Having spent many years rebuilding and modifying engines including countless Japanese motorcycle engines I can tell you that the Japanese would do exactly the same thing they did in this film furthermore and probably surprisingly to you and many others the tolerances that the Japanese make their engine components to are much wider than Rover and most other manufacturers would have been using this is done to reduce scrap rates and therefore costs and selective assembly is practised to ensure proper working clearances.
My manger was speaking with the Toyota line engineer about our machine shop and said "how many thou do you machine too " Reply from Toyota was "Thou ! we machine to the micron ". Toyota Deeside would take 45 minutes to assemble an engine and have it at full power and programmed. Any taken from the line went straight to Kaizan QC to find out why, no reworking.
@@WOFFY-qc9te sizing to "tenths of a thou" has been Std manufacturing tolerances from the 1920s, selective assembly optimises the assembling of parts machined to these fine limits, that's it!!!
I have seen this film before . Very good & to the point. Having worked at West yorkshire foundry as a Sparky many years ago I saw the V12 blocks being made. & repaired due to damage & casting flaws. Have had a few V8 rovers. Now the proud owner of a TVR Chimaera 4650 lined Rover V8. Still a great engine & the amazing sound is very adictive. Thanks for the video. Steve.
I used to set up griffs and chimeras at a company I used to work for. I absolutely loved them. Utter delight and adrenaline when they were right, complete pig when it inevitably went wrong. Easy fixes for most of the problems, but could never get rid of the hooded man with the scythe I saw, every time I looked in the rear view mirror. Bloody good fun car. When I win the lottery, there will be a 500 griff in the garage 😂
This is a training film for internal company use, and has the look and feel of being made in the 1980''s when Western companies were loosing to Japanese competition and it became fashionable to managements to try Japanese methods, of which quality circles is one. The Japanese had been using quality circles since the American Occupation at the end of World War 2 had told them to. In most cases, quality circles in western companies petered out within 2 or 3 years. It is surprising that Rover were having defective crankshafts in the manner depicted as by the time this film was made, they had been building the Buick alloy V8 for about 20 years. Definitely not a good look. Looks like they ran the machinery purchased from GM into the ground and didn't have a replacement schedule. Amusing to hear it described as "not a volume production engine". I suppose by the parent company's standards that would be right.
The only high volume V8 in England,, an obsolete Buick! They really did NOT have the power required and were too expensive to make. The cast iron V6 version was around for decades though by the 80s made ok power. Harsh rattly thing however.
Big trip down memory lane for me! After leaving college in the mid 70s I worked for a small company on the capstans then round the corner to a big volume manufacturing plant as a Patrol Inspector. What an adventure that was. I discovered parts were being signed off as checked when the gauge to be used was in the stores and had been for years! Other sections were using a gauge incorrectly so any part - good or bad - was passed as good. Another chap on centreless grinding was using a Mercer air gauge with the needle way outside the tolerance markers - he hadn't been shown how to use the gauge. I left then was back twenty years later when it was all ISO9000 and paperwork, tons of paperwork. I got sent on an 8D Investigation course at Ford/Getrag at Halewood. I solved many problems at Halewood. Nowadays I'm making spare parts for Matchless and BSA motorcycles still using the QC I learned all those years ago. PS Good to see the geography teacher and others from 'Please Sir', and Chief Inspector Japp was in there too. Great film, thanks for showing.
DON'T PREACH TO US. LIFE IS GOOD, BAD AND INTERMEDIATE WHEN PEOPLE ONLY ALLOW GOOD COMENTS THEY ARE MANIPULATING THE PUBLIC.. ALL COMMENTS ARE VALID. IF YOU CANNOT COPE WITH NEGATIVE COMMENTS YOU ARE THE PROBLEM
MACHINERY WAS WORN OUT WHEN BUICK SOLD IT TO LEYLAND AN ENGINE CAN HAVE LOOSE LINERS AND EXTRA TGHT LINERS AND LINERS TOO LOW AND LINERS TOO HIGH ON SAME ENGINE MANY AMAZING DESIGNS WERE RUINED BY POOR QUALTY CONTROL IN ANUFACCTURE AS DONG IT PROPERLY WOULD MAKE NO PROFIT CITROEN DS RANGE ROVER MK1 E-TYPE STAG MINI
Here's a longer version of the Leyland Group Quality video, produced by the CTV Workshop in 1976. Intended for viewing by company employees only :D ua-cam.com/video/w9FQbR4TaDo/v-deo.html
@@gothicpagan.666 _"lighter than a pinto."_ That's not much of a flex, they weighed about the same as the Titanic 🤣An LS1 is also lighter than a Pintosaurus, and make really good power.
