Rover 3.5/3.9 "Intermediate" Timing Cover

[CTX-SLPR]

Howdy,

So I have a hybrid Series II/Stage II timing cover on my Riviera that works great and gets rid of the wear prone spur gears, however it took quite a bit of work to make it fit and I had to customize quite a few things including chopping a pair of timing covers in half to make it work.

Rummaging around for small displacement motors for Bonneville racing lead me back to the different generations of timing covers for Rover V8's. In 95 and 96 Rover made an "intermediate" timing cover that still took a distributor but used a gerotor oil pump. 97-~99 they used the same basic casting but instead boring the distributor hole (the hole is there, just not machined through) they used a sensor in the cover and a flying magnet on the cam gear. Now if I was making another one for my Riviera I'd be happy with the second one or even the later ones with the distributor completely gone but this is for my Bonneville LSR motor that has to run old school with no EFI or DIS type ignition, so I snagged a cover from a 95 Discovery 3.9L

The fittings and lines are for the oil cooler.

You can see the gerotor pump and the 60's oddfire points distributor sticking in it

Fast forward two months or so and I finally got my first attempt at a usable block (didn't work out) for the 3.0L destroker. Yanked the filthy with oil stock cover off and after wrestling with the drive gear popped the Rover cover on.


The good news is that it fits a 14 bolt pan like a charm, the stud is threaded into the timing cover through the pan, I did the other bolt hole after I took the picture.


The bad news is that Rover deleted a pair of the bolts around the water pump.


I knew they were missing however and it looks like with a bit of clearancing and the use of a Buick gasket, I can get them to seal fine with a plug or maybe a set screw of some kind.
I also grabbed the balancer to get the waterpump pulley to line up and it's neutral balanced so not good for a stock crank but fine for an aftermarket unit like what I'll be using.

More on how it works when I get more time and parts to work on it.

 

[charlief1]

Looks like an interesting idea. Can you put a timing cover gasket on the cover and take a pic of it. One other this is are you stuck with a Rover water pump or can you use the Buick one?

 

[Nick Micale]

How do you prime the oil pump/engine since the crank needs to be turning to develop oil pressure, possibly an external pump just for that?

 

[CTX-SLPR]

Looks like an interesting idea. Can you put a timing cover gasket on the cover and take a pic of it. One other this is are you stuck with a Rover water pump or can you use the Buick one?

I'll pull it off at some point and take the picture, probably next Monday as I'm trying to get the final stages of my Riviera rewire redone for an ROA event in Denver early next month and I want to put some miles on the car. I'll just use the Rover pump since my cooling system will be in the trunk for the Bonneville car. The cover looks like you might be able to put a Buick 3.0L pump on but definitely not the traditional 3.8L pump but I'll check at a later date. Since neither car has a fan on the water pump, it looks like it will still work for a Buick since they are both passenger side exits.

How do you prime the oil pump/engine since the crank needs to be turning to develop oil pressure, possibly an external pump just for that?

Nick,
I'll just use what I did for my Series II/Stage II pump priming:


With the rover cover I'd oil it through the oil cooler ports or maybe one of the redundant oil pressure ports.

 

[CTX-SLPR]

Been out of town and my buddy's van had a fuel leak so we did other stuff instead of messing with this. Maybe this Monday we'll pull the cover back off and take a picture of the Buick gasket on the Rover cover. Also noticed that the water pump is reverse rotation (ya'll probably already spotted that) with the smooth drive pulley. Since I'll still have the turbo in the same rough spot as a stock motor, that's not going to work so well. I've either got to find a pump and pulley that will work in "normal" rotation with the ribbed side of the belt or I might have to run a remote setup. A later FWD pump might work and I have a gasket laying around so we might try that Monday as well.

Been hunting for a STD bore 14-bolt pan block with no luck so I might be milling the bottom 1/4in off of this cover and putting an adapter plate on it to run a later 20-bolt pan block since I've had a few people say they've got a STD bore unit stashed away.

 

[CTX-SLPR]

No pictures but I did play with the water pump and there is no way to mount a Buick pump (RWD or FWD) on the cover, the FWD pump is around 10% too big to fit though it comes close. Also there is no way reverse the direction of the pump and have it still work, even with an impellor change.

Now I'll mess around with the clearance on my stock intake and Poston (near stock) headered Riv to see if there is room to put an idler to send the belt over to the Alt without running into anything. I'm think you need at least 1/2 pulley belt wrap to keep it from squealing.

 

[CTX-SLPR]

Finally have a chance to upload the picture of the water pump. As you can see, the FWD pump is 10% too big to fit onto the Rover cover. Even if you could put it on there, it's still reverse rotation.

Still struggling with a way to route the belt drive that is not totally obtrusive to ya'll. This might turn into something I end up just using for my LSR car. Any ideas on the belt drive?

 

[CTX-SLPR]

Got an idea while staring at it last night:

That grey banana looking thing is a plate that supports the Saab 9-3 54mm (2.125in) 6-rib idler pulley to get the belt going the right way again. It attaches to a pair of bolt bosses on the water pump and the other end to the alternator bolt that goes through the tensioner.


The drawing is rather crude and that's the smallest ribbed idler pulley I can find. However pouring over images of my own motor and other's assembled with radiator hoses and air intake tubes, that looks like it will clear.

 

[Paul Lohr]

Good work. It takes a lot of creative thinking to get this done.

Do you think there is enough belt against the water pump pulley to drive it without slipping? Of course the new idler pulley would have to move towards the northwest to get more of a wrap on the water pump pulley. I bet there are things in the way that will prevent it from being moved.

Paul Lohr