>After reading yet another recent issue of "Thoroughbred and Classic Cars"
>(I think) I learnt that Japan were actually building Austins at home after
>the Second World War (I have a vague recollection of seeing a picture of
>an Austin A40 Somerset in the article -- could be wrong though). If memory
>serves me correctly (rarely!) the Japanese Austins were sold as Nissans.
>Anyone else read that article?
Not this one, but I've read others. For one thing, the Nissan Motor
Company had licensed a number of designs from the Austin Motor Company.
When they began exporting these vehicles, they wanted to give them a
non-Japanese-sounding name, so they chose Datsun as a sort of crypto-
anagram for Austin. Then in 1980, when "cheap Japanese imitation" had
left the world's vocabulary, they changed the company's name back to
Nissan because it sounded more Japanese.
The Datsun cam does in fact fit in an MGB engine -- Andy's got one in
his race motor. Specifically, there are two improvements: the cam lobes
are ground on a larger base circle, and the distributor drive gear is
stronger on the cam than on the distributor drive shaft. The advantages
here are that you can get a greater amount of lift out of a regrind on a
Datsun core cam because there's more metal, meaning that if you grind to
an MG base circle you end up with more lift between base circle and nose.
To get the same lift on an MG cam you'd have to grind away too much of
the metal and you'd end up with a weak cam. As for the distributor drive,
the main advantage there is that on the Datsun cam, the driveshaft wears
out before the camshaft gear, and you can lift it out and drop it in
with little effort or expense. On the BMC cam, the cam gear wears out
first, so you get to disassemble the engine to replace it.
Now if you can fit a 240Z engine into an MGC, you'd really have something...
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