc single-cylinder.
Jimbo stumbled across the rig after it had sat parked for years. According to him, it suffered a tragic engine failure pretty early in its life (go figure). Getting the Predator engine to propel the UTV isn’t such a crazy thought on paper, but retaining 4×4 added another layer of complexity. Fortunately, he’s an engineer who’s plenty familiar with shadetree jobs such as this.
The first step was to fabricate an 8-by-8-inch adapter plate to serve as the engine mount base. Jimbo bored an 85-millimeter hole through it to fit the driveshaft bearing support. Then, he made a bracket out of 1/4-inch-thick 6061 aluminum to hold the driveshaft bearing collar. Some 3/16-inch angle iron was necessary to raise the engine and provide clearance under the driveshaft to connect the front wheels, but ultimately, he got ‘er done. A few custom spacers helped align everything as well.
With everything fastened in place, it was time to test the UTV around the yard. Adjusting the idle properly proved to be a pain because of the engine’s built-in compression relief device, but for the sake of this run, it worked OK. The new engine played nice with the Hisun’s factory CVT after fitting a Comet 780 series clutch, and even in high range, the mighty 13-horsepower Predator had enough oomph to sling some dirt. Sweet!
I’m finding running and driving examples of these Hisun UTVs for $3,500 on Facebook Marketplace. If you can locate one with a borked engine, you could probably score it for pennies on the dollar. These Predator 420 engines are on sale right now for $329.99, and even with raw materials costing more than they used to, you’d still be way under the cost of a domestic UTV. Of course, it would only have a fraction of the power, but just imagine how cool it would be to say you did it?
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