I've been after a bigger motor for a while now, I couldn't justify the cost of a brand new build as what I was looking for would cost around £7k, and I only do 2-3000 miles a year. I scoured various forums and Facebook pages for just over a year, and enquired about around 20 engines, but they all had something that ruled them out: no holes for the EB engine bar, built by the owner themselves, unverified mileage, etc. The most important thing for me is reliability, so I didn't want anything too extreme, but a nice torquey bus motor, with low miles built by someone reputable. A friend had a turn-key motor built by Stefan Rossi at ACE and having driven this for an hour I was very impressed. A low mileage motor (less than 400 miles) came up on eBay and was everything I was looking for, a few messages later and it was mine. It's a 1904 stroker, built by Stefan Rossi for a guys bus, but the PO only did 500 miles last year so decided to cash it in and go back to stock, using the money to finish his bus off (hyros, huge tubs? Etc).
Here it is being built....
I binned the VS exhaust as they tend to strangle the engine, and put my stainless 4-1 with single quite pack on. Here it is going in...
And up and running...
Having only done less than 400 miles I took it to the rolling road to get it set up properly, Andy at BD Engineering really knows his stuff and said it was a bit early really as it needs to bed-in properly and loosen up a bit, but I didn't want it running lean.
He spent over an hour setting it up properly and took it easy on the power runs, going up to just over 4000rpm, but we got over 100bhp with a slipping clutch and big hole in the heat exchanger. Stef Rossi reckons its good for 120bhp once it's run-in and tuned again, and having replaced the dodgy heat exchanger I can feel a big difference already.
So, after all the messing around, I finally have just what I was after. I didn't want to have my existing motor opened up as the plan was always to sell this to recoup some wedge. I sold the old engine earlier this week for £1750, and having paid just £3500 for the new one, I have managed to get a pretty-much brand new stroker motor, built by one of the best in the business, for just £1750. It's transformed the bus, so much better to drive now, and pulls like a train.
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