Why would anyone want a Classic car?

Good point. A friend of mine had one of the early rotary cars - an NSU, I think. He tells me that if you met another one you held up a few fingers in greeting ... the number of fingers indicating the number of engines you'd had ...

Ian

Reply to
Ian Johnston
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So why were they failing under original warranties, serviced by original Triumph dealerships ?

And why did it take Saab to fix the waterpump design ?

Reply to
Andy Dingley

The paper design of the V8 is the original. But Triumph also needed a new 4-pot anyway, so cutting it in half was an obviously attractive proposition. The paper design of the slant 4 was about before the first prototype V8 was built.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

Originally Triumph's work alone - Ricardo came on board later. Supposedly to work on developments such as the Sprint and the TR7, their input also found its way into the cooking version and the V8.

Certainly. However Rover and Triumph engineers were talking socially long before the marketeers were thinking of BL. Car making in the Midlands was one big village - the same external suppliers, the same plant and machinery builders, the same colleges (most of these engineers had studied together) and people job-swapping between companies.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

The Ro80

Possibly the only car where fitting a Transit V4 counted as an upgrade.

Reply to
Andy Dingley

The Airstream was a jellymould, the Airflow wasn't though. It was streamlined, after the fashion of the day, but it was elegantly done - not the "upturned basin" of the Beetle or a real derogatory jellymould. Too linear front-to-back, too slab-sided to count as a mere "jellymould"

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Reply to
Andy Dingley

Didn't that go for Saabs as well?

Ian

Reply to
Ian Johnston

Didn't Saab also get rid of the angled head bolts/studs: a feature which positive screams "Watch Out!"

Ian

Reply to
Ian Johnston

You bounder. It's pistols at dawn for that. Jellymould, forsooth.

Anyway, remember that in 1955, Citroen got a Cd which wasn't beaten until Audi fiddled the calculations [1] thirty years later...

Ian

[1] By including the area under the car and between the wheels in the frontal area, thus increasing A and reducing Cd.
Reply to
Ian Johnston

Ian Johnston ( snipped-for-privacy@btinternet.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

I'd far rather have either an Ro80 or a Saab 95/96 with the "original" engine.

Reply to
Adrian

Ian Johnston ( snipped-for-privacy@btinternet.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

The youth of today....

Bet he's never even heard of a Tatra T77 - which predates the Chrysler Airflow by a year. The Crossley-Burney Streamline was the same year as the Airflow, but positively laughable in comparison.

Reply to
Adrian

But why would you want to take the head off such a reliable engine ?

8-)

I think the V8 should have had Dzus fasteners instead

Reply to
Andy Dingley

and the slogan "Handling of a Dymaxion"

Reply to
Andy Dingley

engineers

You really are without clue, even after the formation of BL the lack of communication between divisions was noticeable by it absence. It was this lack of communication that caused half the problems that BL became famous for, labour relations being responsible for most of the rest...

Reply to
:::Jerry::::

Not really, remember that SAAB, having replaced their two stroke engine for the Ford V4 unit then dumped that for the Joint Triumph / SAAB 1850 lump !

Reply to
:::Jerry::::

original

Rover dealers had issues with the V8 when they first came out, I suspect that Rover could well have had better 'dealer network' relations at the time - indeed if you look at factory workshop manuals of the period you will see that Rover is far more informative than those from Standard Triumph.

Reply to
:::Jerry::::

:::Jerry:::: ( snipped-for-privacy@privacy.net) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Do you want to rethink that?

Reply to
Adrian

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Adrian saying something like:

There was a Fiat Topolino of about 1926 which istr was quite jellymould-ish.

Reply to
Grimly Curmudgeon

they were

Not unless you are going to re write history...

Reply to
:::Jerry::::

Sprint heads are known to crack.

Reply to
Peter Hill

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