Hi all,
>In a range of Rootes cars consisting of Hillman, Humber, Sunbeam and
>Singer, what markets would each car have been aimed at? ISTR that a
>Hillman was the basic, family model, the Sunbeam the sportier one and the
>Humber the posh one. Where does that leave the Singer or have I got it all >wrong?
>And what was made (if anything) at Rootes in Maidstone? The building there
>seems far too big just to be a dealership and it seems a little odd (or
>coincidental) to have a dealer with the same name as the brand.
Rootes Maidstone used to make truck bodies, afaik.
A story circulating at the time was that the pre-production models actually handled rather well, but it was discovered that the headlamps were lower than the Construction and Use regs required. So they simply jacked up the front end, which obeyed the law but ruined the handling (shades of later MGBs). Don't know if this is true - over to the NG.
I think another problem was the lack of development potential of the engine. While the venerable A Series engine in its direct competitor grew from 848 to 1300 over the years, there simply wasn't enough meat or room in the Imp block to take it any further than - what was it? about 875?
A great shame. While quite different in character to the Mini it had some excellent points. Ruined, as other have said, by poor development, poor build quality, incompetent management and resentful workforce.
It was a bad time for British manufacturing. Just as an aside (don't I always) in the immediate pre and post war years Britain had a thriving light aircraft industry. The Government appointed two Ministers to review it. They were John Stonehouse (who did a Reggie Perrin) and Tony Benn. We now buy Cessnas and Pipers from the USA, Robins from France and so on. I understand we are pretty good at making paper darts.
The Imp engine in my Clan Crusader is 998cc, and a conservative 75BHP. You can go up to 1040cc with the original crank. Above that you have to go to expensive long-throw (longer than the standard 65mm anyway!) cranks.
I think about 1200cc is the absolute max, but competition versions of these can reach 140BHP. You need to replace the head gasket with a Wills-ringed head though.
It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Dave Plowman (News)" saying something like:
The same lump was used in the base model Talbot Sunbeam at 998cc afair. In that application it was quite reliable, showing that the original idea was sound enough, just too prone to bad maintenance.
Nope, the Sunbeam used a 930cc version. (same stroke as the 875, just a larger bore). The 998cc big-bore version is still the best but pistons and rings are getting expensive.
The original was loosly based on the wartime Coventry Climax fire pump engine which was designed for high output at low weight - probably without much regard to cost. So should be sound enough. ;-)
No, it was bad design, there was no way the radiator could get enough air flow through it - resulting in blown head gaskets and damaged head, block or both. The Talbot Sunbeam had the radiator in the correct place and thus the over heating problems that the Imp was prone to vanished...
The message from "Dave Plowman (News)" contains these words:
One of the supposed advantages of the transverse engine in the Mini is the gyroscopic effect countering roll when cornering but ISTR reading years ago that as originally designed the engine pointed in the opposite direction. If the direction of rotation of the engine was not reversed as well that surely would have meant that the gyroscopic effect would have accentuated roll when cornering but then would that have been at all important given Issigonis' desire to design a motorised shopping trolley rather than a normal car.
It was designed with a transfer engine to save space - nothing else. The reason the engine was turned round was the carburettor at the front suffered from icing problems. So they swapped that for distributor ones. ;-)
I've still not had it explained why they didn't just change the rotation direction of the engine after being forced to turn it round. Would have saved those noisy transfer gears. You'd have needed a different dizzy and oil pump, but can't really think of much else.
That would in effect mean a new engine, remember that blocks are designed to accommodate the thrust forces from the power stroke and as such the block would have needed to be re-worked, also the camshaft (lobe timing) would have had to be altered.
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