Tiz's Minis

Cheap Inlet Manifold

In that excellent book Tuning the A-Series Engine by David Vizard he has a long discussion about ways to improve the inlet flow of the A-Series Engine. He tests many different manifolds, providing detailed analysis.

It turns out that the Manifold on the metro is pretty good, not the best but a big step up from the standard Mini manaifld. In fact the MG Metro manifold can be used unmodified, as it's seperate from the Exhaust manifold.

My manifold was from a standard metro, this is cast as a single unit so in order for me to use it, I've had to cut it off. It's a bit of a fiddly job a combination of grinder and hacksaw did the trick. So it doesn't interfere with the new LCB a certain amaint of tidying up is necessary to remove the remains of the cast iron that joined the exhaust and inlet manifolds.

It is possible to use the exhaust manifold as well, it also flows pretty well. You would almost certainly need to seperate the exhaust manifold from another casting as I don't think it would be possible to seperate the manifolds without damaging one of them. One other advantage of using the Metro exhaust manifold is it can reduce noise

Labels: exhaust, manifold

posted by Andy Tyrrell @ 5:13 PM 0 comments

Life gets in the way

My mini is still in the garage waiting for some attention, well to be more precise an engine.

The car was moved to it's garage prison soon after the gearbox failed. I quickly brought a Metro with a 1275cc A Series engine in it as a temporary replacement. My wife was not too impressed, whoever styled the Metro was not thinking of the image conscious when he put pen to paper.

My intension was to do an engine swap, that was some time ago.

The good news is I had an enjoyable weekend in the summer removing both engines. The eyesore that was the metro was removed by a nice man with a big grabber arm on his truck, (Great Toy!!).

The bad news is the project hasn't got any further.

Free time has been my biggest problem, weekends seem to get soaked up with stuff. The stuff isn't necessarily bad, infact it's excellent quality stuff and normally involves entertaining my young daughters.

Things have got to get moving again, I need to hear that 1275 fire up.

Labels: engine, family, mini

posted by Andy Tyrrell @ 4:50 PM 0 comments