A triumphal day

Drive it like you stole it :-) A PI deserves to be spanked every so often - it was a great system for the technology of the time and one that can still be good today

Aah, I'm only trying to despatch the skinny 165 tyres before I put my 185s on ;-)

Can you still get 165's at a reasonable price. I had to go 175/75 on the MG because the 165's were nearly twice the price.

rm

Sorry for my ignorance - but what is PI? Whatever it is, it sounds like I need it! ;)

Petrol Injection

Certainly not as an add on - the Lucas system was mechanical and pretty troublesome. All modern cars use EFI - electronic fuel injection - which is rather more sophisticated.

Well, these came with a set of 15inch TR6 alloys - all Goodyear I think, but one is on the limit.

Try

The Doc concurs. It's on the car, and it's original - that's where the charm ends. I've spent a lot of time / effort learning how it works, tweaking it etc just to get back to factory-intended performance (allegedly circa 132 bhp and heaps of torque). I've got a set of 2500s carbs waiting in the wings for the day that it becomes too much of a chore and expense to keep going.

Having said that, I'd also be tempted to (a) bung in a Rover V8 or (b) jury rig the Bosch injection system from a 2.5 Senator to work with the triumph manifolds (it's been done to good effect).

Though, I'd change the word "sophisticated" to "elegant" in your prognosis Dave. The sheer mechanical foolhardiness of the Lucas system is baffling - compared to say the ultra simple mechanical system that Bosch produced in the mid 80s (K jetronic) - not a friggin' ECU in sight, nor any bloody rotating plunger metering units - just fuel on demand constantly waiting behind the inlet valve. Not sophisticated but miles better for it.

Did Bosch ever do K jetronic for a six cylinder car? That might be a good retrofit - a mechanical system that works, avoiding bolting on a load of ECU-based stuff onto a 60s/70s car.

DocDelete ( snipped-for-privacy@thehomeofnospam.org) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

They aren't. Not IME.

Some BMWs, I'd guess. My earliest one was an '87, and that had EFI.

Dave Plowman (News) ( snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Whole stack of cars around the late 70s/early-mid 80s. At least :- Porsche, Merc, BMW, Ferrari, Volvo, Peugeot.

K-Jet was the ubiquitous choice.

The other sensible option today would be a MegaSquirt-based EFI. I don't think I'd go near trying to retro-engineer L-jet, and I'm sure K-jet wouldn't be easy to tune to a completely different engine.

It was somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "DocDelete" saying something like:

I was told by someone that's had various PI cars the way to keep it running reliably over the years is to rig up some cooling, over the pump I think he said. A decent 12v fan would probably do the job :)

Michael

In news:4149b87f$0$32246$ snipped-for-privacy@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net, DocDelete decided to enlighten our sheltered souls with a rant as follows

Mk2 Granada used K-Jetronic.. V6, but K-Jetronic.

Colway are fine. Thousands of rally competitors can't be wrong.

Looking at the prices, I may well try their super sticky treaded track tyres on one of the Alfas next time I need a new set of boots :-)

SteveH ( snipped-for-privacy@italiancar.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Thousands of rally competitors don't need tyres that actually manage to grip well on tarmac *and* last for a couple of tens of thousands of miles.

Your choice. If I were then buying it, I'd be budgeting for a set of decent tyres immediately, and I'd ask for that to be reflected in the price.

Even a £300 set of tyres, when costed over 20,000 miles, only costs 1.5p per mile.

I was looking at the prices last night - And it'd be around 60 quid for a full set for my car. So that's a 5th of you're 300, so I'd only need to get a 5th of the mileage to still have the same running cost. 4,000 miles doesn't seem unlikely out of them, IMO. Then again, I don't do all that many miles a year, so I'd most likely be looking at replacing my tyres through age before wear became a problem.

So it may well be a set of Colways next time round for me too.

Stuffed ( snipped-for-privacy@rse.non) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

Of remoulds? How much for your car for a full set of Dunlops or similar?

You'd seriously trust your life to a set of tyres that costs the same

Or one minor accident to negate the whole saving.

The trouble is that s**te tyres don't wear out. They just don't grip. If you're lucky, of course - many remoulds just delaminate and go out of round or shed their tread.

So you'd buy a set of tyres with a head start on that aging process?

False economy, for spurious reasons.

The main reason that the rally boys use Colways and the like is that they're remoulded with far more aggressive treads than the mainstream manufacturers can provide, giving them tyres far more suitable for gravel stages. You surely don't think that anybody in motorsport goes for *any* product because it's cheap?

There's an environmental argument for using remoulds - and you notice how that word's not used anywhere on the Colway site? - but that's negated by the fact that a lot of tyre carcasses are now recycled into rubber granules for road surfacing and other reuse.

Do you have any proof of this? My impression is precisely the opposite, that cheaper tyres and remoulds tend to be made from softer compounds that _do_ wear out, but have little trouble gripping for that very reason.

While that may have been true thirty years ago, I don't think many companies would stay in business if it was the case today. Again, do you have any hard evidence of this?