The valley has much smaller cross braces.Quote:
Umm ,apart from the 4.0 litre crossbolt and later thicker web jobs
It may have been for "Iceberg diesel " that they beefed up the block as AFAIR reading , they had several test engines split in half.
The pre 1980 blocks also had a much smaller main bearing cap register and there were a lot of problems of dropping caps after "shuffle". I can recall that happening to several Range Rovers. They usually dropped no 3 or 4 for some reason.
The 1980 onward blocks are considered much better for that reason. its actually the main bearing caps that changed , but then an old block will have old caps.
Refresher Source:- How to Power Tune rover V8 Engines Des Hammill P16-17 .
Regards Philip A
BTW the Vitesse 4.2 cranks were most probably the "iceberg" cranks , that were sold to JE Engineering, who then made their own 4.2 then Land Rover bought back the rights and used them in the 4.2 in LSE in UK and US. The circle became complete.
