Leyland P76 Owners 2011

Technical - Engine

E6 Engine Problems


Greeting fellow P76 and Marina owner,
Being an owner of a Super Six P76 I have been having some really consuming times with my E6 engine.
The couple of car motors I have had seem to have the same problems with the values receding into the head and blow across between the pots with the gaskets failing. I have not taken much interest in the rings at this time.
My first attempt at fixing this problem was to send away a head to be done up to take the lead free petrol, which when the head came back I put it on the original motor only to find that this did not fix the problem. So in desperation this time last year I went to the club and bought a E6 motor that was laying around for the past years (10 or more) cleaned the cob webs out and hornet nests was able to started it and then fitted it to the car. This allowed me to go to the Nationals at Newcastle and other outings for a year.
The motor had not been touched so I am assuming that the engine was original.
Over the last couple of months the engine was starting to have that oily smell and idling was terrible and no power, so I thought I look into it.
Doing the compression test on cylinder 5 it indicated 120 psi but when you pulled off the spark plug lead it had no effect on the engine. By removing the other leads they seem to affect the running of the motor
Lifting the cam cover and using a set of feeler gauges I found that the 10 thou slipped between the cam and the valve cap of most of the cylinder except the 5th inlet the 3rd inlet and a 4 thou slipped under the cam of inlet cylinder 1.

Original motor from the club

This motor had










Original engine which had recondition head installed.






As you can see from the photos you don’t have much area between the cylinders and the remarks from Jason and Mark are very interesting.
Facebook
“This is a real problem with the "E" series engine.
To make the engine block short for an eastwest application, the designers went for siamesed bores... the cylinders are joined in the middle. sort of like a figure eight. This made for a very small amount of material between cylinders. Any sort of detonation (pinging), will blow the head gasket.
With the demise of Leaded petrol, one must now use 98 octane fuel & a sensible amount of timing advance to stop this happening. In regard to the oil consumption, if you were to pop the pistons out, there is a good chance that the top piston rings will be broken.
Another sure sign of detonation.”
Mark also commented on compression swap due to head gasket failure
Now the question is are the “new Gaskets” the problem and do they need to have more tension supplied and do I need to put some addition sealant between them?
What do you say?

Last updated
April, 2011
This web site may contain Copyright material
If you find any problems with the site, please email the Web Editor