Where the heck did you dig this up? BRILLIANT. You should have included the credits. Got my brother researching names to faces. Lots of Northern 70's-80's characters in there. Very informative. That's how things were, and probably how things should be. Another Shrigley spectacular. Many thanks, Ant. 🙂
It's a shame we have lost our car manufacturers I was involved in training in the building trade gave me agood feeling when working as team, makes every one feel good in themselves, I enjoyed that video thanks
There are various kinds of quality. # There is high quality - as in a Rolls-Royce, it is a better car than a Jaguar, but it costs a heck of a lot more. And a Jag is a better car than a Mini - but costs a heck of lot more than a Mini. This kind of quality varies, and should vary, according to market need. # There is managed quality - designing production processes so that defect rates are minimised - this is what this film is about - minimising factory wastage and shipping products to dealers in ready for use condition. # There is designed-in quality - a product's engineering, choice of materials, etc, so that the failure rate during the owner's use is acceptable. This what the British car industry,, including Rover, never mastered and never saw it as something they needed to master.
Interesting video, but they are all actors. Gosh so many actors from the time I can't remember their names. Tony Doyle , Colonel Hadley in Who Dares Wins. Some might say it's an early fake video, scripted. But packed full of actors from Professionals and Sweeney. No one that knows anything about engines though? No workers ever in sight? Maybe be it was a strike day?
It amuses me that you Brits can make fantastic engines but some cars have a terrible reputation I have a TVR which is Rover based (tweaked of course) and a Lotus Excel which I love Here in Australia a lot of American engines have taught me that Yanks can't make cars - especially those that can corner!
A lot of this is not quality control, at all. It is simply about the smooth running of a production facility. Something which had already been done, decades earlier, in every continent on Earth except Antarctica. Parts catching on the guide rails? I think that Henry Ford or Samuel Colt had already figured that one out.
The v8 in the Leyland p38 was a bit more powerful than the 3.5. I know Leyland originally called them the p76, but I think p38 is far more accurate because they were only half a car
I thought this was some sort of a joke or a grammar lesson about paradoxes or oxymorons or something having British Leyland and quality control in the same sentence😂
That was pretty good, the actors were even convincing! The Rover V8 was a great engine, I rebuilt two of mine, though they had no crankshaft wear to speak of, the bores were hardly worn and only needed a hone with new rings and bearings they were good to go for another eighty to a hundred thousand miles one engine needed new valve guides which I farmed out to a local reputable engine machine shop but that was all. The biggest problem was when they enlarged the capacity from 3.5 litre to 3.9 and after around 75-100,00 miles some liners came loose. I had that problem with my last Land Rover Discovery 2 4.0L as they called it. But I used a novel sealant called steel seal or some such thing and it worked, I put 25 k on it before I sold it with no further trouble. As I say a great engine. Don't suppose too many are on the road now because the Discovery 2 was a rot nightmare, due to Land Rover no longer putting underbody sealant on them. Talk about built in obsolescence !
The 4.0/4.6 was a complete rework, it had cross bolted crank caps, bigger crank journals, stiffer casings, different head stud pattern, better oil pump and a lot of other design changes. They made a 4.4L proto based on the original 3.5/3.9 block dimensions and it suffered crank whip and other things under test so redesigned things (I have a unground 4.5 proto crank with leyland part number cast in that escaped leyland proto dept in that leaky british way ;) ) . The blocks were graded for liner thickness on the line and the thicker castings were diverted for 4.6, with the thinner walled ones going to 4.0 because the liner was smaller. They still do suffer with slipped liners though, but now the cure for that is a top hat shaped liner conversion which stops the liner being forced down by combustion pressure if things get a bit loose/too hot. If they had of stayed in production maybe the factory would have come up with similar but it didnt start to manifest in serious numbers until higher mileage to catch in the proving stage.
Are you in Australia? In the 1950's Holden (local GM brand) and the Ford Falcon were the volume sellers of locally made cars. In the 1960's they were joined by Çhrysler making the Valiant locally. But Chrysler struggled - they never sold as many as Holden or the Ford Falcon. It was pretty well known that if you were a Holden dealer, all you had to do was clean the protective wax off, add water and oil, put in a battery, put in some gasoline and make sure the engine started. If you were a Ford dealer, almost the same, clean off the shipping wax, add water, oil, and gasoline, battery, and start the engine. Customer options such as radios, vinyl roofs were added by dealers. If you worked for a Chrysler dealer, cars would arrive with things like no steering wheel, because the factory had run short. Or maybe the guy who fits steering wheels was off sick. Or they would be missing radiator hoses or something. Dealers could get a factory rebate of any work done or parts needed, but it was an annoyance. The worst cars from a dealer's point of view were Fiats. They were fully imported from Italy and arrived with rust. The rust could be bad enough that the car needed surgery at a panel beaters' Customers are funny - they never accept a brand new car with the no-cost rust option.
