just to be contrary, I drive a car with projector lenses and it is MUCH better than my prior car with regular head lamps. However, this is not an american made car, maybe that's the difference - headlamp lens is glass (and, sadly, a replacement headlamp assembly costs about what a used lathe costs) so there is no loss of light over the 9 years it's been on the road.
my point being, blame the corners cut, it's not always the tecnology
Bill
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will iam_ b_ No ble at msn daught com
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"Tim Wescott" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@web-ster.com... | Since I want to go around corners weight is a concern, and since I want | to pay for this in my lifetime an aluminum block is probably not in the | cards. But I'm putting a 5-speed behind the V-6, which should be | equivalent to an automatic and at least 25 more horsepower (automatic | transmissions are for weenies). | >
Sure they are! Buick 215 V8. All aluminum. Go looking for a BOPR (Buick, Olds, Pontiac, Rover) V8 which can be had from the original 3.5 liter/215 up to 5.2 liter (with money of course!) They're still out there. Used in the Buick Special from about 59 to about 63 and in the Olds Jetfire (and even turbocharged from the factory.) They cast the blocks with sleeves, and that never worked out so well. Rover cast the blocks first and then pressed in the sleeves, which was a whole lot cheaper and a more consistent process. There's lots of aficionados, mostly because the whole motor, soaking wet, only weighs ISTR about 320 pounds and put out about 180 horse originally, give or take, depending on the configuration. This is one of those underappreciated motors due to the lack of use on this side of the pond and the reliability issues built into the processes of the time. The Buick V6 is a cast iron version of this motor with two cylinders lopped off, so the bolt pattern is the same and most of what's up front is also interchangeable, even with a lot of the Rover stuff, obviously which evolved on its own after being freed from GM's ownership in 1974.
I think you'd have to find some old car magazines from when the Vega was new. The design was developed by a team at GM Corporate, not in-house by Chevy--among other things the first time they actually ran it on the track it broke in half.
And then there was that annoying bolt next to the gas tank.
On Fri, 24 Feb 2006 15:15:37 -0600, with neither quill nor qualm, "*" quickly quoth:
Don't be silly. Everyone KNOWS you can't align a Vegamatic or a Shovit...er, Chevette unless you know the weight of the people who were to be the normal passengers. Alignment changed with about a
50lb load differential. (How do I know this? I was a Hunter A111 system tech for a frame & body shop for about 4 years.)
Luckily, the frame men did that for me most of the time.
Kinda like those 6.5 hour flat-rates for tuning the early Mustang V-8s. It started with "R&R engine..."
- Woodworkers of the world, Repent! Repeat after me: "Forgive Me Father, For I Have Stained and Polyed."
You can get the BOPR V8 from a catalog too. It was still in production until last year I understand--if you can find pre-2002 Range Rover or Pre-2005 Land Rover Discovery in a junk yard it should have one, or if you google "Land Rover Parts" you'll find some US sources for complete engines. If you google "Land Rover Engines" you'll find a different set of suppliers, mostly in the UK, that have new engines with various mods.
Looks like with Ford taking over Rover, though, they've decided to purge themselves of GM influence. Perhaps somebody else will buy the tooling and keep it in production.
"> You can get the BOPR V8 from a catalog too. It was still in production
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"THE ROVER V8 WILL BURBLE AGAIN The Rover V8 is dead -- long live the Rover V8! Despite reports of its imminent death, the famous V8, used in many Solihull-built Land Rover products, is alive and burbling and in production in the UK. MCT, the West Country based engineering and manufacturing specialist, has won a contract from Land Rover for the continuation of production to support the aftermarket requirement for original equipment engines. ..."
I ran one for a couple years here in California..was still tight and solid when I sold it to a kid here locally. But then..no snow and no salt here in the desert.
The phone companies were using Chevettes for low ranker company cars and occasionally they would show up at Nationwide auctions up in Napa. I think I bought as least 3 of them, all needing only minor work, let my wife drive em for a couple years then reselling them for a $500 more than we paid for em, including whatever repair costs there were initially. Worked out pretty well.
I owned exactly one Pinto..dont remember the exact model..pretty sporty. Ran pretty good, quick and handled well. Sold it to someone for what I paid for it after driving it for a couple years. A couple years later..I get a visit from two very large men from the FBI. It appears that it had been used in a series of bank robberies in the midwest somewhere, where the perps had outrun the cops (or out driven them) and was ultimately found concealed out in the tules. Stolen plates and they used the VIN number to track it back to us. Seems it had been sold, but never registered to the new owners. I showed em the copy of the Release of Liabliity and told them who we had sold it to, best as we could remember..and they were happy.
