Another car

Here is another one - **LINK**

Steve

Battered Daimler Dart and an equally battered fiat 128 soon to have a Lada badge stuck on it.

Edited By Dave Halford on 08/01/2021 11:42:23

Thank you Dave

Hemi powered too.

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I was promising myself one of those for my 25th Birthday [when the insurance might have become affordable], but family commitments meant I couldn’t get one .... ended-up with a V6 Scimitar Coupé a few years later [which is a surprisingly close relative to the SP250 Dart]

MichaelG.

Because of the fibre-glass body? I drive Scimitar (GTC), a better car except for the engine!

It's a Fiat 125, not a 128, as shown by the twin headlights (or a Polski Fiat). The Lada was based on a Fiat 124.

Edited By john halfpenny on 08/01/2021 12:35:38

Talking of Scimitars, a few doors down from the Dart - **LINK**

Edited By Steve Crow on 08/01/2021 12:50:04

Reliant Scimitar SE6 and Mk 2 Mini 850 ( circa 1968)

Am I on the 'Top Gear' forum by mistake?

The Daimler Dart engine was designed by Edward Turner of Triumph Speed Twin fame. The engine uses parts identical to the 500 Triumph Twin. Valves, guides, pistons, shell bearings and many other parts were all interchangeable. Daimler at the time was owned by the BSA Group (who also owned Triumph Motorcycles) before being bought by Jaguar Cars.

Nice engine if a little fragile, which unfortunately was a Turner signature, which badly needed someone of the calibre of Doug Hele to sort out. At one time there was a plan to put this engine into the Triumph Innsbruck and Stags, fortunately the Triumph engine department managed to change this plan after a series of spectacular 'blow ups' on both test beds and in mule vehicles.

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Nice to see that, Steve; but of course it’s a GTE ... mine was the Coupé

Though never quite so prettily presented as this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliant_Scimitar#/media/File:Reliant_Scimitar_before_it_became_a_GTE_in_Hertfordshire.jpg

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 08/01/2021 13:51:32

What were the weak points of the engine?

Mine, sold in 1978 before buzzing off to Saudi Arabia for 7yrs with nowhere to store it, was reliable except for a replacement fuel pump. The bonnet developed a crack, extending through the semi-circular reinforcing tube which I repaired (bodged) by enlarging the crack, whittling a flat on a length of broom-handle, inserting the broom-handle all the way into one part anointed with Brentford's best f/glass resin and finagling the part back into the other side of the crack and levelling the repair with f/glass resin.
The spark plugs hidden in tubular holes in the depths of the rocker-covers were a pain to remove/re-insert. (does anyone now remember the days of sooting/oiling-up spark plugs, SU carbs, the frequency of punctures and wet-morning starting problems ? My word, how things have advanced !
DaveD

John,

One of the test bed failures was a spectacular in that the engine disintegrated between the front pair of cylinders and the rear pair of cylinders. On wag suggested welding the remains together to make a V twin. I happened to be walking past the test bed when it had its 'moment' There was an almighty bang and a sheet of flame filled the cell, the tester came out with singed hair and covered in dry powder from the automatic fire extinguisher system. Anyone so caught out by the extinguisher system got called 'Fred the Flour Grader' after the then current Homepride adverts.

The cars failed on test track running due to oil cavitation within the crank drillings which starved the big ends. This generally led to con rods 'escaping'. We did fit sump baffles, and modified the crank oil drillings which cured the cavitation but Daimler blamed our installation rather than accepting that it was their problem.

That said we could design in our own problems as good as anyone though! The Triumph Slant 4 engines with the integral cam carrier - which necessitated angled head bolts was a nightmare for destroying head gaskets until we solved it with the first silicone silk screen printed gaskets and reinforced fire ring closure. Developed jointly (no pun intended) with Coopers Gaskets. The integral cam carrier was demanded by SAAB for their engine as the Slant 4 was a Joint Venture with SAAB. After they took over their own production the first thing they did was get rid of the integral cam carrier and the angled bolts!

