Thread: 202/3.3L conversion with varijet carby

Which engine do you have. The blue 12 port engine or the earlier one with 7 ports? If the first then you already have most of the good stuff, the Starfire rods and the fully counterbalanced crank. As far as the Varijet goes, the best modification for one of these is tp pitch it straight into the rubbish bin. A good replacement is a Rochester 2G, with 1 1/2" bores used in conjunction with a proper set of extractors. Find them on the internet. If you are using a red 7 port engine, then the same Rochester carb. is a good choice, or twin 1 3/4" SU's used in conjunction with 186S split cast iron headers. There are a number of internal mods to be done whilst you are rebuilding the engine to make it suitable for prolonged higher rpm work and a search on this site for my writings will give them to you.

Originally Posted by Romulus

The blue one. It was rebuilt about 15000km ago by previous owner. I am not planning on pulling it apart.
This SIII does mainly highway miles, very little heady duty off road so 'low' gear will be rarely used, plus the Fairey OD will also make a big diff. In any case, I'll be happy just sitting on 100 give or take and cruising along.
I do have a set of extractors, at the moment it has the OEM exhaust manifold fitted, so that is easily swapped. I was scratching my head has to how to adapt the 'twin' holes at the end of the OEM exhaust manifold to my single SIII pipe, the extractors will be much easier to adapt!
OK, I will look for the carby you mentioned, thanks for your advise!

If you don't want to dismantle and do it properly, at least fit a high volume oil pump and a decent sized engine oil cooler. You really do need better valve springs and a camshaft with more top end. For an exhaust system without buying extractors, you will need to fabricate a flange to fit your manifold and run a twin system all the way out the back. To wit, a two x three cylinder system, 2 1/4" diameter is good. Your SIII exhaust system is nowhere near good enough for this engine. Forged pistons would be good also, as would be a good cylinder head cleanout and port match. To do it properly you should have the crank cross drilled, & flute relieved, the rods drilled both sides to squirt more oil up the piston for cooling and to lubricate the little ends which should be made full floating. The rods need to be modified for thin wall little end bushes and drilled and countersunk to oil them. You then have a Bathurst quality engine internally.