Cylinder "Heads Up"

[H8OAG]

For Info

I was talking to the MG Racers in Crieff and their championship class for VHPD 190 may be changing for 2017.
Many drivers have been complaining about the cost of running a VHPD

Engine rebuild every season
Steel crank to allow for "engine pinging"

A precision engineer has come up with a converted VVC head that produces 180 bhp all day long
The VVC is removed to fixed valve working
The cam journals changed to accommodate a new Janspeed cam with profiles similar to a VHPD 190

The Crieff team are road testing the new head at Oulton next week and a decision will be quickly made on whether it becomes the new MGZR class next year.
This will involve a manufacturing run of cylinder heads

Surely a possibility to lift and shift into an Elise?

.......I will update on when and how much

[campbell]

Interesting scoop, Iain.

[Ferg]

A flood of VHPD parts when they change would be a good thing too.

[Scuffers]

I don't get this...

Yes, running VHPD's in race cars is a pain, however, the problems are not the head, so how is changing it to another one going to help?

Last version of the VHPD head was actually pretty good, some small but significant improvements over the originals.

All that said, I believe the issue is that they are now un-obtainium, whereas the VVC head tooling is available and the current 'holder' is looking to have a batch of heads cast, as far as I know, they only have the tooling for the VVC and std heads, no idea what happened to the tooling for the VHPD (Vulcan) head since PTP went down.

Edit:

Should mention that to convert a VVC head to 'fixed' cams is easy, Piper etc. do off the shelf parts for this, ie. blanking kit and inlet cam with bigger journals, I used to use this 15 years ago when VHPD heads were simply too expensive to use.

[Ferg]

What are the differences in the castings between the VHPD and the VVC? Anything that can't be fixed by some machining?

[Shug]

Prepared to be corrected here, but I believe the ports, valve sizes and combustion chamber are the same. The difference is around the top at the cam carrier/ladder arrangement - the journals on the inlet cams are larger to accomodate the physically bigger VVC cams and there's also an area for the VVC cam phasing mechanism.

As Scuffers says, all easily sorted by a custom inlet cam with bigger journals and a blanking plate for the VVC mech that Piper sell. As you can't machine metal back on , that's the way to effectively turn a VVC head into a VHPD.

[Scuffers]

What are the differences in the castings between the VHPD and the VVC? Anything that can't be fixed by some machining?

Shug is correct in part, the early VHPD heads were a hybrid between the std top and VVC bottom (chambers/ports etc).

later ones had changes in port angeles etc, but these were done by PTP and farmed out for casting/machining, unlike the originals that were cast by rover.

since PTP went down, I don't know what happened to the tooling for these later ones, the Rover tooling is in the hands of an MG specialist who's looking to re-cast a batch.