The lugs on the side were the machining datums. In the foundry, the castings critical features, water jacket positions, valley height, etc, were balanced and 3 point locations machined on the lugs. After the blocks were machined, 3 of the lugs were removed. I worked in the foundry and it made us cringe seeing how the machine shop banged them about, moving the datum.
Bobuilt10: That is surprising. Something that all young professional engineers learn is that it should be possible to check all machined dimensions against datums even on the finished product. Without that you can have no quality control and no way of diagnosing process issues. Usually, the engine rear face and either the bottom machine surface or the top surface (head gasket contact surface) are datum surfaces. The V8 engine design and all machines and tooling to make it were sold to Rover by GM USA, who also sent people over to set it up and teach Rover how to operate it. This engine was intended for Buick cars, but GM decided not to use it. It has always been reported that GM did that because another division came up with a cast iron "small block" design that was negligibly heavier and the alloy V8 could not match the in-service fault rate and durability of the cast iron small block. If you are correct, perhaps it is the real reason why GM abandoned it - one of their production engineers seriously effed up. But I think the real reason for the problems is that by the time this film was made, Rover had been making this engine for most 20 years, and they had just worn out the factory machinery, running it into the ground. That is typically what British firms did.
@@keithammleter3824 If I remember correctly GM had real problems with casting the alloy block, so much so they gave up and went back to iron. A V6 version of the Buick V8, with an iron block, was used up until the late 90's.
@@agt155 What is the source of your claim? It sounds like a myth to me. GM had a lot of experience making large alloy castings for the war effort in World War 2. They were turning out about 125,000 aircraft engines a month at their peak. Including vast numbers of turbocharged alloy V-12 engines for USAAF fighters. They knew a thing or two about casting aluminium. If GM couldn't make good alloy blocks consistently, Rover with enormously less experience, would have had no hope and would not have risked it. The fact that they could make small block cast iron engines weighing negligibly more than the alloy V8 (which is easily verifiable) they sold to Rover would have been a key point.
@@keithammleter3824 The fact GM spent all that time and money developing the aluminium block just to drop it and develop an iron one instead indicates there were big problems. GM blocks were produced from gravity fed steel dies with cast-in liners, Rover blocks were sand cast with pressed in liners - a hint of the problem? Rover did have extensive experience with aluminium engines, they produced the Meteor version of the Merlin V12 for use in Centurion tanks and also made a V8 version. The iron block Buick V6 weighs 16Kg more than the Rover V8. People don't appreciate the incredible power to weight of the Rover V8 - still competitive today.
@@agt155 : You haven't given the source of your claim, so I assume you can't, and we should not trust it. I think you don't understand how big American companies operate. GM had multiple divisions competing with each other to a certain extent. To the CEO of a company the size of GM, the expenditure of a few tens of millions is no big deal, even in the 1960's. Their total company operating expense was about 8 million dollars per DAY, not counting factories not in the USA. The CEO and his direct reports would have regarded the alloy V8 merely as an experiment that didn't pan out. Sure Rover had experience. But pretty small compared to GM. Rover made about 9,000 Meteor engines over a 20 year period. That is insignificant compared to the 125,000 large aircraft engines GM made per month in wartime. And how do we know Rover didn't have trouble with it? On a spare no expense low volume military product you can tolerate a high scrap rate. In volume production competing in the retail space you can't. The weight of the alloy V6 used in Buicks is not relevant as it is a much later engine. It weighs 170 kg installed. The Buick V6 contemporary to the 215 alloy V8 was a cast iron engine. What was relevant to GM at the time was that the alloy V8 (the 215 ie 3.5 litre) weighed 144 kg dry and the competing GM small block cast iron V8 was 184 kg dry. The 40 kg difference did not allow any significant change in car front ends or structure (weight on front wheels > 600 kg, so 6% improvement) and against a total car weight of at least 1200 kg would have meant negligible difference in performance.
1980 my family got an SD1 to sell for someone chocolate brown paint and beige velour and the silencer box rotted off and bald tyres. We used it as a Saturday car blasting it everywhere wheel spinning loved it sounded like a turbine then an apocalyptic racket at 100mph as the door seals popped open. Every time getting in and out door trim and courtesy lights fell out.
It goes to show that if you want to make an interesting and factual documentary always employ the best actors you can, they make such things far more interesting with no boring monatone voices boring you to death. The licence to build the short block V8 was obtained from Buick and was a well established engine so Rover just needed to keep up quality control which was very much lacking at Rover back in the 70's
Hey up mate super loved watching this so thank you very much it's just a shame what happened to this industry, always thought the old buick should be a goodun as all alloy but grew up with fords first so i guess preferred them, do keep thinking about a rover for my diesel hilux though if only for the V8 sounds. Thanks again
Great video ,just goes to show what can be achieved by working together with a common aim ,reminded me of how the MOT VTS Council was formed due to dis-jointed legislation varying testing standards and a very random punishments for any transgressions,it worked really well getting some fairness back into the system, but now its gone , so the MOT test is going to be the new rover V8 assembly NO CIRCLES
Thanks for that Andy. That was great. 😊 Can akso say, i had a rover block bored from std to 30 over, done on a 90 fixture, and the bottom of the bores on both banks wouldnt clean up on the cam side. It had been bored at a wonky angle from the factory ❤
It’s sad really. That was a great idea that if combined with investment in new kit and perhaps buy in from the work force to focus on quality. Rover might still be here today.
