Fast Marina Magazine

Mine has a low number
18vf h62** thats all that is on the plate, but has what looks like 464 stamped into as opposed outwards on the plate below the engine number? The body number in the 49000's on the scuttle and the chassis in the 85000's MOWOG cast into the head inside the rockerbox.

T

I have an Ital engine with a number beginning 12V966EL. Any ideas as to the spec of the 966? Thanks.

I'm afraid my Ital records only go up to 12V 941AA


Chris

My engine number for the Jubilee TC is 18V FH26589 with 486 below I think (Pictures a bit out of focus)
Does this mean mine has an older engine than Tonys Car? His is an older car!

As far as I know the sequential part of the engine number is the last bit, so your engine number is 26589 and Tony's is just below 6300. There are differences though, there is more than one prefix. I have seen 18V EH and 18V FH, I'm not sure what the difference is. It certainly isn't age as the prefix can vary from one car to the next. FH numbers seem to be less common, I am basing this purely on my old M reg coupe, which was built around the same time as your Jubilee but the number was 18VEH103745. 103745+26589= 130334. 130334 would probably be about right for the number of 1.8s built by the time your Jubilee was put together, after all you know how many Marinas had been built by that point from your chassis number. If we hazard a guess that they were roughly half 1.8s and half 1.3s then the figure we got from adding the two engine numbers together fits well!

Josh I have been trying my anorak on again and looking at the code structure shown in the parts catalogue. I think that the 'F' indicates that the crankcase ventilation is via the twin carbs. The 'H' indicates high compression. By comparison I think that the 'E' indicates crankcase ventilation via the single carb on a Super or Super Delux.

I think that this means we can identify TC engines by their FH engine code, whatever car they happen to be in.




Chris

Funnily enough I had a similar thought this morning. Just checked my records and the majority of TCs have FH engine numbers so it appears you are right. There are a few EH numbers in there so they could be fake TCs or TCs which have been fitted with engines from other cars.

Now this is interesting, because I have details of a few very late TCs. From the chassis number we can't work out how many TCs were made but from engine numbers we might be able too. The latest TC I have details of is KEU444P, the Cosmic TC saloon Martin Wallis and I dragged out of a garage in Norwich, it now lives with Dave Richardson. The engine number on that one is 41383. It was made very close to the end of MK1 production so it's unlikely many more were made. The latest EH numbers were around the 183,000 mark. The latest 12VEH (1.3) numbers come in at just over 300,000. Low compression and high compression numbers appear to be sequential.

So adding all those numbers together gives us nearly 525,000 MK1s produced. The very latest MK1 chassis number I have is 525*** so the figures seem to add up well! I knew TCs didn't sell very well but it's crazy to thing there were less than 50,000 of them!