MG-Cars.net

Welcome to our resource for MG Car Information.

Recommendations

Parts

MG parts spares and accessories are available for MG T Series (TA, MG TB, MG TC, MG TD, MG TF), Magnette, MGA, Twin cam, MGB, MGBGT, MGC, MGC GT, MG Midget, Sprite and other MG models from British car spares company LBCarCo.

MG MGA - Spring break

Anyone ever experience a valve spring break ?
Art Pearse

Yes
And even really well known aftermarket springs break as well
William Revit

Well, up to a few days ago I had not heard of it, but it happened to my son in law's Spitfire 6.
Valve dropped into cylinder (collets dropped off), stem still retained in the intake hole and the piston then forced it back into the manifold. So bent valve, scratched piston and no bore damage!
Art Pearse

Ahh
That's terrible bad luck, dropping into the cylinder--usually on an older car they break at startup and cause a missfire to give you a warning
My friend races an E type Jag which has double valve springs - it broke an outer spring, the other spring held everything in place but it had this weird missfire off throttle and wouldn't rev out properly
Plenty of racing Chevs have gobbled them up, you can see the $100 bills running out the exhausts when then go bang
William Revit

I had a really dramatic incident many years ago when I dropped a valve. I had always assumed it was self inflicted as I had done a decoke the day before and assumed I had not refitted cotters correctly. Perhaps it was a broken spring ? The springs would have been original.

The incident. I was driving north on M1 near Derby. Suddenly one hell of a lot of noise and vast amount of smoke out of back like an old style F1 engine blow up. Anyway when I took engine apart the piston and valve in one cylinder had disappeared but the sump contained what looked like aluminium gravel, clearly the remains of the piston. The con rod had bent and there was a 2” by 1” hole in the cylinder wall, and finally there was one of the bits of aluminium gravel jammed in an open valve in another cylinder. For some reason I never rebuilt that engine.

Paul
Paul Dean

This thread was discussed between 10/05/2019 and 13/05/2019

MG MGA index

This thread is from the archive. The Live MG MGA BBS is active now.