History V8-60 History...Give it up!

More meat in a Simca 60 block. You can bore them 1/8 over and still have good wall thickness. If you offset grind a 40 crank to 39 rod journal dia, you'll get a 1/8 stroker. Drop it in a 1/8 over Simca block and you'll have a 150 cu. in. 60. We had one in one of our midgets. The french castings are harder too. Took a lot of sawzall blades to cut the bell housing off for a motor plate.

 

Excuse me ,but theres no way a 1940 regular flathead crank ,will fit into a v8 60 or a simca block !its like trying to fit a bbc crank into a sbc ,aint gonna fit no matter how you grind it .Another thing about Simca v8s is they are factory relieved on the inlet valve only ,and they have a baffle cast into the top inside area of the centre port to stop the much maligned cross flowing ,they are rated slightly higher HP at around 85 .The crank ,rods ,pistons ,manifolds and heads are interchangable with v8 60s.

 

I posted some factory HP curve info on here recently...the 60 actually was MORE than a 60 by that curve...HP was still rising sharply where the factory cut off the graph!
There were at least 3 utterly different versions requiring many different parts...the very early 4 bearing, no chance of finding one on this continent. Only one I saw was in a French junkyard 35 years ago...
the '37-9, and the '40...enough different pieces to drive anybody crazy, and of course all are hard to find.

 

As noted somewhere else on the HAMB also a Ford Tractor starter will fit but the positive terminal will come close to the pan or block

 

If anyone out there has a NICE pair of the elusive v8-60 wheels....

please pm me...

I got the cake....heavy axles...32 junk...whatever....hit me up

 

Speaking of 'blown', I've BLOWN-UP at least 3, V8-60's in a boat I had back in 1959. It was a 12-foot racing inboard called a "Crackerbox". It would hit waves which would cause it to bounce and the propeller to come out of the water at full-throttle, full-RPM, and when it would go back into the water the crankshaft would sometimes break!

I bought one complete, full-race V8-60 engine from a guy who ran it in a midget and on alcohol. He threw-in 3, 5-gallon cans of alcohol with the deal. We went water skiing the following weekend....on alcohol!

Parts started getting a little hard to find so we later but a USRE (Universal Street Rod Engine...sbc) in it.

327 Chevy in a 12-foot boat was a little scary!!!!

JG

 

I think what Dean was saying is the 1940 V8 60 crank (which had different rods than the 39 and earlier), being offset ground to 39 specs is how you get the stroker. Not using a regular flathead crank.

 

Pic of V8-60 in 31 Cpe

 

Honest Charlie is selling new motor cycles using V8/60s with no tranny, just a clutch and an angle drive for the belt to the wheel. Sounded sweet, saw them at Hershey, a couple yrs sgo. Iceman

 

Hi Can anyone direct me to engine parts for the French made (Simca) version of the V8 60hp flathead?
Rings bearings Distributor etc. I have a book coming but at this stage unsure of interchanagability (if any) of parts with the 37 to 40 Ford
Steve

 

I was at a fire dept function yesterday ( posen illinois) and they had a small sized little 38 ford light duty hose wagon / pumper which had a 49-53 flathead in it. they claimed it was origionally an inline 6 that blew up and got replaced. I told them it had to be the v-8 60, and explained that motor to them. would ford of put that small motor in a comercial firefighting application like this also???

 

Bruce ,on that 4 bearing motor you saw many years ago ,how was the extra bearing placed ? We run a 5 main motor that uses a special girdle and the extra two mains are chopped out of the big counterweights , but four ??? curiouser and curiouser

 

They looked evenly spaced...probably the end pairs were outside the 2 and 3 bearings, center 4 cylinders between them.
exhausts (2 per side!) would have been between first pair and last pair on each side, intakes thus were spaced out and not paired. This engine also used an electric fuel pump from what few glimmers of info I have found. It was late 1935/early '36 or so, VERY low production before replaced by the version we got in 1937. I think spread from England Ford. The "real" version carried 1935 prefix...54...so change was very early.
As I said, when I saw the bare block it was DISTURBING. It was clearly a Ford 60...but everything was wrong! I never saw one even in England, and had NO information to explain what I had seen. Sorta like seeing an elephant fly by on your way home from work...would you tell anyone?
Anyway, I have since seen a few inadequate bits of info. There were a couple of the gaskets and a tiny amount of info in the "V8 Times" maybe 10 years ago. I have a bunch of Ford England parts books, which ignore the thing entirely. Just enough info to make me believe my own eyes.

 

Hi I got all my parts and rebuilt the 1958 V8-60 Flathead
I would really like to convert it to full flow oil system. The oil system is quite a bit differnet from the bigger flathead
Does anyone have a diagram with oilf flows or seen this done

 

back around 1960 I had a V-8-60 that was the first engine swap into my 28 chev 3 win. I remember a few things about it. We used a 39 lincoln (?) 3 spd top loader that we got some other parts for to make it open driveline. I thought it was odd that the block was dry sleeved.We got a new set of sleeves from a place called "FORD PARTS OBSOLETE". They had the gaskets,waterpumps and I believe an oil pump. My dad and I put it together,he was a T&D maker and made a fixture to pull the sleeves in. It really looked cute in that 28 chev engine bay,but was a bit of a dissapointment in the performance dept! After all.it was only about 20 hp more than the 4 it replaced!I ran it for a couple months untill I saved enough $ to buy a 265 core from a yard. We rebuilt that, used an honest charley adapter to the ef trans and then I was hot spit! I was a junior in HS at the time. A friend of a friend raced midgets and we gave it to them,dont know what ever happened after that,so thats all I know about my infaymous V-8-60 !

 

Seems as though this post went unanswered.

Forgetting the aforementioned 4 main bearing engine which I am totally ignorant, of here's the deal with "casting" information as requested.

The earliest blocks in the 1935 models were "tin sided" meaning tin covers were brazed to the block casting to form the outside wall of the block. Possibly to maximize the water jacket and or to minimize the weight.

This block I believe continued into 1936 until the full cast iron block replaced it.

Both of these engines had an oil filler tube that appeared to go down to the top of the built in bell housing. There was no oil filler through the intake manifold into the valve lifter galley.

In 1940, the block was changd and the oil filler was through the intake manifold. While the bore and stroke was the same, the crankshaft had .100" bigger diameter main journals and rod journals and thus the rods were diferent as well. Main and rod journals of a '40 crank can be ground .100 u/s to utilize standard rod and main bearing inserts of the early engine which are readily available. Obviously the early rods must be utilized and attention paid to the diference in the length of the nose of the crankshaft. 1940 was of course, the last year for the V8-60.

So, basically three styles of blocks, easily visually identified.