Gunner
"A prudent man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them; the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences."
Yup. I got a rock hole in my Toyota's GLASS headlight, noticed the problem before the mirror was wrecked and cleaned it with detergent and water. Then I dried it out and put clear vinyl tape over the tiny hole. It is still working fine, and the fix is so invisible the safety inspection people can't even find it. Those headlights are now 16 years old.
On our Dodge Ram van, the plastic headlights are very white and hazy. I tried to buff them, and finally realized they were hazy on the INSIDE, too, so I could buff till they wore through before they would get clear. Those plastic headlights are only 6 years old!
Well, they use salt here in MO, too, but it took about 8-10 years for the doors to rust out.
This was totally insane. If it ever overheated, it either cracked the head or warped it. I got lucky, mine only warped a little, and bound the cam when it was hot soaked. Once the oil got circulating, it was OK.
It was actually a pretty innovative engine, the oil pump was concentric to the crankshaft and driven by a keyway, and the water pump was driven by the timing belt. That is fairly common today, I don't know if the L-4 (Vega and Luv truck) was the first to do this. The valve adjusting system was pretty neat, too. But, that iron head was a disaster waiting to happen.
Where? Revco gobbled all these up years ago to make indy engines. They destroked to the 168 Cu-In limit at the time, put new heads on it and a bunch of other mods, and it made a great engine.
Yeah, it was a really good block, at least. But, I think they must be VERY hard to find now. We are talking about an almost 30 year-old engine!
There was a thing about a V-8 powered chain saw that two guys pick up and essentially drop on a big log. It goes through the log about as fast as dropping a brick from a 2 foot height. But, for two even pretty beefy guys to pick the thing up, it couldn't weigh much more than
400 Lbs. I was wondering what engine they used, but nobody seemed to know.
"Jon Elson" wrote: (clip) I could buff till they wore through before they would get clear. (clip) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "Let me make one thing perfectly clear."--Richard M. Nixon
The "Chevy Side Tank Issues" were shown to be a fabrication of an unscrupulous journalist who purposely set out to get one to light and didn't quit until he managed it--google "gm nbc rigged". NBC ended up paying GM 2 million dollars in damages over that one.
Different animal from the Pinto gas tank where it was proven in court that Ford knew that there was a problem, that they had evaluated an alternative design used in another Ford product that has been shown to be safe in 60 mph impacts and rejected that, that it would have cost less than $12 per car to correct the problem with the design that they chose, and that they ran a cost analysis and found that it was cheaper to pay off the victims than to fix the problem.
Further, an NHTSA study showed that at the time 24% of cars on the road wer Fords but 42% of the collision-ruptured gas tanks occurred in Fords.
Many good, insightful responses by people who actually drove these cars.
FWIW -- a automotive research/news organization [Wheelbase Communications] had an article in our Friday Fed 24 major metro paper about providing "Detroit" with advice and insight.
Writer was Rh>If you need a laugh, find a copy of Richard Porter's "CrapCars"
On Sat, 25 Feb 2006 21:27:26 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, "J. Clarke" quickly quoth:
If it were totally bogus, why did all truck manufacturers stop making passenger-compartment gas tanks? This was before the crew-cab era.
Yeah, stupid move, but why didn't anyone bother to ask the owners if they'd give $12 to fix a potential problem IF their car was hit from behind at a pretty good speed? In 3 words: The Frackin' Lawyers. It was the legal climate combined with some stupidity which prevented Ford from immediately making the changes and doing recalls. One could almost guarantee that it would have been cheaper to do the recall without any lawsuits, and that it -would- have been done but for the ambulance-chasing speaking weasels. Feh!
But you never answered my question the last time this subject came up. How can engineers foresee things like this? It's only through complex destructive crash testing scenarios that problems like this appear. Software testing and modeling are vastly improved nowadays but weren't even available at the time.
All because of a bolt facing backwards on a Pinto rear-end. What was the total number of explosions, J? I never have found that statistic. How many ruptures vs. how many explosions and the percentage which the Pinto took in that are the stats I'd like to see. Has anyone ever found them?
- Woodworkers of the world, Repent! Repeat after me: "Forgive Me Father, For I Have Stained and Polyed."
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