Staff Car Sagas
The PC team reveals all.
The course of true restoration never did run smooth and yet again my marathon Jensen Interceptor restoration has hit a bump. It appears that when we broke the engine in last year, we also broke the engine. It is a nightmare, an expensive one, and I have had to have a big sit down and talk to myself in order to not throw in the towel.
The problem was obvious from the moment we tried to start the engine again earlier this year. It was tight and it wouldn’t fire. Paul Lewis and the team at PALE Classics did a compression test and discovered it was way too high (175:1 not 135:1 as it should have been) and all the time the starter appeared to be struggling harder to make the crank spin. Paul had a look down the bores with the endoscope and found scoring, particularly in the front four cylinders. That’s when he called a halt to proceedings… a wise move. He saved the engine in doing it.
The atmosphere of exuberance was replaced by despondency. At the time, we had thought the Jensen would be being driven to the MOT station, we were pulling the MOPAR V8 out of the engine bay and bolting it to the engine stand ready for deconstruction. Not the best day.
Unravelling the misery
Diagnosis of the problem was extremely tricky. The engine had been built at the PC Resto Show in 2015, not the perfect environment for a build, and the engine itself was a mixture of refurbished block, crank and a pair of heads from different sources. All machined correctly but… from what we saw when taking the engine apart, there was evidence of a piece of plastic gasket protruding into the oil supply hole for the front of the engine which might have led to seizure.
However, there was also evidence that the oil drilling to the front camshaft journal was to blame. It’s drilled into just below the cam-bearing web and we think it should be plugged, or similar. The plastic constriction would be allowing oil pressure to decrease and isn’t necessarily something that we would have seen during the build, especially under the dim lights at the NEC and particularly if it was pushed down into the drilling. Equally, it could be the cause of an earlier