Throwing a Rover V8 together.

[Des]

I'm waiting for a not so bollocky freezing off day so I can put this ugly lump of old donk into my car

 

It's been collecting dust for a year waiting for me to pull my finger out / decide what to do. It's from the time when the 3.9 was renamed 4.0, although same capacity the 4.0 had bigger mains, the caps were crossbolted, and the outer row of headbolts were deleted, this block would also take a longer stroke crank to make it a 4.6, so obviously beefing up the bottom end was a carefully thought out precaution, as we certainly didn't want to see Rangies boiling their knackers off every 10 miles of hard shoulder.

The block I have is a sort of inbetweenie, with all the disadvantages of both, early small main crank with the later type of caps, but not drilled and tapped, nor is it drilled for the outer headbolts. I have a theory that the missing headbolts are the problem, this was about the time when it all went wrong, I think the extra load on the remaining causes cracks in the block. Now do I drill and tap for these missing bolts? I'm going to use studs anyway, I'd really fancy having the mains bored out to take a 4.6 crank but don't want to put a lot of effort into a block that may well turn out to be no good, I'm already a bit curious / suspicious as to why a block that's been rebored has such a light trace of headgasket footprint.

No engine number on the bugger either, which I assume means it was a replacement, just this in a funny place,

 

 

So it's down to me to give it a number, I was thinking of,

 

 

But obviously will ring DVLA and check whether it's been taken already.

 

The cam is a bit boy racer so will swap it, and not sure about this,

 

 

Looks like a proper chain but I don't need the hassle of having to time it up. Years ago I'd love to build an engine, I'd be out in the cold right now lapping in the valves and probably painting up the block like a tart but now I just find it a massive arseache, lost my mojo somewhere along the way.

[autofive]

might be worth asking on the TVR forum about that block

[Bren]

The outer headbolts cause problems in that when the are torqued up it creates uneven clamping, the head "tilts" where the two rows of bolts are closest.

 

Speak to any of the well known Rover V8 specialists - they just "nip" the extra row of bolts up.

[jonny69]

The Griffith and Chimaera came with a 4.0. TVR used to use Rover blocks and they had them out to 5.0 litre, but I don't know what they did to them so you'd have to look at the bore and stroke. There's another block, I think the late 4.6 in the Range Rover, which didn't have a distributor.

 

Whichever way you look at it, the strangling point on Rovers is the heads. I probably wouldn't get it modified for a 4.6 crank because it'll be a very expensive job and you'll gain more by bolting on a pair of 4.6 heads which have bigger ports. Then, with a cam that can be used on the stock timing gear (Piper 270?) and something like an Edelbrock 4-barrel carb for induction, you should have a decent and very reliable flier of an engine.

 

My dad ran Rovers for years in his Cobra. First one was a fairly stock 3.5 with a Holley 4-barrel; second one was a bit hotter - a 3.9 SD1 engine with a bit of head work and Piper 270 cam; the Holley made way for the more reliable Edelbrock carb because the Holley had problems with the vacuum secondaries. The latest one which was built around 1999 was a new 4.2 cross-bolted block with 4.6 heads. Back when he was planning it (like 1997) there were problems with getting the distributorless block to run outside the car it came from and there weren't aftermarket ECUs to use so he went for a distributor on the 4.2 block. It's got heavily worked heads, modified injection system and was built by Dave Ellis. Close to about 300hp on the dyno but I don't know where TVR got their figures from because they made some pretty outrageous horsepower claims.

[Des]

TVR, of course! Now I know where it came from, have to wonder how many Rangies have lost their engines to those odd looking plastic things, now I'm avenging the travesty, albeit in a small way. I've heard the story of the outer head bolts causing the gaskets to allow the cylinders to start chuffing all over the cam, but I think I'd choose that over the block getting knackered, made sense in the old days of the 3.5 but the 3.9 / 4.0 has less metal around the bores. I'm not going to do the tuning thing, just the easy cheap route for a slight improvement, the RV8 is just too much of a donkey, it's better suited, once watertight, for low power, (by modern standards) and longevity, for power it's possibly less work and likely cheaper to shove in a Lexus engine, which I'd love to do but will never find the time, space, inclination.