Iceberg V8????
Discussion
I've just spent the evening round a mates (he has his own 4x4 repair business) and we got chatting over a few beers about V8's how good they are etc etc when he says to mine and a few others amazement "I've got a V8 Iceberg it's a prototype V8 diesel" He then pulled a dust sheet of a block in the corner of his workshop and there in all it's glory sat an Iceberg V8. It has one piston missing as this is how they where sold to stop them ever being used but IIRC these blocks can withstand loads of tuning. How much do you think this block is worth?
The picture below is NOT of his block but anyone else out there find it incredible that one of the rarest V8's produced is sitting the corner of a workshop in East Anglia?
>> Edited by greenlandy on Tuesday 16th August 09:05
The picture below is NOT of his block but anyone else out there find it incredible that one of the rarest V8's produced is sitting the corner of a workshop in East Anglia?
>> Edited by greenlandy on Tuesday 16th August 09:05
The iceberg engines had bigger cranks so 80 mm stroke was possible thus making bigger capacity engines. It saved aftermarket tuners having to modify a buick 300 crank with all the work that entailed. Nowadays, they have been eclipsed by the cross bolted engines so there's not anything very special about them anymore. My rovers used to have iceberg cranks and I was well chuffed at the time
Boosted.
Boosted.
In what way does the block differ from a standard one? Is it a totally new casting or is it strengthened by some kind of magic? WLAcopilote said:
The "incredible" thing about the Iceberg V8 (other than two-thirds of it sits below the water) is that it is a DIESEL Rover V8...
I thought that rocker cover looked familiar!
Can you make any engine into a diesel? Remove spark plugs, increase compression ratio and add diesel...?
Pretty much yes, but it won't last very long unless you beef it up to cope with the extra cylinder pressures, and then beef it up some more to cope with the extra mass of the bits you've just beefed up. (Or you can sleeve the bores to reduce the cylinder pressure forces to something comparable with a petrol engine... but we don't want to go reducing the output, do we? )
Increasing the compression ratio may not be entirely straightforward as there's usually too much space to easily get rid of, unless you have a Heron head like the pre-HE Jag V12. The standard petrol combustion chamber has to go, which may help, or it may make it impossible.
You also need to modify the head to incorporate a swirl chamber for indirect injection or modify the intake tract to swirl the charge for direct injection.
By the time you've done all this, it often doesn't have much in common with the original engine apart from the basic dimensions. The best bet I reckon is an engine with a Heron head and a massively over-engineered bottom end.
) Increasing the compression ratio may not be entirely straightforward as there's usually too much space to easily get rid of, unless you have a Heron head like the pre-HE Jag V12. The standard petrol combustion chamber has to go, which may help, or it may make it impossible.
You also need to modify the head to incorporate a swirl chamber for indirect injection or modify the intake tract to swirl the charge for direct injection.
By the time you've done all this, it often doesn't have much in common with the original engine apart from the basic dimensions. The best bet I reckon is an engine with a Heron head and a massively over-engineered bottom end.
simpo two said:
Hmm. To save having to increase compression, what would happen if you kept the compression the same then kept the spark plugs to ignite the diesel instead?
It'd be like what happens if you fill up with diesel instead of petrol by mistake, only more so... diesel injected directly into the cylinders shortly before TDC wouldn't be as well mixed with the air as diesel injected into the inlet tract instead of petrol, and the spark plug wouldn't stand a chance.
ETA: Also diesels run incredibly weak by petrol engine standards, especially at low throttle settings, so even less chance...
>> Edited by Pigeon on Wednesday 24th August 04:06
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