Ford Cortina MkI - Guy Croft Twincam installation

[Guy Croft]

Here are some shots of Cyril McMullen's Cortina being 'reconstructed' at Wellingore Garage. Cyril drove the car over from Belfast earlier in the year for a new (GC) engine. The unit is on shown on hot-test on my Youtube channel GC1438.

The suspension rebuild is finished apart from new rear springs and includes rebuild front struts, new front springs and adjustable rear dampers, uprated front anti-roll bar, those parts supplied very ably by the Lotus Cortina Spares Center in Crewkerne.

Here the engine is sitting on its mounts so that I can discuss placement of the oil system accessories, carb linkage, fuel regularor and other parts. The unit will get a new sealed alloy airbox with short rampipes - it did not have any on the previous setup.

G

[Guy Croft]

Let me know if those photos are unmanageably large please...!

G

[badlyworntoy]

Mk1 Sportinas turn me funny....very nice!! Oh and It does have a Hillman Avenger steering rack as I suspected.

I

[Guy Croft]

thanks Ian

I was wondering about that. Is that a good thing?

G

[badlyworntoy]

Not particularly,Like I said its just a lot easier and slightly more cruder way of doing it...its the way it was done more often in the 70's/80's. These days folk tend to want to use all ford parts as they tend to drive a lot better this way (feels like an Escort),This involves using custom crossmembers shortened Capri or Escort racks and hacking up the strut tops to get the geometry correct as you have to use Capri 2.8i or RS2000 struts and various other modifications to get it all working. You wouldn't get much change out of £1500 just on parts doing it this way these days!

Remember the 3 significant things to happen in the late 60's
1 Man went to the moon (suposedly)
2 Kylie Minouge was born
3 Ford started manufacturing cars with rack and pinion steering (MK1 Escort)

I suppose at least with the Hillman/Talbot rack its easily converted back to steering box without any disturbance to the bodyshell and with the prices of MK1 Lotus and GT's rocketing out of most peoples budgets,the option of converting them back to steering box will probably add yet more valuen to cyrils Cortina.

[Guy Croft]

Thank you very much for your helpful & expert reply Ian.

G

[Guy Croft]

wrong rampipes of course, my fault entirely, it's so long since I fitted an airbox...

Some update pics attached. Car is over at Lance Pritchard of OJZ Engineering, one of the top names on my short list of exhaust system fabricators.


http://www.ojzengineering.co.uk/page.php?page=101

GC

backplate way too thick & heavy ...doh no.1!!

would not clear linkage.JPG (135.28 KiB) Viewed 1629 times

[Guy Croft]

few little updates as of today..

G

[Guy Croft]

up at the garage half the day today doing the in-situ startup on Cyril's car, some footage on Youtube channel 'Guy Croft ' (now in my own name)

GC

[Guy Croft]

no nice comments/questions for poor old Crofty then??!!

G

[Urbancamo]

We are all stunned by the quality of this build! Questions cannot be easily made..

Only thing I can ask, does box-shaped airbox work well when it comes to flow characteristics? Some say corners must be rounded etc. but I want to hear your opinion because you know exactly what you do.

All I can say, this is a real nice project. And really nice to see some other engines in these cars instead of those Ford Kents, Lotus Twincams and so on. Some driving footage from outside would be nice when the time is correct. We all want to hear Twincam sound.

[TomLouwrier]

Sure, I'll bite.

Real nice car and a very good installation.
It just strikes me as ehm... well... peculiar that the car reads Ford Motor Company, while in fact the Motor is a Fiat.
I can certainly see the value in a well engineered build, art for art's sake so to speak. It is just that these cross brand grafts (call them frankencars, call them mongrels) do not really 'have it' for me. Especially this early model Cortina has quite a pedigree on it's own with either a Ford or Lotus engine. Surely it wouldn't need a Fiat one? (though that is the better machine of course ;-) )

regards
Tom

[Guy Croft]

thanks guys!

Tom you have a fair point. I would not necessarily offer up a Fiat TC to a Ford, it just happened to have one already albeit a rather tired old one. I would add however that it's by no means a first I have made engines for all Ford Escorts right up to transverse Mk3 including notably the one in my new book for Barry Ryan - though I heard it ingested something catastrophically and got 'pulled'.

Cyril the owner of this one is President of the Northern Ireland Italian Car Club and has a Fiat Samantha with a GC engine too, so a 'fan' of what I do.

The reality is - up to a point - I have to place commercial considerations (!) above authenticity quite often and personally think the pedigree of the TC units stands well in almost anything.

G

[TS131Volumex]

Here , here .
Simply a stunning engine in a stunning car .
And , no doubt , there is an equally stunning Fiat powered by an equally ( or ' close to ' ) stunning Ford lump floating about somewhere .
If these things are done properly , as this is , the diversity can only make things more interesting . There are still endless premium authentic versions of these classics all over the place not to have to worry on that front for a long time .
Matt .

[4v6]

What to say?

A thing of beauty indeed Guy.
So simple in the bay compared to todays cramped and overcomplex stuff, wish they were all like this.
Not to mention the vehicles styling and presentation, todays stuff just looks stale in comparison to the breath of fresh air these dated "old uns" impart.