Why would anyone want a Classic car?

Grimly Curmudgeon ( snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

The Topolino didn't come out until '36.

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

I think it's you doing that, Jerry - everything I've ever read has suggested that there was a lack of communication - now you're saying the lack was noticable by it's absence - IOW, they WERE communicating?

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

Gawd nose why. They truly were horrible engines. Still, originality freaks seem to want them now for their ShiteOldLandies.

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

True, but I would really love to have a good RMF (Not the RMB with its poor brakes though)

In message , Ian Johnston writes

(More snipped)

Rubbish. The Alpine A110 easily beat that Cd back in the mid 1960s.

In message , Adrian writes

Was that the Tatra with the big central fin?

Chris Morriss ( snipped-for-privacy@oroboros.demon.co.uk) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying :

The first of 'em, yes. The T87's the best known.

I think I know (or am at least in occasional correspondence) with the person you mean. From his comments it wasn't a small job. IIRC they cast a new block.

they were

It's been a bad day, well that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it !.. :~(

never

version I

created.

developed

As they are on many other engines, your point is ?

There's nowt wrong with the Girling Hydromech system provided it's set up properly, but it can be frightening if it isn't.

Ron Robinson

The only drum braked car I've had which gave confidence when stopping from high speed was an S1 Bentley. And its top speed was something over 110 mph.

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

That's what I meant to say/ write.

The Sprint was a great head when it worked, but they didn't last worth a damn (if they hadn't warped first). You know exactly what his point is

- stop behaving in your usual combative trollish manner.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote

Problem is the heads are handed, so you need mirror images on the other side, not just 2 lots of Dolly heads. Also, IIRC the Dolly was a 1.8? or a

2-litre, whereas one half of a Stag engine is a 1.5-litre; I am not sure it follows that Dolly heads will fit without other changes. The main change even if they do is that you have two camshafts instead of one, which means you have to redesign the whole timing chain setup...and you now have a more powerful engine but the same, often marginal, cooling system.

So by the time you've sorted all that, you've got something so far from a pukka Triumph engine that you might as well put a Rover V8 in anyway if you're doing it to a car today. Doing that tends to roughly halve the value of your car, because a rebuilt Triumph V8 is about £3k plus fitting.

Your theory was, IIRC, the designers' actual intention. The smallest possible 4-cylinder was a 1.3 and the largest imaginable -cylinder was a

4-litre. The conjectural V6 never saw the light of day but the Saab V4 is a sort of relative. So potentially you had easily 5 or 6 engines sharing many common parts for which much of the tooling already existed. That, I think, was what they didn't want to chuck away.

Replacing the Triumph V8 with the Rover one would have created substantial problems, not the least of which was that they thought they were going to sell 25,000 Stags a year. Take 200,000 V8 iterations of the engine out of the economics and suddenly your family of engines doesn't look so economical any more - *and* you haven't got 200,000 Rover engines available anyway.

"Andy Dingley" wrote

Rarity? They sold about 4,000 Stags a year for 7 years. Many went overseas. Those that stayed in the UK - say 3,000 a year, I dunno offhand - were sold through the dealer network which was what, 200-odd sites? So they sold 15 each a year, so the service department of each saw an average of just over 1 Stag a month. It would have been quite a while before the poxy build quality was evident at a dealership level.

Cast a new head wasn't it ? Same as a Sprint head, but mirror-image.

Dollies came in all sizes - but the Sprint and the TR7 were 2 litres.

? Two per engine or two per head ? Camshaft parity is conserved between the 8 and the 16 valve heads - that's the whole point about them!

There's nothing "marginal" about the cooling system, it was just broken. When it works, it works fine -- but it never was. You have to fit late-model Saab bits to make it reliable.

The point about a 32v Stag is the crazy uniqueness, like making a 4WD TR7. It's unfeasibly complex to do it and totally silly.

The Saab (sic) V4 bears no connection to it whatsoever - except for bits of the ignition system, which were crap on both originals, and Saab replaced them on both.

Only one - they were two different companies. Technically it would have been easy, but they weren't close enough managerially to do this, any time over the lifetime of the Stag. You might as well be talking about fitting the slant 4 into the P6 shell...

Only in Rover (or any other part of BL) would _selling_too_many_ possibly be considered a problem !

My Dad's MG J2 has a nice set of drum brakes. They're some T series bits that appeared on it in the '50s, but still with the '30s cable actuation. And of course the rev limiter on the engine (nailed to the redline! - he's alrrady got one broken crank) keeps the top speed down.