Going to be close...

I managed to find some bolts today that I could use to bolt the engine to the stand. The stand was from Ebay - 50 quid delivered, which I thought wasn't bad. In this pic I've already removed the fuel injection. You can see that the engine is not very tall - it's mostly sump you can see in this pic:



Took some time to get it bolted onto the stand though. Soon enough though, more bits started coming off. It was very easy to strip down actually:



Took some other pics with a metre rule in place. It's hard to make out the actual numbers with the resolution that uploaded to photo storing sites give you, but hopefully it can be seen how compact the engine is for a 5 litre:







With one head off, it's even easier to see how short the block is, and how thin it is in terms of it's casing. It's not a big engine at all:



However, once this head was off, I had something of a surprise. The engine has already been bored +40. This means that the pistons are 1/25" larger in diameter than standard. You can see this by looking at the piston crown:



Clear as mud, it says .040. Now this is going to be close. +40 is the maximum these engines can be bored, so if the bore is worn at this size, then the block is scrap. If I'm lucky, I'll get away with a hone to get rid of any glazing, and I'll be able to put +40 pistons back in. Fingers crossed.

I also looked up the engine code. Looks like my engine was made sometime in the early 1980s, so must have been one of the first fuel injected ones. Judging by the shape of the sump, it came out of a Ford Bronco.

Uncle Henry comes to town

If you've been reading this you might have got an inkling of what my next steps are. In any case, whatever - I bought this on Ebay:



What is it? Well, this should be a clue:



Or if that isn't close enough:



It's a Ford 302 V8 called a Windsor. With a cubic inch coming in at around 16.4 cc, it's a 5 litre. What am I going to do with it? Put it in the TVR of course. Now, it looks like a rusty piece of crap, and it currently is. The plan is to rebuild it to a high spec and drop it in. My rationale for this is as follows - the 5 litre Rover (GM/Buick/Rover/TVR Power) engine is a real stretch from the 3.5 litres it started out with. Even Range Rover only took this engine to 4.6, and in nowhere near as high a state of tune as TVR used. Added to that, the Rover engine doesn't really like to rev - it's a bit of a cruising engine really. Because I plan to take the 302 to 331 cubic inches (5.4 litres) with a longer stroke crank (what the Yanks call a stroker kit), there's no way I could get this size of engine with the original engine by means of boring/stroking. I also think that TVR should have used this engine to begin with. Some people say that because the Rover engine is 'British' (it isn't really), then it's a great candidate for use in a British sports car, well that holds no truck with me (see this post on this very blog). TVR have used Ford engines going back years, and should have stuck with them for the Griff/Chimeara in my opinion.

Why this engine in particular? Well, it's origins are from the same era as the Rover/Buick engine, so again, I'm trying to build the car TVR could have done if they'd looked at Ford engines of the same vintage as the Rover/Buick. It also has been used in TVRs before - in the TVR Griffith 200 (the original Griffith named after a TVR dealer in the US called Jack Griffith who fitted a TVR Vixen with a 289 Ford V8 - the 302 being an evolution of the 289 used by Griffith and by Carol Shelby in the 289 AC Cobra, and by the Sunbeam Tiger). It also has great heritage - as well as the aforementioned recipients of the Windsor V8, it also saw service in the GT40 which won Le Mans in 1968 and '69. There's nothing that the Rover/Buick has been used for that's come close to this. It's also the engine in this car which belonged to the late Peter Wheeler who was in charge of TVR at the time of the production of the Chimeara, which in my book, vindicates the choice.

What about the weight of it? It's not actually that heavy. The block is actually very small in this engine, and Ford pioneered a technique called 'thin-wall casting' in producing it, which means that the block is not very bulky. There is a wide selection of aluminium cylinder heads that can be used, which save an enormous amount of weight, I will be running a light flywheel and light, small pulleys too. Over all, I'm not expecting it to weigh significantly more than the engine that's already in it. I estimate that it will produce a true 365bhp at the wheels once it's built, meaning that it will have well over 100bhp more than it has now, so even if it weighs 20-30kg more, this will be insignificant to power to weight, and given where the engine sits in the car (well behind the front axle line), it won't make any difference to the handling.

