Thought i'd show you guys these pics, taken today of a rover 75

with headgasket failure, the mechanic is a mate of mine and had

this car in for the said job, he was utterley gobsmacked at the state

of it. The owner reckons it had only just started to show any signs

of gasket failure! (He's lying!).

He reckons this is just one of the reasons rover went under, using

cheap crappy parts like this headgasket, from a buisness point of

view he loves rovers, they keep him busy. But as a every day car

he wouldn't have one if he was given it, but saying that, he reckons he

might end up being given this one!

 

Cheap headgasket....

 

Is it coolant, or is it a sick bucket?

 

All this damage due to a crap gasket! Note the oil around the liners, there

should be coolant there, also the liners had moved due to the heat and

damaged the head!

 

And to make things worse, this is the customers 3rd rover, similar

things have happened to the others too, you'd of thought he'd of

learnt by now......buy japanese!

Christ, Rover still made cars which ate headgaskets for a living, right up until the very end.

 

That a metal HG?

Yep was a metal gasket, but it was the orangey 'dribble' that

did the sealing, just melted! :headvswal

Yep was a metal gasket, but it was the orangey 'dribble' that

did the sealing, just melted! :headvswal

What about the rads?-all the fins used to fall out,leaving just rows of cooling tubes!-utter pap! :o

Rovers due tend to be prone to that LOL

i had a rover sterling payed £250 smoked it around for done fook all to it never let me down and to be honest it was a nice smooth comfortable ride

Our lass has an MGTF 135 (i know but she like's it :headvswal )The head gasket went while i was driving about 30 mph.No smoke no drama just lost power for 5 seconds then ok. 15 seconds later cut out. :confused: Opened the bonnet no water :confused: Checked the dipstick umm!Creamy.Had head skimmed new gasket and had no more probs :D Thing is it only had 20 thou on the clock :wack:

I used to have an MGF. All K-Series suffer in a similar way.... However, there is a solution. The KV6 also suffers in a similar way.

 

Check out my website - read it carefully and when you understand Rover's mistake it's easy to rectify... The output from my dataloggers shows the solution works.

 

www.mgfmavhh.ukf.net

 

Dave

i had a rover sterling payed £250 smoked it around for done fook all to it never let me down and to be honest it was a nice smooth comfortable ride

 

Probably had the earlier 0-series engine in it then. Far more robust engine.

Just read the posts above... There's nothing wrong with the parts (including the HG) - it's purely a design cock up. The K-Series was developed in 1.1L format for use in the Metro. The profile of such a car demands a fast heat up time - so they blindly put the thermostat on the wrong side of the cooling circuit - means the engine gets to operating temp quicker (better economy stats etc helps small car sales).

 

However, in that layout, you are effectively regulating the temp of the rad, rather than the temp of the engine... Not such a problem with a fwd mounted small low power engine - Metro's suffer very few HGF's relative to the other cars.

 

The 1.4, 1.8 and 2.5V6 used in the larger cars carried this 'wrong' thermostat location into the design - but now heat up faster and require much better cooling due to increased power output... The rear engine cars really suffer the worst because of the large cold coolant capacity of the pipe work to the rad... read the website for a proper explanation.

 

Classic support of this theory is the very low HGF failure rate of the MGF Cup Car - tuned engines and thrashed about... very few failures... why? because the thermostat is removed for the race spec engines to allow better cooling at the expense of warm up times.

 

Dave

Or get the BMW diesal versions? :D

O-Series was only fitted in VERY early sterlings - it was carbuerreted rather than injected - so was really only fitted for less than a year at the start of prod. btw - the O-Series is a superb torquey engine, love it in my MG Maestro (awaiting abuse...)

 

The sterling/800 range used the M-Series 2.0 16V DOHC engine, which was then replaced by the T-Series 2.0 16v DOHC with optional Garret T3. The pre '97 V6 sterlings used the Honda Legend 24v V6 (lovely engine) and then post '97 the Rover KV6... yuk! bring on the HGF.