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MG MGA - Colyn’s Engine

Colyn

After watching your bird poo video it flipped onto the video of your engine showing 140bhp on the rolling road it reminded me of something I was going to tell you. A few years ago I was talking to Cameron Gilmour and I mentioned that you had said that your engine had this power and he didn’t believe it’s power was anything like that. If you haven’t perhaps you should enlighten Cameron as to what a great job he did. As you know I also have a Cameron rebuilt B engine but mine was a standard rebuild.

By the way we should have been together today for the Scottish MGA Day but
COVID came. We are going out today all the same as is Tim Price.

Cheers

Paul
Paul Dean

If I remember rightly, a 1950 crossflow engine I built for a friend reached 138 bhp on Peter's rolling road.
Chris at Octarine Services

Hi Paul, great to hear from you.
It's strange that you should bring this subject up because we were discussing it on the MG Experience Forum a couple of weeks ago.

Over the winter I had the valve springs set up by Peter Burgess and he suggested that he could improve the gas flow of the porting a little if I wished.
So I asked him to go ahead with this work and we arranged to put the car on his rolling road afterwards to see what difference it had made.

Three years before this when I had Peter set the then new engine up on his dyno, we got a result of almost 137 bhp.
This was taken with my dual electric fans running constantly and Peter found that the two fans used up approx 2 bhp.

So the result was just a whisker under 140 bhp at that time.

I was hoping that the new gas flowing of the head would lift the bhp figure to over 140 bhp.

Unfortunately, Peters Dynastar dyno has recently had new control software installed and he has found that the bhp read-outs are now showing around 7 bhp less than previously.

So my engines power reading is now shows around 133 bhp, which means that there are no bragging rights this time around! :^)

What this does illustrate is that different dynos will give really differing results and that you can't really compare one dyno's results with anothers.

The engine does feel even livelier than before though with the Burgess latest Econotune porting, Peter reckons that this porting is good for around 7 bhp iirc.

So I am still delighted with the power that Cameron Gilmours engine develops whether it is giving 140 or 133 bhp, it is still fantastic!

Yes I was sorry that we couldn't all do the Scottish MGA Day this year, last years event was just fantastic and we were really looking forward repeating it.

Cheers
Colyn



Colyn Firth

This thread was discussed on 29/08/2020

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