We still see a few of them around here, but keep in mind the newest of these cars are over 20 years old now and being the sort of cars they are an awful lot of them got driven to death pretty quickly.
The best car in the world is going to have a tough time surviving and idiot 18 year old boy driving it!
Jeff DeWitt
L.W.(Bill) Hughes III wrote:
Isn't there one missing?
Mine arn't exactly new either, but neither one of us is an idiot 18 year old boy!
Jeff DeWitt
L.W.(Bill) Hughes III wrote:
IIRC, it wasn't the engines that gave out on them, it was the bodywork. But then, it rains a lot here.
Dave
Ouch !
Actually, it ran very smoothly, but it was a regular Saturday morning job to put oil in the twin SU's dash pots :-)
Just hit a major milestone today - finally towed away Dad's 1952 Mercedes
300L from my house back to his. Must have been a tow weight of not far off 3 ton including the trailer, but the Wagoneer hauled it along well. Been trying to get rid of that Mercedes for several years. Truth be told, the anticipation of today was the 75% of the reason I bought the Wagoneer.Dave
The XJ engine was mechanically very stout, also overweight. Bad auxilliaries were the cause of trouble, and deferred maintenance. If maintained they are a extremely durable, reliable core powerplant. The big DOHC six in Land Cruisers was also a decent powerplant, why can't you get it in trucks?
The later XJ40 Jag aluminum "slant six" was also a decent plant. You can get them for nothing, but they don't bolt up to any common driveline and they are all electronic. There is a distributor but it's just a rotor, like the Dodge Magnums.
I also
Which Volvo six? The one I remember would go 500K routinely.
Yup. The really big truck six was even more impressive. There was a guy who put three 58 DCOE Webers on one and put it in a torsion bar suspension Packard instead of the straight eight. It would outrun anything on the road except a gas station. He claimed it would put 350 hp to the rear wheels.
Ass talking some more are we Bill?? Yes. The last time I was in LA one thing that surprised me was the number of Brit and Jap cars from the
50s, 60s, 70s (the 240Z is 33+ years old now) on the road. The tin worm has kiled them all out here. The engines ran up to the end and then some.The OHC Nissan 4 and 6 were long running engines as were such Toyota engines as the 20R and 22R. Heavy though.
Most of the six cylinder Triumphs were swapped out for Buick V6s, Mazda rotaries, or fitted with Webers here in the States. I threw at least twenty of the old Strombergs used on Jags and such over here in the smog years in the aluminum smelt pile a few years ago. No one misses 'em. The SU was another matter: a good easy carb to work on once you learned how. The Harley guys used to be the big market for them used.
Ford should unload Jag and Aston Martin and they should build their own engine (or get the TVR Speed Six). Really, people want a Brit engine in their overpriced brit sports car-but not something under a damn plastic cover. Build a big huge displacement six with huge polished cam covers and neatly laid out polished plumbing.
"Bret Ludwig" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com:
The biggest fix I ever made in my Triumph TR3 days was going to a plumbing supply store and buying neoprene "O" rings to replace all the cork gaskets that SU used, that seemed to stop all the gas leaks and seepage.....
Bret Ludwig proclaimed:
Never tried a 240Z, but the steel body on a 1970 Datsun 2000 Fairlady was so much tougher and harder than that on a 1970 Chev it wasn't even funny. Had to buy special carbide bits just to work on the body. The engine was equally incredibly tough, used connecting rods stronger than those from a Z28's 302.
Bret Ludwig proclaimed:
The E-type engine could be made to be stout, if you replaced all of the soft parts and the heads. The Toyo DOHC 6 was much tougher.
That would be it, the one last used in the 164E series, to be replaced by that V6 shared with Reynoh and Poogwat. Short lived as in not used for very many years on this side of the pond.
The PRV , that was a piece of shit to be sure. I didn't know Europeans, except the italians, could make a piece of shit engine that bad til then.
Isn't that the same engine that was used in the Eagle Premiere and at least the early LH cars? (and the Delorean come to think of it).
My Mom had one of those Premieres and it was a really nice car, kind of weird but a nice car. Oddly enough pretty much everything broke (except the engine) until the extended warranty ran out, she hardly had any trouble with it again the rest of the time she had it.
Jeff DeWitt
Up through the 3.8 there was nothing wrong with the Jag six. Brit metallurgy went to hell in the Scargill era but most of the 4.2s were giving good service if maintained, at stock power levels. Lucas ancillaries and the US built Borg Warner slushbox were troublesome.
Yes.
Her experience is unusual in that usually everything including the engine went bad on those things.
XS11E proclaimed:
I wonder if they used different gaskets on different years and models? On a 64 TR Spitfire, the darned things dripped as much gas as went into the manifolds. On a 64 TR4, I did much the same as you, replace all the cork looking stuff and the jet lines and got rid of all the leaks. On a
66 MGB never had any leaks to begin with. The best SU carbs were the Japanese copies used on the Datsun 2000, never needed touching after one application of a UniSyn.
Bill lives in a very restricted area of southern california. In the rest of the state, the japanese vehicles on the road outnumber the domestic ones.
L.W.(Bill) Hughes III proclaimed:
When the local Oldsmobile dealer started selling Subarus in '72 they arrived on the lot with rust already bubbling through the paint.
Those little engines ran a lot stronger than the Pinto and Vega engines....
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