Martin

Martin

Sounds like a similar fiasco to Turner's swansong, the Triumph Bandit/BSA Fury 350cc OHC twins in about 1971. Flew apart on the test bed, if they did not vibrate the bed to pieces first, according to various accounts. The guy was a brilliant stylist -- the Triumph twins are timeless classics and beautiful -- but he could not even get that right by 1971. The Bandit/Fury was an awful looking thing to boot.

ET was not involved in the bike you are talking about. He created a 350cc OHC bike designated ETED1, the forerunner of the Bandit/Fury. You are talking about a bike designed by Bert Hopwood. This came about through Hopwood's dislike of Turner. ET's bike was not without problems but straight off the drawing board it had a sparkling performance but not without problems, mechanically noisy and a broken crankshaft. Nothing that could not have been sorted out. When Hopwood heard about these problems he used it as an excuse to create his own version.

ET, when designing always had one eye on production costs, something many designers don't, subsequently this has been used as an excuse to some of the failures of his bikes. One thing ET was aware of here was that this bike was only a 350, and that would have an effect on the selling selling price. Not sure Hopwood had quite the same outlook

As for styling, although ET often had the final word on what was manufactured, a guy called Jack Wicks (FJW) was responsible for Triumph styling, as you say, timeless classics, Wicks had an exceptional eye for styling.

To get back "on topic", sort of, although ET laid out the scheme for the Daimler V8 it was FJW who did the general arrangement. He did this during the works 2 week annual shut down in 1957. The engine made its designed for 140bhp straight of the drawing board. FJW also styled the Dart, not one of his better efforts!

This engine was not without its problems as has been pointed out! As for problems that would cause grief to an owner the one that comes to mind were the crankshaft bearings, being a compact V8 the bearings were a little narrow. Accepted wisdom of the time was to have the sump off at, if memory serves, 50,000 miles and replace the various bearing shells to ensure no trouble.

John

As John MC has pointed out, the change of bearing shells on the Dart engine at 50,000 miles was a preventative measure against bearing fatigue failure due to crank cavitation issues.

The Bandit/Fury bikes did perform well as road tests of pre-production bikes attested to at the time, but they were plagued by production issues. One major issue was the cylinder head bolt recesses breaking through into the OHC boxes, something like 70% of castings were being rejected due to this after machining. The original Turner designed ETED1 is shown in a picture on page 233 of Hopwood's book "Whatever happened to the British Motorcycle Industry?" It looks like a twin cylinder Tiger Cub. The later Bandit / Fury was a step change for the industry; apart from being a high revving engine (10,000rpm) being competitive with products from Japan, it also featured DOHC, 5 speed gearbox and electric start. There were many ingenious and tantalising designs being developed, a V5 modular engine based around a triple and with twin cylinder offshoots. A single cylinder 480cc 4 Valve OHC engine was also under development by BSA, the one prototype escaped the scrapman and was last seen in a Bandit frame at Silverstone in 1988.

The biggest obstacle to the industry, and this holds true across the whole of British manufacturing was the lack of investment in modern machine tools. At the Meriden closure auction I was struck by the machine tools being 1940's/1950's in fact many were 'war grade' - one Brown & Sharpe 'rocking bed' cam grinder had a hole in the base casting as big as your fist where a piece of shrapnel had hit it from the original Triumph factory bombed out in Priory Street Coventry factory! At Herberts', when I was an apprentice, I worked on a Herbert No. 16 Universal miller dated from 1915 and rejected by the Russian Tsarist Government inspectors as unsuitable (Herberts had a huge Russian contract to supply the Russians with machine tools for their war effort)

Martin

Gentlemen, Thank you for these tales, I have been involved in I/C engines all my life, most recently 15 L V8s. One engine was destroyed COMPLETELY by a broken valve spring. That something was wrong was indicated by 2 valve heads in the exhaust manifold ! Noel.

If we were playing Top Trumps (as was ) you take it over my old Corvette C3 454cu.in (7.4L ) !

DaveD