In the new year I will hopefully be rebuilding my sprint engine due to oil leaks compression issues and clutch judder,I am thinking of carrying out a full rebuild and hopefully having the bottom end fully balanced including the clutch.
Please can you give me your thoughts on the balancing if it will make any difference or not, the car will only be used on the road ( no racing or rallying).
Where abouts is the best place to have the machining work carried out I live in the Southampton area.
Where is the best place, and what are the best parts to buy i.e timing chain head gasket set water and oil pumps clutch etc, as I have read on this forum there are some parts you should give a wide berth to due to poor quality and manufacture.
When taking the engine out is it best to take out just the engine or take out the engine and gearbox together,
and is there any tips to make the job easier( apart from getting some one else to do it )
Right, I'll try and deal with these in order,
Balancing is ALWAYS worthwhile, If you are doing a full rebuild, it's a no brainer, balancing (or blueprinting) the engine gives better performance, smoother power delivery, better fuel consumption and extended engine life. Why would you NOT do it?
Since I am in the Midlands, i'll let someone further south make the recommendations for machine shops.
For gaskets, buy Payen if you can, for other parts get the best you can find, Vandervell bearings if possible, Mahle pistons (or if your budget will stretch there are some nice forged ones available Stateside). Clutch wise there is a LUK clutch cover you can get on a Saab app which is both lighter and cheaper but still good quality. Details of this are elsewhere on this forum. Stay away from anything with County written on it and ABSOLUTELY DO NOT BUY a timing chain tensioner made by ROLON! I cannot stress this enough, these rubbish tensioners have cost various members here many THOUSANDS of pounds in destroyed engines.
And finally, taking the engine out, the jury is split on this one! Its easiest to remove the engine and gearbox together, along with the exhaust downpipe.
But you can either lift it through the top, or remove it from below, along with the front subframe. Both methods have their merits but either way you will need a hefty crane! Personally, I favour the drop it out the bottom method. Its much less likely to damage the body this way!
Steve
'73 2 door Toledo with Vauxhall Carlton 2.0 8v engine (The Carledo)
'78 Sprint Auto with Vauxhall Omega 2.2 16v engine (The Dolomega)
'72 Triumph 1500FWD in Slate Grey, Now with RWD and Carledo powertrain!
Maverick Triumph, Servicing, Repairs, Electrical, Recomissioning, MOT prep, Trackerjack brake fitting service.
Apprentice served Triumph Specialist for 50 years. PM for more info or quotes.
Southampton? I live in Fleet so if you ask me just take it to Roe Engineering, speak to Mick or Leon there, they did mine.
Please can you give me your thoughts on the balancing if it will make any difference or not, the car will only be used on the road ( no racing or rallying).
My engine will be standard and is fully balanced, even down to the rods and pistons! If your engineering shop are balancing the bottom end make sure they do the pulley inc the bolt, plus the flywheel and clutch cover.
For the price that pistons are being sold at over here it may be worth just getting a set of forged ones. JP Pistons are your best bet for non forged replacements if you can't get OE. And don't listen to anyone, they are absolutely fine!
Bearings wise County are fine, I believe Mart uses them in his track day Sprint, but if you want the best then obviously Vandervell are the ones you want.
I have linked to my restoration thread, there may be some things in there of use.
It's interesting that there's quite a lot of debate around bearings. Modern cars use bi-metal aluminium/tin bearings and they basically don't wear out. Under 'normal' loads aluminium bearings are at least as good as tri-metal ones, in fact they are usually much harder wearing.
They are usually more forgiving that tri-metal in terms of dealing with debris contamination (embedability) but worse than tri-metals on conformability (i.e. mis-alignment, poor machining). The harder surface does tend to wear crank journals more than tri-metal too. Tri-metal is much better for competition or 'heavy load' engines as they can tolerate much higher loads but things need to be spot on and clean. Your typical factory car being made quite poorly and run with dirty oil doesn't stand a chance!
I would say tri-metal is usually preferable because it was what was fitted from new but with these being rare I wouldn't completely rule out bi-metal bearings in a road car. I removed my tri-metal bearings from my Sprint engine which was showing 120,000 miles. The big ends had already been changed sub 100,000 miles and the mains were original and badly worn so I cannot see that they can be that great. I chose to replace with tri-metal bearings because I happened to have some anyway.
