On 19/10/2019 22:40, wrote:
On Saturday, October 19, 2019 at 5:10:09 PM UTC-4, David Billington wrote:
On 19/10/2019 21:24, wrote:
On Saturday, October 19, 2019 at 3:12:14 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Sat, 19 Oct 2019 07:42:27 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Wednesday, October 16, 2019 at 4:48:55 PM UTC-4, wrote:
So when I retire in a few years I want to build a sports car from
scratch. I have the equipment and knowhow except for the bodywork.
Which means I would get to butyand learn how to use an English wheel.
I don't know which engine to use though. So I'm looking for
opinions. I want to use a 4 cylinder engine. The engine needs to be
fairly common and parts must be available for hopping it up a bit and
for general rebuilding.
Very important the engine needs to look great. So I'm looking for
opinions here. A great looking engine that's fairly common, can be
hopped up some, and won't break the bank to work on.
Thanks,
Eric
"Looks great" caused me to slam on the brakes. g As for your other requirements, it's hard to beat Hondas for most of them. Japanese law required that engines be changed at 40,000 miles a decade or so ago, which put a lot of used ones on the US market. Moderate speed equipment is readily available.

I rebuilt two Alfa Romeo 1300 cc engines in the late '60s. They were beautiful. One had a Veloce head with twin side-draft DCOE Webers. I don't know of anything that looks that good today, but it's hard to tell until you get all of that plastic junk off the top of them. I own a 2018 Subaru Crosstrek, and I've seen it with the plastic off of it. Not exactly a thing of beauty, but I do like the engine.

If you want real sports car performance, avoid turbos. The turbo lag is antithetical to sports-car type responsiveness, unless you spend megabucks. Garden-variety turbos are not sporty engines. They just wind up -- eventually -- and put out a lot of power. In a light sports car, you don't need that much.

What you need is great throttle response and good breathing. There are a lot of good engines out there today. Your project is one I've dreamed about off and on over the years, and having done some sports-car racing between 1967 and 1972, I have a good idea of what I'd want my engine to be good at if I ever did it. I'd look at Honda, Toyota, and Nissan. If one dropped in my lap, I'd look at a 3-Series BMW. But I'd make sure that aftermarket parts are readily available for anything I chose. Oh...and make sure you can mate it up with a transmission for rear-wheel drive. Maybe an engine that's used in a small pickup.

Good luck and have fun!
I am also considering motorcycle engines, though I dont know how I
would marry one to a transmission. But a V twin, a BMW boxer twin, and
a 4 cylinder boxer engine have all crossed my mind. There are some
older foreign engines I really like but then that may make parts hard
to get and expensive.
Eric
Well, there have been some successful ones. In the early days of the Locost, at least one was powered with a Honda Fireblade (CBR 1000RR, 998 cc) motorcycle engine, and the report was that it was faster than a Locost powered by a Rover V8 (essentially the old 215 cu. in. Oldsmobile aluminum V8).

It's all a matter of what you want in a car of this type. When the original Lotus 6 (soon to be Lotus 7) came out, you could put any engine in it that you wanted. Lotus would deliver them with 948 cc Morris engine or a Ford Anglia. Neither one put out more than 50 hp in stock trim, but they were race winners.

My college roommate has one of the 50 Lotus 7 Mk. 4s delivered in the US, and he has a 1600 cc Ford Pinto engine it it. That's essentially the same engine as the English Ford 125E New Kent -- probably the most common engine in Lotus 7s. I've driven it; it probably doesn't have more than 100 hp, but it weighs less than 1300 lb. and it goes like hell.

So decide if you want a wild thing or something that's a little more relaxing to drive. It doesn't take much power to make those little space-frame club racers really run. But it has to suit *you* or it isn't worth the trouble.

Have fun!

I think you have the wrong engine in mind there, the Ford Pinto engine
was OHC see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto_engine while the
Kent in various derivations was OHV see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Kent_engine . A mate has a Caterham7
(Lotus 7) with the Kent engine in 135hp Supersport spec but neither is a
great engine IMO just very common and easy to come by or were.
No, Dave, I have the right engine. The Pinto was available with a 1600 cc pushrod -- essentially the English Ford New Kent -- or with the 2.0 - 2.3 liter SOHC engine (that had too few oil holes in the crankshaft, and tended to burn up main bearings g). I know both engines from personal experience -- mostly bad. d8-)

The 125E New Kent was a well-developed engine that began with the 105E, which had a hollow crankshaft. I owned one car with a 115E and worked on a friend's car with the 109E. I was very familiar with the whole series. They pioneeredÂ*the short-stroke (oversquare) design for ordinary sedans, and wound up being the basis of more sports-car and racing engines than, probably, any other. Aside from the short stroke, there was nothing unusual about them, but they were pretty sound and had a lot of horsepower potential.

I also once got the lousy job of adjusting valves on a Holbay-headed, cross-flow Kent, and, to my misfortune, the twin-cam Lotus version, from which I ran as fast as I could. d8-)

When word got around our local chapter of the SCCA that I knew a way to cold-lash the valves on a Bristol engine, all sorts of things showed up in my driveway on Sunday afternoons. They thought I was a magician. Tney were wrong. I just had an English mechanic friend who knew all the tricks, and was very patient in teaching me.

Ed Huntress



Sounds like 2 countries separated by a common language, on this side of
the pond the Pinto engine always referred to the OHC engine as fitted to
some Ford Cortina Sierra etcÂ* and the Kent was the OHV engine, I didn't
know the Kent OHV was fitted to the Pinto but basically your mate has
the Kent OHV engine in his Lotus 7 by the sound of it. I know an engine
machinist that specialises in the Lotus twin cam, BDA, and some Ford
Kent Xflow head work and he didn't seem too traumatised when I met up
with him again recently but he did mention that the twin cam blocks
differed from the standard blocks as they were beefier and marked with a
big L on the block casting and maybe other changes for reliability. An
ex racing driver I used to know told me about head work on the old Aston
Martin straight 6 engines and why so few people wanted to work on them
as apparently they have no shims and the valves stems have to be ground
or the seats cut to get the gaps right, makes the FIAT system with the
shims on top of the bucket tappets a dream, IIRC VAG adopted it under
license and a mate mentioned that even Ford don't use hydraulic tappets
on some engines these days as when shimmed in manufacture they last
which was my experience on the FIAT engines when maintained.