"RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht" (ramblininexile) 09/14/2016 at 13:58 • Filed to: None

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Ebays.

jimz > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:07

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formerly known as the Buick Wildcat V8.

I Will Always Be The Honey Badger > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:08

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I foresee my future.

WilliamsSW > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:10

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Of all the engines I could fly behind, a turbo-charged, water-cooled, American/British V8 wouldn't be one of my top choices.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > jimz 09/14/2016 at 14:11

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The BOP 215, now More British.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > WilliamsSW 09/14/2016 at 14:16

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A water-cooled turbocharged British/American V8 with chronic head gasket issues. And which (mostly in the large bore version) develops liner drop. And carbureted. And experimental class so it only has single ignition. And which likes (early version) to suffer oil pump failure and (if tilted) can suffer pump starvation. At some point it moves from “risky” all the way past “death wish” into “this is a fetish of some kind, isn’t it”.

WilliamsSW > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:17

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But other than that, it's perfect, right?

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > I Will Always Be The Honey Badger 09/14/2016 at 14:17

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It’s almost as daft as a rally-modified Yugo with two twin-turbo Peugeot diesels.

WilliamsSW > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:19

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The scariest part to me is the pump starvation issue - the other problems at least take time to develop. Yikes.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > WilliamsSW 09/14/2016 at 14:22

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Well, unless you crack the block or lose power from lobe wear on the cam or the crank breaks. Or if you’re down too many HP on takeoff from cam chain stretch. Other than that - perfect! It’s an elegant turd, for a more crazified age.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > WilliamsSW 09/14/2016 at 14:24

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It’s pretty easy to dry sump one of these, but it’s rarely done. This one hasn’t been.

WilliamsSW > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:28

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Down too many HP on takeoff might be your best case scenario. Abort the takeoff and stay on the ground.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > WilliamsSW 09/14/2016 at 14:31

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...stay on the ground, dismount the engine, find a dumpster, beat stupid out of self with bat...

(Full disclosure: I am building a project car with a Rover V8. There are good things about them, and I definitely get why they did this, but the horrors are purely and simply too many for this application, and they’ve complicated it. The turbo is... a marginal idea.)

WilliamsSW > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:38

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Ha! Well, what’s great in a car isn’t necessarily great in an airplane. Porsche proved that. Speaking of which, wouldn’t that prop have to be geared? Add that to the list of reasons...

I Will Always Be The Honey Badger > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 14:39

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I prefer my yugos with a big Cadillac engine.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > WilliamsSW 09/14/2016 at 14:49

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A small prop like on a four cylinder would be ~2000rpm, from what I’m seeing. A prop the size of this one would probably be no more than 1200rpm. Which is slow enough that the engine probably wouldn’t trash itself but probably not very efficient either - and dangerously easy to overspeed the prop. No rev-limiter present either. So, unless there were a concentric speed reduction, we can add that to the Bad Idea Pile already present.

WilliamsSW > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 15:01

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That’s exactly right. Newer single-engine airplanes have prop diameters ~75 inches or so (no clue what that thing is), and engine redlines between 2300-2600 rpm. Prop tips would reach Mach 1 ~3400 rpm - which is a really bad thing. So, you either run the engine inefficiently at lower RPM, or gear it and dramatically shrink TBO - which, let’s face it, should be about 30 minutes on this thing anyways...

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > WilliamsSW 09/14/2016 at 15:10

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What’s interesting is the careful work (and obviously expense) that went into the drive adapter on that thing. It actually might have a planetary reducer in it. If it’s a one-off, it was produced with money very little relative object - since BOP family engines don’t share bellhousing patterns with anything else. In such a case, WTF? Presumably the company that was building the turbo system wanted to sell an adapter too, if so... Bonkers.

The other option, was someone making slightly less stupid non-turbo aircraft Rovers on a regular basis? Still very WTF, but in a different way.

