1850 tuning

[roger440]

I think i have a triumphtune 1850 cam somewhere. Not much happened until the car was fitted with a decent exhaust manifold. That woke it up. Seem to remember circa 130hp. Was in the mid nineties though. But it was pretty good for an 1850.

[roger440]

Blueprint it, everything, even the oil pump, get it all balanced, get the ports matched and the exhaust manifold matched to the downpipe. Fit a 123 programmable dizzy, a decent freeflowing exhaust and a vernier timing gear. Assemble it all carefully and it'll probably show you somewhere around 140-150 horses and be reliable and smooth running. For the icing on the cake and big improvements in power AND economy ditch the carbs and go to EFi! If you've done the right groundwork (and won the lottery by getting a sound block) it'll take the extra horsepower happily.

Steve

It is staying carbs. And it won't get balanced either, I am a tightwad and it won't get over-revved. Dizzy I will work on, timing I will re-drill the sprocket. Simple stuff to get it as right as possible with little outlay.
Still think I should have put a saab turbo (or the griffin version) in, but that is another can of worms.

I still reckon you are missing a trick by not balancing the engine. Yes it's money, but it's money well spent. An unbalanced engine (or even a merely badly balanced one) will fight itself. it will give less power, run less smoothly, pick up slower, wear out faster, worse fuel consumpion etc et-boring-cetera. No matter how well or carefully you put it together, it'll be no better than when it rolled off the line 40 years ago. Which might have been OK, in rare cases, might even have been decent, but was mostly pretty poor.

Now you have the chance to make it as good as it CAN be, for not an enormous outlay. It'd certainly cost less than a pair of 45DCOEs and a Mangoletsi inlet and could well deliver better power (depending on how bad it was to start with) besides the other side effects of longer life, better pickup and MPG and smoother running. To me, it's a no brainer. I can understand how you'd like to build the best engine you can for as little money as possible (don't we all?) But like a building or a paintjob, the end result is only as good as the foundations/prepwork. Fail to get THAT right and whatever you do at the top end is wasted.

Oh, and balancing works and gives valuable improvements throughout the rev range, not just at the top end! It's just that a badly balanced engine is much more likely to grenade at 7k than a well balanced one!


The Saab engine is (was) made by Saab and derives more ancestry from the Triumph slant, even in its post Y2K form than any relationship to Vauxhall. The GM buyout just gives you a handy chance to fit a Vauxhall gearbox (the Manta/Omega/Carlton box) to a Saab engine cos that's what GM did! For my money, either a Saab turbo or any of the 16v C20XE derived Vauxhall engines are a better choice than messing with a Sprint motor, it's hard to choose between the 2, both have their advantages and disadvantages. But my bias is well known, so i'll say no more about that!

Steve

Ive told him

Single best thing you can do. To any engine.

Did a 1500 way back in the day. Whole thing was built very carefully. Standard though. That engine just lived forever. So different from your average crank bearing destroying 1500.

Just this evening got my whole rotating assembly ready to go for balancing. Its been done before, but not really sure how well.