You have to ask yourself why things got to customers with these problems, and I think that a lot of it was that british attitude when management spoke and the shop floor just listened and knew their place as peons. And a lot of the people saying no in the original situation were probably not wanting to rock the boat becase thats how the status quo was. Ironically it was left to the shop floor to sort out. Vauxhall's used to operate a similar scheme called the ideas scheme. But it was more about making things cheaper to make than solving quality issues irrc. I always remember being told the biggest payout under the scheme was when a assembly line worker suggested eliminating the drain bung from the rear axle on rwd cars, it eliminated adding a bung, making a bung, and having someone insert the bung saving millions over the production years. The side effect was when the axle needed its oil changing, that draining the diff had to be pulled out instead making it a painful expensive job in comparison to a quick axle oil change. So in effect it pushed the costs (multiplied) onto the customer further down the road... At GM of the period, you could only get recruited for anything except production if you had a degree. It didnt matter what that degree was in, just you had one (to increase paper worth of the company as a metric for investors I believe). So a candidate with a ND in vehicle engineering was rejected and my friend with a art degree got in. During the early ecotec years, the engine design suffered a flaw where a cambelt tensioner failed which lost the belt and destroyed the engine, Vauxhall ran out of replacement engines and the cars were sitting round in dealers for months or years waiting for warantee repairs and it nearly destroyed the affected models sales. The dirty shame of that incident is engineering knew about the problem tensioner, and recommended to replace them all on a recall, but upper management veto'd this under costs & decided to save money by targeting only a very narrow date of engine production. Whatever happened to the british motor(& motorcycle) industry? white collar management, with arts or humanities degrees. That's what happened...
My late production TR-8 had over 100,000 miles on it before I pulled the engine....the 3.5 is solid...but the rest of the car looks like it was built by drug addicts
So many well-known actors of the period (?mid-late 70s?).
Thanks for putting it up.
How many of those guys had bit parts in the Professionals?
Ooh, equinestaydry posted a new video!
Fen street gang, On the buses.
Please Sir, Porridge..
My p6 v8 original engine never been touched 40 psi on idle and silent what can I say
Lol. British Leyland and quality control in the same sentence! Well I never😂
Sarah Jane Smith ❤
I was expecting a Dalek through door at any minute
Before your time Andy 😂
What a delightful oxymoron.....BL quailty control.
Almost as good as quality control😂
This is an adult movie with all the naughty scenes edited out.
Elisabeth Sladen is Barbara. She was also Sarah Jane in Dr Who.
The Japanese would fix the crankshaft machine. Not alter another component to mask a fault.
Bloody hilarious
Having spent many years rebuilding and modifying engines including countless Japanese motorcycle engines I can tell you that the Japanese would do exactly the same thing they did in this film furthermore and probably surprisingly to you and many others the tolerances that the Japanese make their engine components to are much wider than Rover and most other manufacturers would have been using this is done to reduce scrap rates and therefore costs and selective assembly is practised to ensure proper working clearances.
@@grantbaker3336exactly, tolerance grading and selective assembly has been the cornerstone of mass production for the masses.
My manger was speaking with the Toyota line engineer about our machine shop and said "how many thou do you machine too " Reply from Toyota was "Thou ! we machine to the micron ". Toyota Deeside would take 45 minutes to assemble an engine and have it at full power and programmed. Any taken from the line went straight to Kaizan QC to find out why, no reworking.
@@WOFFY-qc9te sizing to "tenths of a thou" has been Std manufacturing tolerances from the 1920s, selective assembly optimises the assembling of parts machined to these fine limits, that's it!!!
@@Brit_Toolmaker In the UK, yes, not in Japan.
I never hsd a Problem with my 1976 Princess 2200 HLS
I have seen this film before . Very good & to the point. Having worked at West yorkshire foundry as a Sparky many years ago I saw the V12 blocks being made.
& repaired due to damage & casting flaws. Have had a few V8 rovers. Now the proud owner of a TVR Chimaera 4650 lined Rover V8. Still a great engine & the amazing sound is very adictive. Thanks for the video.
Steve.
I used to set up griffs and chimeras at a company I used to work for. I absolutely loved them. Utter delight and adrenaline when they were right, complete pig when it inevitably went wrong. Easy fixes for most of the problems, but could never get rid of the hooded man with the scythe I saw, every time I looked in the rear view mirror.
