I came across a strange Rover V8 head last week. Exactly the same as normal including all the markings and numbers, but the exhaust ports were round and do not line up with a standard gasket/manifold. See
Mike
Interesting. Possibly a Buick 300 head maybe? Certainly isn't anything I recognise as a trait of aUK tuner, difficult to tell from pic but I wonder if someone's had the ports welded up and machined that way in an attempt to improve exhaust flow? (Wouldn't have worked if they did, lol). Badger.
No definitely not Buick, the head is clearly stamped BL with exactly the same stamp as the standard head shown behind it. As for welding up and machined, its possible, if so it was very well done and as you say would have achieved nothing.
The mystery continues.
Mike
Iceberg diesel? One of the reasons for demise of project was head failure.
AJH
Umm - it's got holes for spark plugs!
Did the Australians make any changes to their version of the engine?
A lot of British sports car makers used it too, TVR being one, so did any of them change it.
Larger exhaust ports the same shape as the normal square ones.
I had a look at TVR and the TR8 they still kept square ports makes me wonder if its some tuning wizard that has ported them. It bugged the hell out of me how badly sized the manifold gaskets were they seemed to restrict the airflow by about 1/4" all round pending a little file dressing - that may be the answer somebody had to make gaskets to suit the round port.
DerekW
People Hi,
it doesn't look like it has been machined at a late stage though.
The exhaust ports are NOT rectangular on their outer perimeter but form an outer curve parallel to the round port inside.
Machining could have produced the round inside port but bending the "frame" so that it would follow the curve of the outside looks extremely difficult if not impossible without having the cylinder head cast this way.
One more visible difference is that the "strange" cylinder head does NOT have the allen bolt and respective hole next to the exhaust stud on the top side
In this case also it appears that this difference can only be made with a different casting.
Take care Pantelis
On or around Sun, 2 Aug 2009 00:39:46 +0100, "DerekW" enlightened us thusly:
They never had exhaust manifold gaskets originally...
That's true, mine doesn't have any.
Mike
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