With my GTT pretty much finished I find myself with not alot to do, so I've taken on a little side project, basically my brother is restoring a 1972 Triumph Spitfire 1500, he is handling the body work and I've been tasked with building the engine.
Now the standard spitfire engine is a 4pot 8 OHV 1500cc engine, with a 3 main bearing crank, 75bhp and revs to 4000rpm before it eats itself, even the best race built engines didn't rev beyond 4500rpm, the engine is an iron block and iron head and weights in at a ton or near enough, no joke the block with nothing in it weights about the same as a complete C1J bottom end so weight is a big factor aswell as reliability and power.
My brother had an R5 as his first car, just GTL nothing special but he bought it to last 4, 5 months, it lasted 5 years and reached 150,000miles before he decided it was time for a change and the engine still ran sweat as a nut so we both know in N/A form the C1J will go forever. To that end its a C1J thats going in the spitfire, now it won't bolt straight in but I don't think it'll take much hammering to make it fit.
I'll be building this engine with a N/A C1J block, pistons, cam and flywheel but I will be using a GTT head for the bigger valves. Fuel will be fed through a pair of SU carbs and I'll have to make a custom tubular exhaust manifold to meet up with the rest of the exhaust system.
I plan on port and polishing the head and raising the compression ratio abit, I won't be messing with the ignition much just yet so I'll be using the C1J flywheel and renix unit to control the spark, maybe I'll knock the tdc sensor foward abit for some advance but that can be done anytime.
Now I've started by getting my spare GTT block out of the shed along with a flywheel, a spitfire gearbox and mounting plate so I can begin measuring up what needs doing to mate the C1J block to the spitfire gearbox, fortunatly triumph used a plate to mount the box to the engine so I just need to get this redrilled to suit the C1J bolt pattern which shouldn't be to diffecult.
However I have 1 problem, in an R5 the engine tilts backward abit but the spitfire engine doesn't, there is room in the engine bay for it to tilt but is there any reason why it should tilt?
You'll see from the pics below I've placed the plate on the engine in the 2 postions, the first with the plate if the engine was tilted and second with the engine in a vertical positon, what you'll notice with the engine vertical the front webbing on the block overlaps the hole in the plate for the starter motor but it doesn't with the engine tilted.
Come on peeps, tilted or not? for and against please