Bloody good fun car. When I win the lottery, there will be a 500 griff in the garage 😂
This is a training film for internal company use, and has the look and feel of being made in the 1980''s when Western companies were loosing to Japanese competition and it became fashionable to managements to try Japanese methods, of which quality circles is one. The Japanese had been using quality circles since the American Occupation at the end of World War 2 had told them to. In most cases, quality circles in western companies petered out within 2 or 3 years.
It is surprising that Rover were having defective crankshafts in the manner depicted as by the time this film was made, they had been building the Buick alloy V8 for about 20 years. Definitely not a good look. Looks like they ran the machinery purchased from GM into the ground and didn't have a replacement schedule.
Amusing to hear it described as "not a volume production engine". I suppose by the parent company's standards that would be right.
There was a lot of porous blocks around 1999/ 2000
The only high volume V8 in England,, an obsolete Buick! They really did NOT have the power required and were too expensive to make. The cast iron V6 version was around for decades though by the 80s made ok power. Harsh rattly thing however.
Big trip down memory lane for me! After leaving college in the mid 70s I worked for a small company on the capstans then round the corner to a big volume manufacturing plant as a Patrol Inspector. What an adventure that was. I discovered parts were being signed off as checked when the gauge to be used was in the stores and had been for years! Other sections were using a gauge incorrectly so any part - good or bad - was passed as good. Another chap on centreless grinding was using a Mercer air gauge with the needle way outside the tolerance markers - he hadn't been shown how to use the gauge. I left then was back twenty years later when it was all ISO9000 and paperwork, tons of paperwork. I got sent on an 8D Investigation course at Ford/Getrag at Halewood. I solved many problems at Halewood. Nowadays I'm making spare parts for Matchless and BSA motorcycles still using the QC I learned all those years ago. PS Good to see the geography teacher and others from 'Please Sir', and Chief Inspector Japp was in there too. Great film, thanks for showing.
DON'T PREACH TO US.
LIFE IS GOOD, BAD AND INTERMEDIATE
WHEN PEOPLE ONLY ALLOW GOOD COMENTS
THEY ARE MANIPULATING THE PUBLIC..
ALL COMMENTS ARE VALID.
IF YOU
CANNOT COPE WITH NEGATIVE COMMENTS
YOU ARE THE PROBLEM
Still love this engines,just thinking of my rover vitesse 3,5 liter. Best car I' ve had. Part of my youth. 😊
MACHINERY WAS WORN OUT WHEN BUICK SOLD IT TO LEYLAND
AN ENGINE CAN HAVE LOOSE LINERS AND EXTRA TGHT LINERS
AND LINERS TOO LOW AND LINERS TOO HIGH ON SAME ENGINE
MANY AMAZING DESIGNS WERE RUINED BY POOR QUALTY CONTROL IN ANUFACCTURE
AS DONG IT PROPERLY WOULD MAKE NO PROFIT
CITROEN DS
RANGE ROVER MK1
E-TYPE
STAG
MINI
How's the quality control going in your shop with cleanliness , hope you got something out of this video.
Kit the foreman from down under
That wasn’t a cheap movie, all top line actors 😉🇬🇧 thanks for sharing 👍🏻
Worn rocker shafts and rockers were a frequent problem on these.
Here's a longer version of the Leyland Group Quality video, produced by the CTV Workshop in 1976. Intended for viewing by company employees only :D ua-cam.com/video/w9FQbR4TaDo/v-deo.html
Quality control? British Leyland never discovered such a thing.🤣😂
Rover V8; Still my favorite engine after 50 years of working as a mechanic!
Cheap horse power, and lighter than a pinto.
@@gothicpagan.666 _"lighter than a pinto."_
That's not much of a flex, they weighed about the same as the Titanic 🤣An LS1 is also lighter than a Pintosaurus, and make really good power.
@@ferrumignis A pinto would make a good anchor.
On injection it's the Best sounding v8 imo
They should have replaced the unreliable Jaguar V12 with an overbored Rover V8
Where the heck did you dig this up? BRILLIANT. You should have included the credits. Got my brother researching names to faces. Lots of Northern 70's-80's characters in there. Very informative. That's how things were, and probably how things should be.
Another Shrigley spectacular. Many thanks, Ant. 🙂
Elizabeth Sladen, Brian Croucher, Tony Doyle 3 that immediately spring to mind.
@@markstott6091 Well done. What was Elizabeth Sladen in. Was she the one playing the secretary??? And thanks for replying. :)
Some good actors from that time.
NO...
