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MG MGF Technical - F and TF VVC head differences

Following on from previous threads, at last weeks Curborough sprint I had a chat with a chat with Steve Wood formerly of MGR who was in charge of the tuning up of the K series from the version in the F to the version in the TF. He said the increase in power was entirely due to better breathing, exhaust and ecu remapping. The head was identical. He thought that some of the development cars may have had worked on heads but that Powertrain at the time when the Trophy came out was still in BMW ownership and that they did not want to retool without being paid a lot and as such the heads remained the same. Steve, if you read this I hope I've paraphrased it right!
marc h

So the Trophy heads weren't all hand fettled then? Hmm. Interesting. Knew about the gains from the better inlet & exhaust flow, but didn't know there was a different ECU map for the 160 version.

My original Trophy showed 172bhp on the Emerald rolling road, and negligible gain from most of the induction kits we tried, so it looks like they did a good job with the Trophy airbox.
Mike Hankin

sorry wasnt being clear - the TF heads are the same as the F heads and the remap was on the TF. Dont know what they did on the Trophy. As it was a small production run maybe all the Trophy heads were fettled and maybe it was a Trophy head that Rob and Dave Andrews were looking at when they noticed the poor mans porting that Rob mentions on his web site.
marc h

Marc,

Trophy was launched in 2001 - after the Phoenix consortium took over Longbridge from BMW, and Rover Group became MG Rover.

Steve's comments are very interesting, but confusing. Dave Andrews has seen a number of these 160 heads now, and they're all the same. Machined around the valve pockets.

Two pieces of evidence appears to contradict one another. We need to get this story sorted!

Do we have contact details for Steve Marc?
Rob Bell

Sadly not but any of the guys in the midlands centre should know him. incidentally Roy at Techspeed had the top of several TF heads and saw no difference with the F head. Clearly we need to get the story straight! Any volunteers let us take their heads off?
marc h

i understand the only change is the valves are slighly bigger.
r.f.j. griffiths

The valve sizes are the same.. I have seen over 150 VVC heads and around one thrid of these have been '160' heads. The '160' heads have extra machining around the valve seat inserts to reduce shrouding of the valves, the throats also have an extra operation to help align the seat insert with the valve throat. This was confirmed to me by the man who ran the head production lines within Rover. I have some photos around somewhere, you have to look carefully at the head to see the difference, with an old head alongside it's easy to spot, but in isolation it's not, the devil is in the detail. AFAIK *no* factory Trophy heads were hand fettled.

Dave
Dave Andrews

Thank you Dave for that illumination, my brain was beginning to hurt...
Mike Hankin

well thats good enough for me! just need to find one now!
marc h

This thread was discussed between 10/08/2006 and 15/08/2006

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