Wedg1e
They call me Mr. Bodge-angles
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- 7,735
- Location
- Teesside, England
It’s a Vauxhall Carlton 24v head. You are correct. Lopping two cylinders off and mating to an omega A 2.4 bottom end to create a 16v CIH aka manta 400 incarnation. They were cast strictly as a 16v but this is a way of doing it on a moderately better budget. Still not cheap by any stretch but I’ve wanted to have a go for some time.
That reminds me of a job we did for a certain UK/EU subsidiary of a US car maker about 20 years ago.
Their latest series of engine was just about to start full casting production but in a high number of the early casts they'd discovered an area at the front of the cylinder heads where the alloy wasn't fully melded before it cooled. Effectively they'd created a dead end in the die and the molten metal had nowhere to go, it needed more runners and risers I guess.
They asked if we could show them a technique other than x-ray which could detect the cavities within the head prior to taking a datum skim off the front (which usually revealed the cavities).
So we did, at which point they asked how much it would cost to hire the equipment for say 6 months, and costs to have two operators working 12 hour shifts to scan every head as they came out of the dies.
We costed it all up and it was £££, so we suggested that surely the way forward would be to alter the dies.
"We've already costed that, your way is cheaper", they said.
So for the 6 months or so that it took to cast every head they'd ever need, two guys sat and waved a probe over every hot cylinder head as it came off the die-caster, and any that failed were chucked back in the pot and remelted. Despite that, I have heard tales of cyl heads cracking at the front as presumably they didn't spot every cavity.
Accountants have replaced engineers (althugh you have to wonder who failed to spot the error in the design to start with ).