You might also try and get a bigger air filter. That little thing could be choking the engine out. On a car I was helping with removing the airfilter was worth 3 tenths! Put as big a filter as you can on it. I have a 14 x 5" on mine. Also have a huge cowl hood though. Cool car, I like it.
hello; Isn't there a TR8 that came stock with a V-8? If you know what V-8 would that be? I wonder the differance in weight from a V-6? The set up your talking about should be fun. IBBY
I don't race the car with a air filter, it is only used when the car is parked to keep dust/dirt out of the carburator.
Yes, it was an aluminum engine although I don't remember if the heads/intake were aluminum even though I had one of them engines years ago.
The Buick V6 is actually fairly light. My N/A engine will be way less than 300 pounds complete. I do have aluminum heads and was very careful about unecessary things but I would think even a cast headed motor with an aluminum intake would be right at 300 pounds. A SBC is closer to 550. Have no clue what the older rover engines weighed. Not too many hop up parts for those though. Once I finish assembling my engine I plan on getting a final weight. Should be interesting.
There is alot of speed stuff available for the old rover motors in England. I lived over there for 20 years and saw many 10, 11, 12, and some 8-9 second full out race vehicles.
I guess I should have added "readily available" to my statement. Actually I didn't know they had that kind of potential. Seems hard to believe you could get that kind of HP from 215 cubes. That would be Stage II 274 ci in the Buick world. They must be REALLY expensive to build. You just don't see them much.
How much could I raise the compression with milling the heads? I know more compression is one of the keys to making this little motor make more horsepower but I don't want any motor that won't run on 93 octane pump gas.
Not really sure. I don't know the deck surface to chamber (cc's) ratio. If you are still running the 3.8 the easiest thing to do would be to find a set of steel shim headgaskets. That will take about .030 from the deck to head mating surface without touching the block. Then a nice 10 to 20 thou on the heads and you would have at least high 8's in compression. I would think up to about 9.5 to 1 compression would be no problem on pump gas with iron heads. That of course is assuming you have the stock pistons. For my new build I just had pistons made to get the compression I was after. A little more expensive but much less hassle