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 15:26

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Question: Do people ever build Rover V8s the way they do Chevy and Ford small blocks?

WilliamsSW > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 15:27

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OK, now you have me looking in closer detail at the photos when I should be working... That drive adapter is interesting- no idea if it’s geared or not, but to go in an airplane, a rev limiter or gearing would be an absolute requirement I think. I did some Googling and all I can find is one guy that put the engine into a homebuilt (a Cozy). So my guess is that’s a custom piece. I suppose the attraction of the engine would be that it’s aluminum. I would think the thought process started and ended with that fact. The Italian carburetor is a nice touch, too.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent 09/14/2016 at 15:35

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To some extent. If you go completely batshit crazy with a crank swap and even a head swap you can get them to over 5.0L - you can get better rockers, better water pumps, better oil pumps, better pistons, adjustable pushrods, solid rockers...

http://www.espritv8.net/espritv8_024.h…

You can go pretty bugfuck nuts (see the revving to 7000rpm), but there are limits and anywhere but the UK it’s most common to just go with an LS if you need aluminum, old SBC if you want the oldness and the simple power.

They’re very light, though, and can be made into a pretty kickass engine.

If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 15:38

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I was thinking that because there were so many variants and it was made for so long that you could do the heads from x model, intake from y , crank from z thing and cobble together something pretty unique.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > If only EssExTee could be so grossly incandescent 09/14/2016 at 15:48

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The large bore later models mostly improved things mechanically consistently, right as they fucked up the implementation by forcing it to run hotter and hotter and made the electronics, cooling, and emissions weirder and weirder. Later models have better crank bearings, better oil pump, better cam location control, better head design, better valves, better pistons, better water pump, almost everything.

The parallel evolution Buick 300 is what people raid for a larger stroke crank, though, and some specialty Rover/BOP based engines use the original engine’s Oldsmobile cousin as the basis for new head designs - 18 bolts instead of 14/10 per head.

AMGtech - now with more recalls! > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 15:54

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I’ve had 4.6 cranks offset ground to increase to 5.0 with boring and Chevy rods and pistons. 300 cranks can be hard to find and difficult to make work with otherwise stock vehicles.

Aftermarket heads are also available, or just port and polish and increase valve sizes to sbc. Infinite selection of cams. Complete roller valvetrains.

Always gotta start with liners though!

AMGtech - now with more recalls! > WilliamsSW 09/14/2016 at 15:56

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Yeah... About that... I’ve personally seen the liner issue go from perfect operating condition to completely fucked in under 5 seconds with no warning.

AMGtech - now with more recalls! > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 15:59

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Can I just have the turbo set up? Stupidly I was looking at range rover classics on craigslist last night...

WilliamsSW > AMGtech - now with more recalls! 09/14/2016 at 16:03

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Oof.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > AMGtech - now with more recalls! 09/14/2016 at 16:11

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Offset ground is a valid point. They increased the journal size so much from an early to a late that there’s almost no reason not to, and there aren’t rogue snap-happy 4.6 cranks lurking in quite the same way as I’ve gotten the impression there are for Icebergs.I guess before the 4.6 the 300 was a much more obvious option, less so now.

Totally correct on the liners.

I keep finding myself in the position of an apologist for these engines while describing how awful most of them were. My fallback has gotten to be “It’s pretty easy to make a good engine out of, despite the fact that the factory made NOT A DAMN ONE RIGHT”.

RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht > AMGtech - now with more recalls! 09/14/2016 at 16:12

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I’m sure the turbo setup is the best working part of that whole thing, and would be great on an engine whut wuz built properly. I.e. not that one, not a chance in hell.

AMGtech - now with more recalls! > RamblinRover Luxury-Yacht 09/14/2016 at 17:10

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Yeah, and when all the 4.6's are fine you can get to about 4.5 starting with a 4.0 crank, and the world has plenty of those.

You can definitely make them into good engines, it’s just so damn expensive for what you will get out of them.