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Hi,
I have an A series 8 port head casting, it is unmachined and quite different from my other two which are Gp5 from 1968.
The bare casting is numbered 707 as usual but the second casting number is different being 1280, having said that, one of the other ones is 280 and the other is 1120, now I am really confused....(not too difficult)
It has 4 core plug holes over the spark plug holes in a forward projection in the casting.
I can see that the casting design provides more water capacity and is possibly an improvement over the other design, prone to overeating as it was.
I understood that the original Morris/Weslake/ST casting was homologated probably in '66 ish as it was used up until '69 to my knowledge however, I have an homologation sheet dated 01/01/1970 showing a cast iron 8 port head C-AEG 612, alas the picture is so poor on the RAC/MSA thermal paper it is just a black blob, intriugingly it is shaped just like the bare casting I have.
Does anyone have any ideas? or information which will enable me to identify the head correctly.
Thanks in advance.
(now to try to upload pictures!!!)

the poor picture in the fia papers is a photo of an arden head - compare it to the clear photo of the arden in the other set of fia papers.

someone, somewhere got the photos mixed up

Hi Guru
Ok that makes sense of the FIA papers, but any idea what I have here.....someone has just sent me a link to a picture of an engine with a head that appears to have alloy core plugs at the front and early Lucas injection fitted.... not easy to see it clearly though behind the throttle bodies etc.
thanks tp

The posted photos are of the BL paid for iron head for Gp5 by Downton/Weslake? The Arden head was a privately paid for venture by Steve Neal and involved remortgaging his house done by Jim Whitehouse. Neal beat the works minis at the 69 British GP meeting at Silverstone and the Arden alloy head then got adopted by BL and sold through Special Tuning.

Hi Ivor,
Thanks for the reply.

I was aware that the the two similar heads (one red and one green in the pictures) are Weslake/BMC as they were/are fitted to my two Gp5 cars from 1968.

It still does not however answer the question of the picture of the third head, the bare unmachined casting in iron with the additional material and the core plug holes which are not on my other two heads.

Any ideas/clues as to what that one is ?
Thanks tp

Hello Trevor

You have a pm

251 ENG wrote:Hello Trevor

You have a pm

No no, share!!!

The one I had my hands on was like this:

Looks quite similar to the bare casting as looks this one
http://www.mk1-performance-conversions. ... 8_port.jpg
As far as i'm aware there were at least 4 differend weslake heads, looks like you ended up with at least 3 Trevor good show!

Hi Vegard,
That's the one it is identical but unmachined.
Any idea where yours originated from or where it went to?
Thanks
tp

Hi Jack,
Looks very similar.......thanks for the picture looks like the Lucas injection used by the Cooper works cars.
It would appear that I have 3 different 8 port heads according to the numbers.
thanks
tp

The one I had I have no idea where came from. It was sold via Ebay back to England.

251ENG asked me to post these:

The Weslake head was always a very low production head & as a consequence it was always undergoing "improvement, modification & rectification"! each batch that were done, some of which as small as maybe 6 heads was different to the last. When I was researching these heads we found that the ones with the open holes in the front at the begining of this thread were later than the closed front early ones. This was done to make it easier to clear the cores in this later head to improve the very poor cooling characteristics of the early ones.

Mark, is the total number of manufactured Weslake heads known?

No it isn't.

It was one of the things we tried to determine. Part of the difficulty was that the Comps Dept kept "hiding" the purchase of these heads in the books, so the accountants couldn't find them. This has made tracing their history all the more difficult.

Hi Mark, Vegard,
Thanks for the pictures, my bare unmachined casting is identical to the one in the pictures.
Is that Lucas injection as it is quite different to my TJ systems? (all of which are slightly different but generically similar).
Not suprised about the 'cooked books', my former brother-in law worked for BMC as a draughtsman and spent some time at ST trying to record some of the components, he tells me that they never stayed the same long enough to get a difinitive drawing so he gave up and went back to Longbridge, he tells me the story of parts being designed/drawn on the top of a workbench then just being fabricated and the 'drawings' lost forever.
Wonderful stories with some essence of truth I suspect.

On a different note he once told me about Cooper S wheels and tyres being rolled out of the factory under the security gate in the fog to waiting 'accomplices' outside..... lol
tp

The set up on Vegard's car is indeed Lucas injection. Much more complicated than the TJ system preferred by the privateers. The rumour is that Comps only had 2 or 3 sets & that these sets were transferred from one car to the next to save money. As the price would have equated to 10's of thousands of pounds in today's money.

I am sure that if you wanted 251ENG could machine your head casting into a head without too much difficulty.

Why Lucas injection would cost soo very much is beyond me.... Lucas mech injection is quite commonly used on many other race cars.... Escorts, (TC and BD), Capris, Jaguars, etc. Not to mention a bunch of single seaters and sportscars... Cannot see why a setup for a Mini should be so much different than any other 4-cyl engine... or perhaps I'm missing something?

In the mid to late 60's it was almost exclusively the preserve of F1 teams. It did become more common later, but then it was rare & expensive.

M

Yes that is Lucas injection , it,s my 1968 CCC replica . They are early 1 1/4" throttle bodies , there is an excellent picture on mk1 of an original engine . Just sorting out the throttle linkage and aux. rad at the moment .

I always thought that the heads with the 4 plugs were a later type .

Yes I could machine you bare head if required , got some original drawings , but not a complete set .

The head on the web sight used to be mine , bought it from Manx , it was a downton test head . They ported it out to see how big they could go , think they planned to use 4 big SU,s on it . Sold it to a chap in OZ that races a mini .