A Rover "Super Four"

This engine was developed by the ex Triumph design office. My understanding was that the bottom end is "derived" from the 1600/2000/2500. Clearly the head is all new though. Front end cam drives etc are reasonbly easy to change, look at BMC with the E series, R series, S series progression.

Chris



Edited By chrisyork on 1213202868
 
DaveHerns said:
And not a very reliable engine as the oil feed to the cam blocks causing the belt to snap
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I did not see that many with snapped cam belt, not sure if I saw any. But did do my fair share off head gaskets on these engines. Don't know if it was down to a design flaw or the owners putting neat water in the cooling systems.
 
richarduk said:
I did not see that many with snapped cam belt, not sure if I saw any. But did do my fair share off head gaskets on these engines. Don't know if it was down to a design flaw or the owners putting neat water in the cooling systems.
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You can't have been involved with many of them then!!
Unfortunately I was at the dealers when they first came out and they were trouble right from the start. Then later I took them on and did loads with snapped belts, and as you say head gaskets. Luckily for me I had someone working doing them for me so I didn't soil my hands on them. You could strip out the head and carrier rebuild it all, but in doing so in the process of cleaning it all up the removal of all the clag meant they went out running low oil pressure and so ran out the bottom end. They were (and still are IMHO) a terrible engine that I would not go anywhere near.
 
How about following another madcap 60s Rover idea in the form of a 5 cylinder? Its been forgotten a couple of decades, but I'm sure I read Rover made one, and now several marques now have them in petrol and diesel.

Personally I'd go for the Alfa mjet 2.4 20 valve 5 cylinder turbo, (the later one) pushing out 175 BHP and 280 ft/lb, and thats before you chip it. It would suit the P6 rather well - low revving and low end torque pulls like a V8 so great for cruising, flys when the turbo kicks in, has a weird off camber idle sound and clatters slightly less than a 2000:;):

Only problem, Ive never seen one for sale and it might be a bit heavy - any thoughts?

Matt
 
Rover made at least one five cylinder variant of the 2000 four and it is thought to have (briefly) made it into a car. All modern fives solve the inherent out of balance problem by using a balancer shaft. This was clearly unavailable to Rover at the time as they were trying to simply stretch the existing engine on the existing tooling. Their proposal was to solve the out of balance by clever positioning and softness of engine mountings. A good idea but very difficult to achieve in practice - refinement of this technique was what eventually lead to the wide acceptability of diesel engines in passenger cars. Rover definitely didn't crack it and the five went in the too difficult box!

I quite like the idea of the Alfa five - presumeably that's the same engine as in the Fiat Coupe where it would be more widely available in scrapyards? The difficulty with any modern engine is to get a compatible gearbox and engine mountings for longitudinal installation - I presume the Alfa and the Fiat are transverse? The Italians have some pretty eccentric vans availble for the home market - the notion of a Transit sized van bearing Alfa Romeo badges doesn't seem quite right somehow! Perhaps some of these are fitted with a less pressed version of the five cylider, in which case they could donate engine and box mounts and gearbox?

You could do pretty much the same sort of thing with a five cylinder Audi engine. VW vans use the same engine in RWD format so can donate the mountings and gearbox leaving the car to donate a performance tuned version of the engine.

The attraction of a five in P6 land is that it should be short enough to fit in the 4 cylider engine bay where a six is likely not to be. There may be some exceptions even to that rule though, the VW VR6, because of it's offset siamesed bores is a notably short straight six (no it is not really a V6!), and the last of the Volvo 760 saloons and estates had a straight six which was advertised as being built specially "compact" ie short, to fit in the 4 cyl Volvo engine bay.

Chris
 
I originally intended to use the Honda 2.7 V6 from an 827 but a there is no easy RWD gearbox option, and after carfull measuring it looks like it's basically too wide to fit the bay. The Honda lump is a 90 degree V with over head cam heads, which makes it very wide. I think I measured it with about an inch each side for clearance, which would make spark plug changing "challenging" :D
 
Webmaster

Is that Alfa you purchased back on the road ? I thought you might have a few words to say about Alfa engines

Best engine of the moment must be the people who make a V8 out of 2 Hyabusa engines

Dave
 
Alfa has gone, sold it to a guy with a rear-ended one to transplant the engine. Having seen the damage and done plenty of research I wouldn't touch the alfa twinspark again, just too fragile.

