1998 Rover 218vvc Coupe - Retro rolling resto

Hi cj,

What size are the BK wheels?

are they the same PCD as an MGF?

That's unfortunate, thanks for letting me know. I'll be needing a couple of sets of spares eventually, so was interested. 

After updating my Triumphs thread I realised I haven't touched this one for a similar amount of time so I guess I should fill you in on what's been going on with the Tomcat. Well... a lot as it happens! More than I ever anticipated when I first brought the car nearly a year ago. After my last update the car had developed a bit of a coolant leak. I managed to trace this to the inlet manifold gasket so when funds allowed I got stuck into removing the inlet manifold, replacing the gaskets and whilst I was there I thought I may as well give the manifold a bit of a spruce up and also replace the thermostat as I was pretty certain it was sticking open.






All sorted. Another problem that occurred was the exhaust manifold had cracked in 3 different places and was causing a bit of a blow, so, while I had the car off the road I decided to drop the whole exhaust system for a clean up, regasket and have the manifold welded including grinding out all the original factory welding





what I also discovered was the cat had been hollowed out at somepoint in the cars past so it was running decat without me even knowing up to this point



Exhaust parts all polished up and refitted to the car including a new cat!




I also took the opportunity to source a replacement, second hand spoiler and have this painted along with giving some areas of the car a nice machine polish to remove the 24 years worth of swirls from the old Scratch and Shine car wash





^^ the reflection was incredible! Another job I'd always wanted to sort on this car was the interior. As I mentioned in my first post, I was never really a fan of the ½ leather interior and although I had gotten used to it, it's condition really let the car down and when a mint full leather interior came up for sale out of a breaker for £200 I jumped on it




It looked fantastic all cleaned up and conditioned and smells amazing too




All seemed to be going well. I even booked the car in for the Tomcat Affair @30 event the club was holding at Milbrook proving ground. Then and kind of predictably the cooling system started overpressurising and the engine was burning a mix of both oil and coolant... bother



So it appeared the classic K series head gasket failure had struck. I stopped using the car after this but really wanted to take it to milbrook which stupidly, armed with 10 litres of water, I did!




And what an awesome day it was too, however going around the last lap of the alpine circuit the car dropped a cylinder and started misfiring. Let the poor engine cool down and braved the 2 hour journey home which thankfully it made. Question was what am I going to do with it? My initial plans were to rebuild the original vvc engine but when I took it out, stripped it and saw the condition of the internals I decided to scrap that and come up with another idea, something different, something exciting, something that as far as I'm aware nobody has done before to a Tomcat. All this lead to the purchase of this



A 1.8 k series turbo engine from a Rover 75/MG ZT. Well actually this 1 had been removed from a ZR that someone converted a few years ago but was removed again due to the poor condition of the shell and was kept for a future project which never happened, its got around 50k on it and has had all the head work done



Safe to say, watch this space.

Thanks for reading