I now have the head off my Rover 200 BRM sat on my bench in the garage, traditionally it should reside on the top end of the engine to provide compression for the pistons and somewhere sfor the valves to do their work but Rover desinged it in such a way as the gasket eats itself.

Anyway, have checked the head and it hasnt warped, glad about that as its a VVC unit and I really dont fancy pulling that lot out to send it for a skim !

So has anyone got any suggestions as to how to best prepare the head so it doesnt do it with the next couple of thousand miles, can cope with doing it every couple of years but dont want it to be a weekly job, the tip about getting shut of it has already been mentioned and is under consideration.

As was the suggestion from the local mecchanic in the pub, the best thing to fix a Rover, 'a gallon of petrol and some matches'

 

Maybe a stronger head gasket would be a good choice then? I know that you can get metal ones but maybe these guys can help

http://ferriday.co.uk/copper/copper.html

 

Are the head/block dowels plastic or steel? Early K series had plastic location dowels and these would start to exhibit shear and the head could move around the bolts. If they're not steel, change them for steel ones (later K series had steel). Also make sure you refit with new OEM stretch bolts - this is very important.

HTH

 

This is the most common problem for 1.8 freelanders (rovers K-Series) judging by the websites - head gasket failure leading to head warping

 

Read this
It's abit long, but worth reading. It explains why the headgaskets go as well as explaining a few other things.

 

Yeah it has the steel dowels and I have read the article, good engine, BUT !

 

J4cko

The other thing you should check is the cylineder liner protrusion above the block deck - this needs to be about 5 thou, but more importantly it needs to be consistent across all 4 cylinders and all the way round each cylinder. The liners can sink in the block, and the head then clamps unevenly on each cylinder liner and hey presto your brand new gasket fails.

I'm in the process of rebuilding a k series which exhibited exactly this problem.

Dave

 

Dave, cheers for that, will check ?

And if they have sunk >?

They new gasket is apparently a composite one, i.e. not metal with silicone beading round.

 

If they've sunk you end up in the spiralling cost phase I'm going through at the moment.

Basically you have to strip the whole bottom end and take the block and liners to a machine shop to get the liner protrusions set to 5 thou. I went an alternative route and had new thicker cast liners shrunk fitted into the block and then machined for the right protrusions - this route guarantees no more liner movement. But I am building a >200bhp engine!

Some people have got away with new liners and a bit of juggling of liners between different bores and got consistent heights that way.

All in all, a right royal pain in the ****...

Dave

 

cometic and felpro are also pretty good
but ferriday are the ultimate for most applications
cheers
matt

 

Bl**dy hell sure glad I sold my BRM !

 

The temperature cycling/thermal shocking leading to blown gasket issue (as in Carl's link) can be a big problem in the mid-engined K series, less of an issue for front engined installations. I remember various things that my dad had to do with his GTM Libra to re-jig the cooling system for exactly that reason. (2 seat mid-engined fibreglass, a bit lighter & stiffer than Mk1 Elise, generally rather nice!) IIRC common tricks include altering heater bypass pipes / drilling small holes in thermostats, altering fan control etc. Strikes me that one of the nice thermostatically controlled electrc water pumps (available from Demon Tweaks and many others) with the sensor in the right place, no thermostat would be the solution I'd chose.

 

Going to put it back together tommorow, I may be some time.......

Will report back when its running, if it goes again I might just crash it out of spite, anything rather than spending another weekend skinning my knuckles in the cold, our garage contains white goods and a toilet, the only car that fits is my remote control one.