I will write a little about my early motoring years.A 1939 Ford prefect was my first car in '56, I was earning about £5.00 per week, giving £2.50 to my mother, £1.50 hire purchase on the car, leaving the grand sum of one pound per week to run it - including petrol, so if anything went wrong I had to fix it myself, there started nearly a lifetime of car maintenance.
In '59 I did my first diesel conversion, Perkins were at the time making a whole range of kits to fit the 4/99 engine in a whole range of cars, Ford Consul and Zephyr, Austin Cambridge, Morris Oxford, Vauxhall Wyvern, Velox and Cresta to name but a few, the kits were comprehensive and used your existing gearbox, cooling and exhaust systems. The car I fitted mine to was an E model Velox of '56 vintage and had mechanically driven wipers, there was even a drive from the camshaft for those!
This engine had an output of 43 bhp, I know this sounds puny but the 2.2 litre straight six originally fitted only produced 60.5 bhp, it was though to say the least underpowered and over geared, a great deal of clutch slipping was required to pull away on the gentlest of slopes, the performance may have been embarrasing but the economy was amazing. The whole kit cost over £200.00 a great deal of money in those days but as the TV trade was in its infacy and engineers in great demand - it paid well, in fact the few teenagers that owned a car in those days were likely to be TV engineers.
I have done a whole string of conversions since then, mainly using the later and slightly more powerful 4/108 engine which I fitted in vehicles ranging from a Vauxhall Viva to a granada estate.
The main problem with the early manufactured diesel cars was noise, apart from the fact that the engines themselves were noisey and in car insulation had hardly been invented then, because of the relativly low power output they had to be very low geared, so you were doing about 60 mph at the maximum revs of 4000, ear defenders should have been part of the standard equipment.
I was driving down the motorway one day with my engine screaming when I was passed by a lorry that seemed to be purring along, I got to thinking about this, how could a vehicle with an even worse power to weight ratio than mine be so unstressed?
Gearing, was of course the answer, they had such a large selection that under low load conditions the engine could be turning much more slowly, this lead me to my 'standard' conversion for the rest of my cars.
I would buy a scrap Bedford van, specifically because the bell housing would accept a vauxhall overdrive gearbox, I rumaged at the breakers for old Ventora's, VX 490s and anything else that used the o/d box, I modified the inhibiter circuit so that I could get overdrive on all four gears but not in reverse, as its very bad for them
. The petrol vehicles I was converting usually had a much larger petrol engine and therefore taller gearing, this was all working out very well until I put it to the test, the Vauxhall boxes having come from what was regarded then as a sprightly vehicle had gear ratios that were much to close, making 1st far to high to pull away with dignity, the answer was lying in my scrap Bedfords - the comercial wide ratio gearbox.I set about dismantling both boxes and transferring the gear set to the overdrive box, I now had a low enough gear to pull away but large spaces between the ratios, these were neatly filled in by switching in the overdrive, the switch for which was conveniently located on the top of the gearstick, so changes were relatively seamless.
So there you are, I ran these modified vehicles for about 25 years, if you want to know why I stopped converting them, just ask, but I expect you have already had more than you can stomach.
Peter
I had a Consul once: 1.7 litres of raw petrol power...