NICEY NICEY
IS CENSORSHIP CENSORSHIP
AFTER WINNG WW2
BRITAIN GOT LAZY
It's a shame we have lost our car manufacturers I was involved in training in the building trade gave me agood feeling when working as team, makes every one feel good in themselves, I enjoyed that video thanks
Most blue collar management would never take advice from shop floor
had a rover 3.5s in the early 80s what a car in its day the performance and sound were amazing the video brought back great memories
Robin Nedwell ?
There are various kinds of quality.
# There is high quality - as in a Rolls-Royce, it is a better car than a Jaguar, but it costs a heck of a lot more. And a Jag is a better car than a Mini - but costs a heck of lot more than a Mini. This kind of quality varies, and should vary, according to market need.
# There is managed quality - designing production processes so that defect rates are minimised - this is what this film is about - minimising factory wastage and shipping products to dealers in ready for use condition.
# There is designed-in quality - a product's engineering, choice of materials, etc, so that the failure rate during the owner's use is acceptable. This what the British car industry,, including Rover, never mastered and never saw it as something they needed to master.
Awesome video, I used to own a V8 SD1!
Interesting video, but they are all actors. Gosh so many actors from the time I can't remember their names. Tony Doyle , Colonel Hadley in Who Dares Wins. Some might say it's an early fake video, scripted. But packed full of actors from Professionals and Sweeney. No one that knows anything about engines though? No workers ever in sight? Maybe be it was a strike day?
It amuses me that you Brits can make fantastic engines but some cars have a terrible reputation
I have a TVR which is Rover based (tweaked of course) and a Lotus Excel which I love
Here in Australia a lot of American engines have taught me that Yanks can't make cars - especially those that can corner!
A lot of this is not quality control, at all. It is simply about the smooth running of a production facility. Something which had already been done, decades earlier, in every continent on Earth except Antarctica.
Parts catching on the guide rails? I think that Henry Ford or Samuel Colt had already figured that one out.
The v8 in the Leyland p38 was a bit more powerful than the 3.5.
I know Leyland originally called them the p76, but I think p38 is far more accurate because they were only half a car
At 4.4 litres it should be....
I thought this was some sort of a joke or a grammar lesson about paradoxes or oxymorons or something having British Leyland and quality control in the same sentence😂
Enjoyed that , thank you .
Where would this film have been shown and for who's benefit? Certainly not the Saturday afternoon matinee at your local cinema!
That was pretty good, the actors were even convincing! The Rover V8 was a great engine, I rebuilt two of mine, though they had no crankshaft wear to speak of, the bores were hardly worn and only needed a hone with new rings and bearings they were good to go for another eighty to a hundred thousand miles one engine needed new valve guides which I farmed out to a local reputable engine machine shop but that was all. The biggest problem was when they enlarged the capacity from 3.5 litre to 3.9 and after around 75-100,00 miles some liners came loose. I had that problem with my last Land Rover Discovery 2 4.0L as they called it. But I used a novel sealant called steel seal or some such thing and it worked, I put 25 k on it before I sold it with no further trouble. As I say a great engine. Don't suppose too many are on the road now because the Discovery 2 was a rot nightmare, due to Land Rover no longer putting underbody sealant on them. Talk about built in obsolescence !
The 4.0/4.6 was a complete rework, it had cross bolted crank caps, bigger crank journals, stiffer casings, different head stud pattern, better oil pump and a lot of other design changes. They made a 4.4L proto based on the original 3.5/3.9 block dimensions and it suffered crank whip and other things under test so redesigned things (I have a unground 4.5 proto crank with leyland part number cast in that escaped leyland proto dept in that leaky british way ;) ) . The blocks were graded for liner thickness on the line and the thicker castings were diverted for 4.6, with the thinner walled ones going to 4.0 because the liner was smaller. They still do suffer with slipped liners though, but now the cure for that is a top hat shaped liner conversion which stops the liner being forced down by combustion pressure if things get a bit loose/too hot. If they had of stayed in production maybe the factory would have come up with similar but it didnt start to manifest in serious numbers until higher mileage to catch in the proving stage.
Interestingly some of the methods they were setting up to solve quality problems are still considered best practice in industry today.
You want us to do what ?
Right then Lads, Everybody out, we're on Strike
Leyland quality control ha there was no such thing they had none they were all CRAP
Looks ok , that’ll do , they won’t notice that , cup of tea mate , time to go home now , it’s only 2 pm , oh sod it , see you in the pub !
When I worked for a Dodge / Chrysler franchise I had to fix no end of problems from the factories, they just pushed vehicles out😮😮
Are you in Australia? In the 1950's Holden (local GM brand) and the Ford Falcon were the volume sellers of locally made cars. In the 1960's they were joined by Çhrysler making the Valiant locally. But Chrysler struggled - they never sold as many as Holden or the Ford Falcon.
It was pretty well known that if you were a Holden dealer, all you had to do was clean the protective wax off, add water and oil, put in a battery, put in some gasoline and make sure the engine started.