Same applies to bike engines in cars (and in bikes for that matter), don't see too many bikes with 200k on the clock without major surgery, but many modern car engines easily achieve those sort of mileages. I finally retired my 820 engine with 190k and that was a 20 year old heavily abused engine that would still be in use if I had fixed the water leak !

As I get older I start to lean more towards the american way of thinking, highly stressed small engines that need constant maintenance are just too much trouble for daily use. Nice big lazy engines that go on for ever are much better (with good management they can be quite efficient too).
 
Re:

chrisyork said:
I quite like the idea of the Alfa five - presumeably that's the same engine as in the Fiat Coupe where it would be more widely available in scrapyards?
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The Alfa is a turbo diesel and unrelated to Fiat's petrol 5-cyilnder.
I have that 2.4L 5-pot in my daiiy Alfa 156. It pulls like a train, gives me 50mpg and revs like many petrol engines could only wish for... I like it plenty.

The Fiat/Alfa/Lancia JTD range, whether 4 or 5 cylinder, is a sister engine to GMs CDTI you'll find in Zafiras through to SAABs. in fact, you may find the diesel in your Zafira on your drive was made at GMs plant in italy, as both firms were in bed for a while. The GM and FIat groups fit the same family of Bosch pumps across their ranges. Some JTD are fitted to some van ranges, maybe there is a RWD gearbox there.

The diesels do some good mileages, and don't let go like the petrols, for some reason... My local Alfa specialist has on average five TwinSparks in a week for rebuilding, but haven't had one JTD in, yet. In fact they said the main diesel faults seem from chip remapping failures from aftermarket fiddlers.
 
Re:

chrisyork said:

The attraction of a five in P6 land is that it should be short enough to fit in the 4 cylider engine bay where a six is likely not to be. There may be some exceptions even to that rule though, the VW VR6, because of it's offset siamesed bores is a notably short straight six (no it is not really a V6!), and the last of the Volvo 760 saloons and estates had a straight six which was advertised as being built specially "compact" ie short, to fit in the 4 cyl Volvo engine bay.

Chris
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The volvo 760 came with the horrible PRV V6 engine. For the 960 they made their own compact inline six.
The Volvo 960 alu. "white block" six is just 4 inches longer than the old steel "red block" 4 cylinder I think, and I am pretty sure the Volvo red block is a little shorter than a Rover 4 cylinder. So maybe even the volvo six would fit in the Rover?
(*Making note to self to grab the measuring tape and head for the garage*)
 
Re: A Rover

Suitably correcte! I did mean the 960! I didn't know a great deal about it though - you make it sound more attractive by the second!!

Chris
 
Re: A Rover

I feel this is derailing this thread to the depths of Off Topic. Sorry! I hope this is ok.
I did some measuring and research today. The Rover engine I found to be approx. 72cm long from the transmission mounting plate to the tip of the waterpump. The Volvo red-block four cylinder engine is approx. 64cm measured in the same way.

Here is a picture of a stock volvo 240 engine bay.

Here is a picture of the same car with the Volvo 960 3.0 24v six + AC fitted.
It looks like there is space enough in front, and given that the Volvo four is shorter than Rover's, I would guess the Volvo six would fit lengthwise in the Rover.
My biggest concern fitting it would be this. The Rover has a crossmember closer to the front of the car than the Volvo. This may get in the way of the parts you can see on the picture, but could also be easy to solve. I don't know yet.

The pictures were borrowed from this great thread in the swedish volvo 200 club forum. The last pages of it covers the installation of the 960 six in a 240 where he has some good solutions to similar problems that may occur if one would want to do the same to another similar car, like a Rover. It's naturally in swedish, but if anyone is interested in getting something translated, don't hesitate to ask me and I will do my best translating for you.
It may look like he has a real nightmare of a wiring harness on some pictures, but this is mostly to get the electronically controlled Aisin-Warner automatic transmission to work. A really good automatic from what I have read so far. The six is available in 2.5L, 3.0L and also a 2.8L twin turbo.
I have some more info about the engine, transmissions, buying tips, wiring diagrams++ if anyone is interested.

Sigurd
 
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