1966 Mk1 cortina GT She Drives!

4 minute(s) of a 319 minute read

I forgot to mention the engine:

I stupidly sold the original 1500 as I decided I wanted a zetec so I bought an ST170 engine and loom, I had it sat on my engine stand with an angle grinder in one hand and the subframe on the bench. I had a thought about how it would look in the car and I thought that it would be a bit disappointing to look at so I had a re-think.

I wanted an engine that would be useable everyday that didn't leak oil and would fire on the button and looks as though it should be in there,

Thats when I decided to inject a precrossflow as it ticks all the boxes - So for my uni dissertation I chose to develop my engine using a piece of software thats used for engine design and development called ricardo wave.

The test went like this:

built a standard version of the engine

Exhaust manifold lengths and diameters (6 differnt versions in total) picking the one that produced the best power and torque curves rather than going for big bhp numbers,

Cams (again 6 in total using a mix of current and 60's spec grinds),

Larger valves were added to the head along with ports to suit which had a lower drag coefficient to suit (calculated not specific),

Twin Webbers (the fueling was still set as a carburettor and the manifold was the same as an off the shelf number)

ITB's (based on the webber model but fueling changed to injectors and fueling suited to equations I made),

A single throttle body and plenum using equations I found (this made more torque than the ITB's with a better curve!)

Supercharged - this was using an Eaton M45 as it has the same output of air as a shorrock C75B which was fitted to some precrossflows using a draw through carb

Supercharged 2 using the single throttle body model and an intercooler.

SO the plan is to inject the standard engine with a cam and a few other bits and pieces and have a crack at making my own exhaust manifold/system

then when it works and this are going well I would like to try the supercharger route which will mean swapping out my 1500 and going for a later 1600 crossflow and modifying to suit the 1500 head and give it a go - I would use a 1500 but the 4 bolt flywheel maybe a weak link and the 1600's have 6 bolts and better oil seals

After all that have some pics

(I sold the carbs not long after this)

the block came from a local college that was used to for teaching purposes it was on Ebay with low miles and had been dry stored for years but was looking a bit rough! The block was overbored to 1590cc which is a fair whack but the other block had oversized bearings on the cam which were obselete which is hard to fix hence why I ended up with 2 engines and 3 heads! and 12 pistons!

this is an example of the ricardo model it shows the inlet maifold and injectors on the righ hand side, the intercooler is in the centre and the supercharger is on the left with the cloud represting the air thats about to enter the engine