Just took the Triumph 2.5 pi to work today after using the wife's Clio and my hack Scirocco for some weeks. (A long story).
It was fu...sorry, bloody excellent! Especially the bit at the petrol station where a fellow customer applauded the retention of Lucas PI - and I managed to give him a bit of wheel spin off the forecourt. Hoohar. ;-)))))
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
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
formatting link
for good prices - and yes, before anyone shouts, they are Colway retreads. I'm recommending them because I've used them for yonks on the principle that a retread with tread is better than a part worn with next to nothing.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
*FOR FOUR* as one tank of fuel?
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?
formatting link
"Colway are the first retread tyre to have been approved by the MSA" - in other words, the MSA refuse to let anybody race on any other retread, and it's only recently that they've let Colways in.
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?
MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.