If you were a Ford dealer, almost the same, clean off the shipping wax, add water, oil, and gasoline, battery, and start the engine. Customer options such as radios, vinyl roofs were added by dealers.
If you worked for a Chrysler dealer, cars would arrive with things like no steering wheel, because the factory had run short. Or maybe the guy who fits steering wheels was off sick. Or they would be missing radiator hoses or something. Dealers could get a factory rebate of any work done or parts needed, but it was an annoyance.
The worst cars from a dealer's point of view were Fiats. They were fully imported from Italy and arrived with rust. The rust could be bad enough that the car needed surgery at a panel beaters'
Customers are funny - they never accept a brand new car with the no-cost rust option.
08:11 what is he joking, couldn’t hear it
Quality control at Shrigley Garage 😉
MINT, good luck a brands matey.
bloke at 12.23 looks like Fred West
You are working your * it's off, take care of yourself. A tired racer is often not at his best.
Thanks for the vid.
The lugs on the side were the machining datums. In the foundry, the castings critical features, water jacket positions, valley height, etc, were balanced and 3 point locations machined on the lugs. After the blocks were machined, 3 of the lugs were removed. I worked in the foundry and it made us cringe seeing how the machine shop banged them about, moving the datum.
Bobuilt10: That is surprising. Something that all young professional engineers learn is that it should be possible to check all machined dimensions against datums even on the finished product. Without that you can have no quality control and no way of diagnosing process issues.
Usually, the engine rear face and either the bottom machine surface or the top surface (head gasket contact surface) are datum surfaces.
The V8 engine design and all machines and tooling to make it were sold to Rover by GM USA, who also sent people over to set it up and teach Rover how to operate it. This engine was intended for Buick cars, but GM decided not to use it. It has always been reported that GM did that because another division came up with a cast iron "small block" design that was negligibly heavier and the alloy V8 could not match the in-service fault rate and durability of the cast iron small block.
If you are correct, perhaps it is the real reason why GM abandoned it - one of their production engineers seriously effed up.
But I think the real reason for the problems is that by the time this film was made, Rover had been making this engine for most 20 years, and they had just worn out the factory machinery, running it into the ground. That is typically what British firms did.
@@keithammleter3824 If I remember correctly GM had real problems with casting the alloy block, so much so they gave up and went back to iron. A V6 version of the Buick V8, with an iron block, was used up until the late 90's.
@@agt155 What is the source of your claim? It sounds like a myth to me. GM had a lot of experience making large alloy castings for the war effort in World War 2. They were turning out about 125,000 aircraft engines a month at their peak. Including vast numbers of turbocharged alloy V-12 engines for USAAF fighters.
They knew a thing or two about casting aluminium.
If GM couldn't make good alloy blocks consistently, Rover with enormously less experience, would have had no hope and would not have risked it.
The fact that they could make small block cast iron engines weighing negligibly more than the alloy V8 (which is easily verifiable) they sold to Rover would have been a key point.
@@keithammleter3824 The fact GM spent all that time and money developing the aluminium block just to drop it and develop an iron one instead indicates there were big problems. GM blocks were produced from gravity fed steel dies with cast-in liners, Rover blocks were sand cast with pressed in liners - a hint of the problem?
Rover did have extensive experience with aluminium engines, they produced the Meteor version of the Merlin V12 for use in Centurion tanks and also made a V8 version.
The iron block Buick V6 weighs 16Kg more than the Rover V8.
People don't appreciate the incredible power to weight of the Rover V8 - still competitive today.
@@agt155 : You haven't given the source of your claim, so I assume you can't, and we should not trust it.
I think you don't understand how big American companies operate. GM had multiple divisions competing with each other to a certain extent. To the CEO of a company the size of GM, the expenditure of a few tens of millions is no big deal, even in the 1960's. Their total company operating expense was about 8 million dollars per DAY, not counting factories not in the USA. The CEO and his direct reports would have regarded the alloy V8 merely as an experiment that didn't pan out.
Sure Rover had experience. But pretty small compared to GM. Rover made about 9,000 Meteor engines over a 20 year period. That is insignificant compared to the 125,000 large aircraft engines GM made per month in wartime. And how do we know Rover didn't have trouble with it? On a spare no expense low volume military product you can tolerate a high scrap rate. In volume production competing in the retail space you can't.
The weight of the alloy V6 used in Buicks is not relevant as it is a much later engine. It weighs 170 kg installed. The Buick V6 contemporary to the 215 alloy V8 was a cast iron engine. What was relevant to GM at the time was that the alloy V8 (the 215 ie 3.5 litre) weighed 144 kg dry and the competing GM small block cast iron V8 was 184 kg dry. The 40 kg difference did not allow any significant change in car front ends or structure (weight on front wheels > 600 kg, so 6% improvement) and against a total car weight of at least 1200 kg would have meant negligible difference in performance.
loved that - thank you..
