Re: What would you buy & why?
Posted: Fri Jan 11, 2019 9:51 am
Hmm, another LHD R5 was on eBay recently,it was the one restored by Drew Pritchard's team for the coming second series of Salvage Hunters Classic Cars, which starts on the Quest Channel (Freeview ch 114 or ch 37 if your area doesn't yet do HD on quest, Chatton mast has just started HD outside of the BBC and it's marvellous, a bit like removing the wrong watching specs and putting on new, correctly prescribed ones) on the 16th, so next Wednesday at 9 (IIRC,but look it up for yourselves as I'm not currently near the telly paper for next week).
The one they did on the show is also white, also remarkably solid to start with and similarly manual. Yes, Rich, it's relatively easy to fit a R5-sourced automatic engine & 'box combination to the R4, I've done one, in 1985 for a customer at one of IM's older workshops who loved their car but could no longer manage the 4's horribly heavy clutch. The engine that was suitable for the task was the larger, 1289cc version of the old Sierra/Cleon motor as found everywhere from Volvos to Dacias, so not only did the car go better because it had grown a torque converter, it also gained several horsepower and a hell of a lot (relatively..) of extra torque.
It drove absolutely brilliantly and the 4's stock brakes were up to the job as that car was a late one that had come with big discs up front.
I wouldn't want to do it all over though, since the manual and automatic versions of the engine were different in so many subtle ways and so it wasn't just a "nuts & bolts" conversion job. Almost, but not enough to make it worth doing again, much as I love the R4's hefty chassis-based construction, its eccentric asymmetric suspension layout and its ride quality that matches a 2CV for softness and may even have been better.
Rich, in what way is the vendor of the Mazda "odd"? Avoiding direct accusations of bestial or otherwise unsuitable behaviour, what is it about the guy that gives you this idea? Aren't we all at least a little odd? No? OK, just us then.
Oh, and DuckDuckGo - the secure search engine that doesn't try to sell you stuff - why would your inbuilt dick 'n harry have me replace the word "Horsepower" with the word "Powerhouse"? Much more of this and it's back to Google for me!
The one they did on the show is also white, also remarkably solid to start with and similarly manual. Yes, Rich, it's relatively easy to fit a R5-sourced automatic engine & 'box combination to the R4, I've done one, in 1985 for a customer at one of IM's older workshops who loved their car but could no longer manage the 4's horribly heavy clutch. The engine that was suitable for the task was the larger, 1289cc version of the old Sierra/Cleon motor as found everywhere from Volvos to Dacias, so not only did the car go better because it had grown a torque converter, it also gained several horsepower and a hell of a lot (relatively..) of extra torque.
It drove absolutely brilliantly and the 4's stock brakes were up to the job as that car was a late one that had come with big discs up front.
I wouldn't want to do it all over though, since the manual and automatic versions of the engine were different in so many subtle ways and so it wasn't just a "nuts & bolts" conversion job. Almost, but not enough to make it worth doing again, much as I love the R4's hefty chassis-based construction, its eccentric asymmetric suspension layout and its ride quality that matches a 2CV for softness and may even have been better.
Rich, in what way is the vendor of the Mazda "odd"? Avoiding direct accusations of bestial or otherwise unsuitable behaviour, what is it about the guy that gives you this idea? Aren't we all at least a little odd? No? OK, just us then.
Oh, and DuckDuckGo - the secure search engine that doesn't try to sell you stuff - why would your inbuilt dick 'n harry have me replace the word "Horsepower" with the word "Powerhouse"? Much more of this and it's back to Google for me!