Unfortunately it's still on the garage floor at the moment, on a trolley:



I have an engine stand, but not the correct bolts to bolt the engine up to it.

Once again I am happy that I started this blog. This poor fella started his thread on Pistonheads explaining his efforts in fitting an small block chevy to his TVR Tuscan (replacing the Speed 6 engine it came with), and you should read the vitriol and idiocy he's had to put up with. There are some nobbers in the world...

Movies

Hmmm.

Griffith 200

Griffith 200 at Carolina Rod Shop - powered by Ford.

Zorsts

Came across a link to an advert today for a much modified Chimaera which had quad exhausts. The colour of the car isn't really to my taste - I like my yellows really custardy, and this colour is a bit of a distraction. However, I think that this exhaust conversion could look quite good on my car. Something to think about - miles off getting this done now...

Ouch!

It may have been noticed that I haven't posted any pictures of the front of the car for some time. Well, this is because I banged it into a neighbour's front garden wall in December when it was snowing. Now, many sensible people at this point would say "why on earth were you driving a TVR in the snow? Loads of torque, no weight, short wheelbase etc. etc." Well, they're right, I shouldn't have been. I was delivering it to the garage where it was going to get something done. In the event, they said "your outriggers are rotten", to which I said " I know" and their reply was "well, we can't put it on our lift then, can we?!". Wish I'd thought of that! Anyway, point is, there's been some damage to the bonnet, and the bit you can see is here:



Which is probably the best shot of it. I did mention in my very first post having bought the car that it's covered in stone chips and various other bits and bobs that need doing at the front and elsewhere, but this really does make it look bad. Here are some others:





And a gratuitous fat arse shot:



Car is going in tomorrow to have that dig at the leading edge of the bonnet patched up. Have got two quotes for a full respray so far - a grand apart! However, I can't afford either at the moment, but I don't want to spend the summer explaining to people what an idiot I am for planting the car in a wall in December, so a little tidy up at the front will have to do. Probably reading this you may be forgiven for thinking 'that damage isn't too bad, can't be too expensive'. Well, it's between 6 and 400 smackers to just get that front bit sorted.

Oh, and to all you jokers in the TVR community, yes, the roof is on, but I'm not driving it - I just got it out of the garage to take a picture.

DVD Ripping

As per below, going through the palava of trying to get my DVDs onto a drive on the network in my house to act as a media server. I also want to get some Peppa Pig vids onto a laptop so that we can amuse my toddler on the aeroplane on the way to our holiday destination. So essentially get our DVDs into a one-file format that can be played just on a laptop, or via my PS3. I've probably gone around the houses a bit on my choice of method, but this is what I am doing:

1) Slysoft AnyDVD to unprotect the DVD and have the option of jumping to the main feature and cutting out any advertising/marketing junk
2) DVD Shrink to be able to re-author the DVD to just have the features I need (I can get rid of the French subtitles feature if I want, for example)
3) Handbrake to convert the file to .mp4 to have a one file solution.

The process is pretty slow and painful actually. The bottleneck is DVD Shrink, because this is what's actually reading the DVD drive. Although it does what it does in the background, you can't do any of the other things until it's done. I can use Handbrake to go directly from the DVD drive (and Handbrake is very slow), but then I can't use a feature of Handbrake which appears to be quite useful - the queuing feature. Basically if you have a bunch of files on your hard drive (say from DVD Shrink), you can queue these up to be done one after the other while you're not there. DVD Shrink is useful because you can chop out all the stuff you don't need, and shrink the file down a lot. Trouble is, you do have to be there to do the first two steps. Basically, ripping a DVD into an mp4 file based on my method takes about 1.5x as long as the DVD you're ripping. So if I'm ripping Peppa Pig 'Stars' DVD, I can expect this to take about 50 mins overall, I think, but even that seems to depend on what I do. Mostly it's best to leave steps 2 and 3 overnight.