1971 Capri Trackcar - always check your pins!

I rung a crank in the Monza - had to strip two 24V engines to find a std crank that was servicable and could take HD shells from Risse Motorsport

PS TTV Billet flywheels are lovely - I now have two of them

Cheers guys

Good news, the first of the engines I've stripped has a really nice condition bottom end. Clearly been rebuilt and to be honest could have run as it was if wasn't changing a load of bits. Crank has had a minor grind before, but enough meat to take to -0.02". Journals are so good that am tempted to just put new bearings in.

Other good news is they're slightly later blocks so much stronger main bearing caps and cam bearings.

Hopefully break the other one down tonight.

PhoenixCapri could you please contact me through PM?

Awesome !!!

You know that 2K works really well on engine blocks

That would look really great in the body colour blue.

So is now the wrong time to tell you about the ford explorer engine...... which is effectively a 4.0L "cologne" type V6

Different block sadly, so not eligible. Did try and buy a granada with a 3.4ltr stroked v6 two weeks back, but missed out by 5mins....

The Eaglets have landed!









So after a very (very) long wait the heads are back and they look pretty good.

The ports have been opened out a good amount, especially around the valve stem which was really restrictive. Sadly there is a water way in the heads that means you can't open them up enough to get a perfect line of sight to the valve head, but this is about as far as we'd dare go without having some spare heads should we break through.

The valves have also been increased in size significantly, +2mm on the inlet and +4mm on the exhaust! Yet this only brings them in line with stock European 2.8i valve sizes. The US heads use smaller valves as part of their strategy for lower emissions/'smog control'. Springs a Kent Cams uprated ones, designed to deal with the much more aggressive cam I'm going to be using.

Another feature of these heads is a inlet plenum heating port - this basically is a secondary port off the middle cylinder exhaust port that feeds into the underside of the inlet chamber, heating the plenum and promoting greater atomisation of the fuel thus a cleaner burn. But it also completely messes up the exhaust port flow from the mid cylinders, and they even connect, meaning there is a chance of charge contamination, especially at high revs. This can lead to knock, meaning lower ignition advance must be used, further reducing power. So I've blocked them off completely

Finally they've been skimmed quite a lot, 20 thou, which should bring the compression ratio up to about 10.5:1.

So I now have a pair fairly simple 6 port V6 heads. Nothing extreme, but they should be able to flow enough air to make 200bhp.

Still a couple of bits to do, like cleaning the spark plug threads, fitting some new core plugs, painting them and blocking off the EGR feeds (yes they used all the 70's tricks to control the emissions on the US heads!), but they're basically ready to fit.

There is more that can be done to them, but this build of the engine isn't pushing the absolute limits of what could be done as I want to make sure it's reasonably reliable. If I want more in the future I should be able to go another 2mm bigger on the inlet valves and take a bit more off the heads to up the compression ratio a bit more. But we'll see how this setup goes first!

Now the heads are back I've settled on a bore size, so pistons are on their way and the block and crank are going off for machining.

This leaves me to build an inlet - probably the toughest bit of the build. So far I have a stock US inlet manifold and some laser cut carb mounting plates



The plan is to mill off the top of the existing plenum and runners and then fit 6 tubes in to connect each manifold port to one of the individual carb ports. Sadly the odd port spacing means things are not exactly simple, but a semi drunken chat with a friend last night about CAN-AM inlets lead to a nice solution. Basically I'm going to allow the runners to be different lengths up to the carb plate, and then correct the difference by using different length trumpets - the middle carb will end up having about 2 inch shorter trumpets than the front and rear ones, similar in idea to the setup on a Rover V8 efi engine.

The only spanner in the works here is that the runners will be a different length up to the throttle plate, so while I'll have equal lengths on full throttle, things are arguably different with low throttle angles, this might cause some issues but since I don't have time to build a full CAE model of the thing, I'm just going to wing it and cross my fingers! In the worst case I'll just have to use full or no throttle - what could possibly go wrong with that driving style?!

I wouldn't say they're well supported, but there are upgrade bits for most parts, especially if you have a Euro version (e.g. there is a triple carb manifold for a euro head, but not a US one). But there's often only one option for each of the bits, and second hand parts are fairly rare, so not easy to build one cheaply - I'm importing a fair bit for this reason. There are also a couple of specialists who can build you crazy version, be it long stroke, or alloy headed race engines, but then you start measuring the cost in tens of thousands!

I do enjoy a challenge (once it's over...)

I thought i recognized the Reg number,i owned it between 92-95,great to see it sill exists,and wow,what a resto.

Mega work car colour brother!