Some people are fine with say King or County bearings, other won't touch them. Interestingly we use County bearings in our race engines at work. These are bi-metal ones and even after running flat out between rebuilds the bearings are usually OK, the pistons though do tend to wear.
Balancing is a no-brainer but you'll need the crank, flywheel, clutch cover and crank pulley to do it. You could go further by balancing the rods and pistons too but the big gains are on the crank line stuff.
Mark
1961 Chevrolet Corvair Greenbrier Sportswagon
1980 Dolomite Sprint project using brand new shell
2009 Mazda MX5 2.0 Sport
2018 Infiniti Q30
There were tri metal county's once for the dolomite slant range but i haven't seen these for 15 years now. Using the current ones in slant is fine the first few thousant miles but then it's over. Many years ago in a daily dolomite of mine they lasted 20.000km, the second set also and then i tried vandervell and those did the rest of the 270.000km.
Same engine, same user, same oil. That's my experience with county bearings. But owners driving 1000km a year with their dolomite will say they are fine.
James467 wrote:Oh Jeroen, you're posting on the forum? I thought you said it was dead?
More often than you did read lately i guess?
The forum is not that lively anymore as a few years ago when each section had over 20 posts a day.
The Dolomite facebook group is more interactive and has my preference at the moment.
But I do read the posts here and when i do read total nonsense for example that county bearings are fine i feel the need to correct and post.
But I do read the posts here and when i do read total nonsense for example that county bearings are fine i feel the need to correct and post.
My post was rather tongue in cheek Jeroen, however please do not accuse me of posting nonsense, this is something I will robustly defend. I appreciate that you may have a 'strong' opinion however you need to accept that others may have different opinions, those based on fact as well. County bearings are fine, I have seen them after 50K miles come out of 1500 engines with hardly any wear on them. Those were Midget 1500 engines which tend to run hotter and have a habit of munching bearings.
Dave, another benefit of balancing your engine is that the loading on the bearings will be less so if you do manage to get an OE set they will probably last a long time.
Tony Burd is in Andover, it may be worthwhile asking him who did his engine work.
On the bearing side I would suggest that the quality of King and County has over the years been variable. I suspect that now they are a lot better, which accounts for the different experiences of our esteemed contributors.
However with NOS Glacier or Vandervell you are going to get consistency. When I redid my Sprint engine I had it balanced. The bottom end bearings were all fine though at about 80k miles. It was just the cam that went south on one lobe and was the reason I did it.
Some Payen stuff is also subject to "copying". Pay attention to the spring tension on the rear crank oil seal.
Its always worth checking the oil pump, but be advised a lot of these have been sold recently with the wrong relief valve spring, which will give too high oil pressure which causes issues on the jackshaft front bearing (shoves it upwards basicly causing exess wear) and passage up to the valve gear. So use your old spring if you change the pump.
Do pay attention to the jackshaft and water pump skew gears too...
Not much has been said about the head but cam lobe and rocker finger wear are your points of issue.
Jonners
Note from Admin: sadly Jon passed away in February 2018 but his humour and wealth of knowledge will be fondly remembered by all. RIP Jonners.
I have to say, I am not a big fan of County parts, not so much the bearings, but their oil pumps tend to be very poor. I've had a couple that were well outside manufacturer tolerances from the box, one person I know went through 9 (yes nine!) brand new TR6 oil pumps before finding a useable one! I'ts not so much that they are total rubbish as just substandard. If you are forced by lack of supply elsewhere to use their products, check every part carefully and reject if it's not good enough! And I don't think Mad Mart's trackday car is a good example, though it is thrashed without mercy, it actually does very few miles and is rebuilt frequently.
Steve
'73 2 door Toledo with Vauxhall Carlton 2.0 8v engine (The Carledo)
'78 Sprint Auto with Vauxhall Omega 2.2 16v engine (The Dolomega)
'72 Triumph 1500FWD in Slate Grey, Now with RWD and Carledo powertrain!
Maverick Triumph, Servicing, Repairs, Electrical, Recomissioning, MOT prep, Trackerjack brake fitting service.
Apprentice served Triumph Specialist for 50 years. PM for more info or quotes.
James467 wrote: I appreciate that you may have a 'strong' opinion however you need to accept that others may have different opinions, those based on fact as well. County bearings are fine, I have seen them after 50K miles come out of 1500 engines with hardly any wear on them. Those were Midget 1500 engines which tend to run hotter and have a habit of munching bearings.
