REFERENCE NO. 99999
This review article, by James Jewell, appeared in The British V8 Newsletter - Volume XIII, Issue 3 - September 2005
"Well, it's about damn time someone wrote the definitive book on power tuning and building the BOPR family of engines! It's just a shame that it hit the market after the engines went out of production. On the plus side, however, it will never be out of date with regards to OEM engines. Yet here it finally is, in all its glory, 216 pages of color photos, bound in the usual sturdy fashion of Veloce books.
The book starts out with a healthy history of the BOPR family, however due to the geographic location of its author; it spends more time on the R than the B.O.P. Still, as a large number of us Yanks will be buying Rover components in the future (especially if planning a big-bore block), we can forgo our parochial pride and dig into the Anglo-Saxon side of things.
"Well, it's about damn time someone wrote the definitive book on power tuning and building the BOPR family of engines! It's just a shame that it hit the market after the engines went out of production. On the plus side, however, it will never be out of date with regards to OEM engines. Yet here it finally is, in all its glory, 216 pages of color photos, bound in the usual sturdy fashion of Veloce books.
The book starts out with a healthy history of the BOPR family, however due to the geographic location of its author; it spends more time on the R than the B.O.P. Still, as a large number of us Yanks will be buying Rover components in the future (especially if planning a big-bore block), we can forgo our parochial pride and dig into the Anglo-Saxon side of things.
After covering the history in general, it covers aspects of the individual components, including their shortcomings. This starts with the blocks. There is a great deal of info on the weakening of the bores as their diameters were increased (which is ironic, as the bottom-end was made damn-near bulletproof during the same time frame). Des Hammill describes Rover's ultimate decision to ultrasonically check each block for bore wall thickness, and the color-coded paint they applied in the lifter valley to identify the measured thickness. This should come in extremely handy to folks who, unlike me, read that chapter before taking a die grinder to polish the valley. Still, if the fates have conspired to give you a thin-wall block, Hammill describes a few methods for re-sleeving the bores, regardless of whether you identified your lot in life via a colored dab of paint or the odor of burning antifreeze. It's really alarming to read the figures about what percentage of big-bore blocks will develop cracks and dropped cylinder liners but helpful to read what coolant temperatures will lower the odds of occurrence. Hint: cooler is better".