Local boy racers

[mowgli]

as the old boxy 216 used a honda engine & box, and the underpinnings of the 200/25 series are based on the old 200, and the fact that mike knows what he's on about, i reckon you could get a bigger honda lump into one...

[Sloth]

Aye there was a tickled up one of those round here a few years back, owned by a guy named 'Guy' amusingly enough, went like stink and used to push skylines and scoobies, much to their dismay

he later had another with a 1.8 kseries turbo in it from a 75. hybrid turbo and huge fmic, saw 300bhp on stock internals. it ran at york one when i was there, 12.3 sec pass.....

[Sloth]

Actually Honda wanted the metro/rover 100 to sell in Japan or something, and they shared info on manufacturing techniques etc including the upside down aluminium casting technique used on the K series, which was actually first used by Cosworth.

Rover then used this pretty awesome technique to blow around 30 billion headgaskets over the next 20 years.

ahhh the "its all designed wrong hence why the gaskets go" story.

utter b/s, the k series is/was one of the mosty advanced engines of its time. all alloy, low water content, 1400cc 16v belt driven producing 103bhp, designed in 1986. nothing else was close. if i was still fannying with cars, a minimetro in orange with a 1.8 turbo would be high on my list.

[mowgli]

the inlet manifold o rings were made of the wrong materials, simple as that.... with the unbelievably small qty of coolant needed, they only need to leak a small amount to make it go bang.... in the early eighties, ford came sniffing to buy ARG & all the k series stuff was wheeled out of the factory & hidden in garden sheds (ealing comedy style) to prevent ford from getting it at a knock down price!!!!!

[MK999]

I'm quite aware of how it was designed having done a 20 page write up on it in my first year of uni and having seen the SAE papers from the original designers on it.

However it's success was it's downfall, as they were that impressed with the prototypes they made a couple of changes to it so it could take over the role of a 1.8 from the current engine that they were planning to use at the same time as the k series, and replace with a different design later. These changes in the geometry of the engine meant there was more flex induced in the block, and it resulted in it wearing through gaskets faster.