Project Cars Update: Simon’s Corsair – In V4 we trust

It’s not worth the bother of tuning up an Essex V4, right? After a bit of page-flicking, Simon’s not so sure…

of page-flicking, Simon’s not so sure…

Ever since I bought the Corsair early last year, I’ve been mulling over what engine to drop into it. Trouble is, I just can’t decide, and the V4 it’s powered by is such a sweet-running thing that I’ve become quite attached to it!

So for now I’m sticking with the Essex, and I’ll soon be hauling it out of the engine bay for a stripdown, rebuild and a bit of a fettle.

There’s naff-all reading material about tuning up the V4 in existence, apart from a couple of paragraphs in my well-thumbed copy of Tuning Four-Cylinder Fords, but in the back are loads of old cam listings, including a Piper profile for the V4. Quite excited, I got straight onto Ian Cox at Piper Cams and he confirmed that they could regrind a cam to those original specs.

Luckily, John at Goldendays (01603 881155) had a V4 cam in good nick sat on his shelf, so it was soon sent packing to Piper’s machine shop. The 5FG/4 profile as it’s known, is hardly high-lift compared with Crossflow and Pinto profiles, but at 0.414 inches (inlet and exhaust) it is by V4 standards, and along with some decent porting, should produce good results — though we’re not talking 180 bhp Pinto power, here! In fact, with a change of carb, the book reckons I could see around 130 bhp with this cam and head mods, and if I can achieve that, I’ll be more than happy!

The engine’s currently fitted with a single-choke Zenith which is a total disaster area, but the Weber 28/36 DCD carb from the Cortina GT apparently gives good results if used with the 2000E/Capri GT inlet manifold, so I’ll be looking to give that a go.

However… back in the late ’60s, a company called Hurley Engineering started offering 2-litre V4 conversions to hacked off NSU Ro80 owners fed up with the rotor tips failing on their rotary engines, and as part of the conversion they designed an adaptor for the inlet manifold to run a Weber sidedraught carb (to clear the lowline bonnet), so yes, you guessed it, I’m on the hunt for one of those!

It could all go wrong of course, or I could simply change my mind, but I’ve already filled the boot of the Corsair with V4 parts collected at shows over the summer, so I’m in too deep to back out now! Plus I’ve been given a tip-off about an NSU sat in a scrapyard with a V4 under the bonnet…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Project cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.