Thanks, good video !
..and then came Japan..
One word Boiled 😢😢
15:30 hyuck hyuck hyuck
Don’t be a Bert 😂
1980 my family got an SD1 to sell for someone chocolate brown paint and beige velour and the silencer box rotted off and bald tyres. We used it as a Saturday car blasting it everywhere wheel spinning loved it sounded like a turbine then an apocalyptic racket at 100mph as the door seals popped open. Every time getting in and out door trim and courtesy lights fell out.
I enjoyed that thank you. The process is used in just about all car assembly companies now. The Japanese claim they invented it though.
Not many people can say an engine saved their life, but I genuinely can say this engine did - had a 109 Stage III roll over top of me.
It goes to show that if you want to make an interesting and factual documentary always employ the best actors you can, they make such things far more interesting with no boring monatone voices boring you to death. The licence to build the short block V8 was obtained from Buick and was a well established engine so Rover just needed to keep up quality control which was very much lacking at Rover back in the 70's
Hey up mate super loved watching this so thank you very much it's just a shame what happened to this industry, always thought the old buick should be a goodun as all alloy but grew up with fords first so i guess preferred them, do keep thinking about a rover for my diesel hilux though if only for the V8 sounds. Thanks again
Hard to believe stuff like this needed dealing with, it's all so bloody obvious 😳
Great video ,just goes to show what can be achieved by working together with a common aim ,reminded me of how the MOT VTS Council was formed due to dis-jointed legislation varying testing standards and a very random punishments for any transgressions,it worked really well getting some fairness back into the system, but now its gone , so the MOT test is going to be the new rover V8 assembly NO CIRCLES
Drove many miles in land Rovers with v8 4.0 petrol engine and four speed gearbags. Gas hogs but sounded good.
Thanks for that Andy. That was great. 😊
Can akso say, i had a rover block bored from std to 30 over, done on a 90 fixture, and the bottom of the bores on both banks wouldnt clean up on the cam side. It had been bored at a wonky angle from the factory ❤
I don't comprehend exactly what I just watched, but I like it!
If you see us at a CSCC SS race with Simon, ask me to tell you a BMC QC anecdote - explains a lot about the weird stuff you find!
Enjoyed that....thanks
Let's list the actors;
From Murder on the Orient Express (without the moustache) - Dennis Quilley
From Between the Lines - Tony (baby-face) Doyle
Brian Croucher - Travis from Blake's 7.
Elisabeth Sladen, Sarah Jane Smith from Doctor Who.
Superb and thank you for sharing. cheers
It’s sad really. That was a great idea that if combined with investment in new kit and perhaps buy in from the work force to focus on quality. Rover might still be here today.
Land Rover is still not just here but having record sales globally.
why did they have to redesign the buick v8 cranckshaft and rods?
Because it was for Yankee 55 mph
You have to ask yourself why things got to customers with these problems, and I think that a lot of it was that british attitude when management spoke and the shop floor just listened and knew their place as peons. And a lot of the people saying no in the original situation were probably not wanting to rock the boat becase thats how the status quo was. Ironically it was left to the shop floor to sort out.
Vauxhall's used to operate a similar scheme called the ideas scheme. But it was more about making things cheaper to make than solving quality issues irrc. I always remember being told the biggest payout under the scheme was when a assembly line worker suggested eliminating the drain bung from the rear axle on rwd cars, it eliminated adding a bung, making a bung, and having someone insert the bung saving millions over the production years. The side effect was when the axle needed its oil changing, that draining the diff had to be pulled out instead making it a painful expensive job in comparison to a quick axle oil change. So in effect it pushed the costs (multiplied) onto the customer further down the road... At GM of the period, you could only get recruited for anything except production if you had a degree. It didnt matter what that degree was in, just you had one (to increase paper worth of the company as a metric for investors I believe). So a candidate with a ND in vehicle engineering was rejected and my friend with a art degree got in.
During the early ecotec years, the engine design suffered a flaw where a cambelt tensioner failed which lost the belt and destroyed the engine, Vauxhall ran out of replacement engines and the cars were sitting round in dealers for months or years waiting for warantee repairs and it nearly destroyed the affected models sales. The dirty shame of that incident is engineering knew about the problem tensioner, and recommended to replace them all on a recall, but upper management veto'd this under costs & decided to save money by targeting only a very narrow date of engine production.
Whatever happened to the british motor(& motorcycle) industry? white collar management, with arts or humanities degrees. That's what happened...
great lump this
🏁🏁🏁🏁🏁
Oooh, a video on the quality control of the Rover V8? This should be a short one ;)
What experiences of poor quality control have you experienced?
My late production TR-8 had over 100,000 miles on it before I pulled the engine....the 3.5 is solid...but the rest of the car looks like it was built by drug addicts
That was very very cool 😎