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The Rover cylinder heads are a poor design and limit potential power. Any decent wrecking yards in North Dakota? I know there is nothing much of anything in North Dakota. Buick 350 aluminium heads were able to be fitted to earlier versions of Rover V8's. These are pretty damn good. Does anyone know if they can be fitted to his engine? Maybe give it a heart transplant with lots more cubic inches.
Isn't Badlands in South Dakota a bit to the east of Rapid city?
Mate to be fair the Rangie was an auto and my manual (stick shift to you ;)) makes a difference.
Cheers
Those are different Badlands. In ND we have a larger area, part of which is a National Park but it is less well known as SD gets all the tourism to the Black Hills area which are adjacent to their Badlands.Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm
No, we have no wrecking yards that have any Land Rovers to speak of. Mine is an oddity out here. In the 15 years I have lived in ND I have seen around 10 Discoverys, and most of them had out of state plates. Finding used parts is fairly hard here.
Stroking is the way to go to get usable torque increases, I beleive that you can stroke up to 5L depending on what motor you start with, if i was to stroke a LR V8 I would start with a cross bolted block, Regards Frank.Quote:
Originally Posted by walker
I was thinking of a Buick wrecker where you could possibly get a pair of Buick 350 aluminium cylinder heads to go on your Rover V8 if they are still compatible. Probably the best cheap modification you can do to this little engine. Better still, graft in the whole Buick 350 or a modern all aluminium Chev. Bob Bendsten in Minnesota can advise on this. Transmission Adapters. What Bob and his crew do is mind blowing.Quote:
Originally Posted by wkburns
I wasn't aware there are more Badlands. I have been to the SD one and toured around the Black Hills. Lovely place.
Buick 350 heads don't fit, but Buick 300 ones do. For 1964 only they were made of alloy, after that cast iron 1965-67. They have much bigger ports and can be fiitted with larger 1.75 inlet/1.5 exhaust valves. Developed on a flow bench they will outperform the best stage 4 Rover heads. They are rare but not impossible to find via ebay, US Buick forums, etc.
I have a pair of '64 Buick 300 alloy heads on my greatly worked 4.6 Rover streetcar, fully modified to stage 4 by The Head Stud in Melbourne to potentially support 410 hp at max flow. Not as good, and nowhere near as costly, as Wildcats but a lot better than the Rover (or for that matter Real Steel's new Merlin) heads.
But it's not a straight swap. Although the 300 heads bolt right onto the LR block and accept alll the rocker gear, covers, etc ok, they had much bigger combustion chambers - 54 cc as opposed to the later LR's 29cc volume. Ok for forced induction but would reduce the CR too much for a normally aspirated engine.
The way around this is to fit LR 4.0 pistons which raise the compression, or as I have done, weld up the combustion chambers to reduce their volume down to 37cc and mill the faces to get the chamber capacity down, then fit metal head gaskets.
Probably not worth the effort on a 4x4, and also the bosses for the front ancillaries are different. They're also now almost 50 years old and many will have suffered from corrosion and other structural issues.
Recently TA Performance have developed their all new Rover eads based on the Buick V6 design, with 1.9 inlet valves. The jury is still out on these, they're cheaper than Wildcats and are claimed by some to produce superior performance numbers, but supply problems and other issues have limted their availablity and testing under real world operating conditions thus far.