[OMC-Boats] Buick V8 performance

Justin,

Your questions about improving your Buick V8 really peaked my interest...

first up, my .02 cents on your idle issue....part 1, there is no replacement for a good thorough tune up, including adjusting your carb (idle mixture with a vacuum guage, preferably), timing, dwell, gaps ALL at the same time. adjusting the timing is too EASY and IMHO has a huge impact on my buicks performance....part 2, if you were idling a lot, were you running your blower? It recently came up about positive crankcase ventilation, well in my experience, if you are idling alot, you are not getting a bunch of fresh air into your engine compartment and all of the blow by gasses built up in you valve covers are getting dumped back into your carb, less O2= rough idle, try getting some fresh air in there (i've been known to open my engine compartment if I'm gonna be puttering around for a long time)...part 3, you also mentioned your were getting tossed around a bit, is it possible that your carb was spending a bit too much time off camber? so the float bowls are not filling properly and the fuel may be sloshing out of past the venturies, It is my understanding that "off cambler carbs" are a common issue amongst 4x4 community thus making fuel injection so popular with the off roaders....

I also looked around at some performance blogs to see if there is anything you can do with a buick 300 or 340...the buick is a close relative to the Rover 215 so it looks like you can get a bunch of performance parts from England, start looking around at Land Rover performance forums. I ran across this forum for buicks that pointed me to this idea...

http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52371

in this post is a company that is offering performance parts for the 300 (well mostly the 215 but interchangable parts)

http://www.aluminumv8.com/

also in the jalopy journal post...

"The front engine cover is shared on the 215, 300 & 340. I believe, but i am not 100% positive, that the intakes are interchangeable, but the heads between the 340 & 300 can be swapped, but not to the 215. The cranks are different between all 3..."

So what if you put a rover Intake with a 4bbl, keeping your bottom end and throwing on a home brew set of ported and polished 340 heads? wonder if you could get a nice cam from the Rover community?....lots of possibilities that you could put on slowly as time and budget allowed, rather than diving directly into a full blown engine swap... will take a little more research and some imagination, but since you already have a good mechanical backround, seems like something you could do....just throwing an option out there.

As a matter of fact I happened to be wandering around my local NAPA auto parts store this week-end and saw a carb spacer/adapter for "most 2bbl to most 4bbl" was 19 bucks and could (conceivably) allow you to bolt on a 4bbl carb without having to swap out the manifold, then if you like that, ge the manifold later. I slowly worked on my sportsman in that fashion for years, bit by bit, small projects....

Cheers,
B.C.