1986 Rover SD1 3500SE Police Car

Fantastic! Thank you for posting up.

Any help on equipment, buttons, radios etc would be much appreciated, plus i don't suppose you have any photos from the era?

I think i might have the number plates, but they are both a bit past it.

Here are some photos of other Lancs cars you might remember.

James

Agreed. I’m not a fan. My preference would be no red fogs, no front police sign and full length stripes like d828gec.

Glorious, just glorious...

This is a build and a half and then some!!!

Wonderful.

Does anyone here know the make of the roof mounted spotlights in the photos

Update time!

With the shell and rolling parts pretty much together, and most of the parts sourced or known to be available, i turned my attention to the all important engine and gearbox.

The engine is a unipart Gold Seal factory rebuilt engine. I stripped the inlet, rockers and heads off and had removed several of the big end and main caps and it looked to be in fairly good order. However i am not expert on engines, so i though i would take it to someone who is, namely Richard at Turner Engineering.

www.turnerengineering.co.uk/

What Richard doesn't know about V8's isnt worth knowing. He was recommended to me by a member of the SD1 club who has had two 4.6 litre engine built for him. Turner's don't generally do jobbing work as they are flat out building full spec engines, but i didnt know that initially. Kindly Richard has given me lots of advice and is going to do the block, heads and give advice on how to put it all back together. Legend.

Here is the block as i took the pistons out. The bores were actually pretty good. Turns out it has already had a +20 rebore.



Loaded up and ready to be taken to Turner Engineering.



Richard has given the block a serious cleaning, replaced the core plugs with decent quality American items, re-honed the bores and here it is looking shiny and new.



Ive bought an engine stand to mount it on while i reassemble it.





Richard also cleaned up the inlet manifold, and i have taken a wire brush to some of the other cast ally intake parts.



The plan is to have the heads rebuilt with waisted stem valves, the guides machined to take the later type of stem seals, and oil flow restrictors fitted into the oil delivery ports to reduce oil flow to the rockers. This in turn will give more oil to the main and big end bearings. Apparently the rocker gear has a more than ample supply from standard.

I am still debating whether to have the heads gas flowed. Not only does this give a healthy bhp increase, but generally makes the engine more lively. Tempting.

I'm also going to have a slightly higher lift cam fitted rather than the standard item.

After that it was time to investigate the gearbox. Some might remember that i stupidly put the Police car's gearbox in the drift car.....very bad idea, as i broke it. See here at 2:48.



Drift car



This is what a broken gearbox looks like.





Anyhow it is now with Hardy Engineering in Leatherhead for a full rebuild along with a spare gearbox which is apparently all good inside.

I also picked up a new GRP backed headlining in the correct colour for my car.

turners are one of the go-to companies for land rover too, of which there is obvious cross over for the V8.

in your exploded gearbox it looks like the reverse gear idler that is stripped?

edit, oh i see the video now. it died getting a bit shirty selecting reverse. well, they don't call it the devils elbow for no reason !

Not so much after mega power as just making the most of what was already there, hence slightly higher lift cam and better breathing. I don’t want to go silly as it will still be run off the original twin su carbs. Might need to alter the needles but I’m still reading about all that carb tuning witch craft.

Decision now made, heads will be gas flowed.

Following on with that theme, i took a look at the inlet manifold. The standard casting has quite crudely cast tracts to the cylinder heads. Here is a spare valley gasket held against the ports. The tracts are quite a lot smaller than the gasket orifices and irregularly shaped. So out with the die grinder!





It took about an hour to do all eight ports. I used a combination of parallel side and cone die bits to get the shape right. The ports for cylinders 1,2, 7 and 8 were particularly bad. Not only were the ports under sized, but the tract in the inlet itself had loads of meat in the inside of the curve (i hope you understand what i mean!) restricting flow, so i ground those back too.

Before





After





I didnt go crazy, as i didnt want to grind into a water way, or make the port so large as to cause difficulty with the gasket sealing properly. I ground them back so there was at least 1mm of ally visible all the way around the gasket. If i really wanted to i could have gone more extreme.

I also tickled the ports where the two carbs bolt on. There was lots of casting flash and a big step in the machining so i smoothed all of that off.

Before



After

I would leave them in as they act as a diffuser so all the incoming air has the best chance of getting to all 8 cylinders equally or the centre 4 gets it all. Also when you open up the ports with the dremmel don't make them mirror smooth as fuel can drop out of suspension of the air, the air needs a bit of agitation to be most efficient. Just remove the casting flashes.
It's a great project, well done for saving it. I do love an SD1 and have had two myself. I had an early vitesse and a phase 1 2600S both great cars.