Getting the engine rebuild took about three months. One of the reasons for this was that I had some problems getting pistons. Pistons were available here in New zealand but I was not prepared to pay $700 for a set of four. After some searching on the internet I found a company in Australia which still had some in stock. They were not exactly what I was looking for but they were a lot cheaper and beggars can't be chosers so I bought them. What I ended up with were a set of pistons to suit a Fiat 124 Coupe. These are domed. Obviously these early Fiats must have had a different head (meaning different combustion chamber design) to keep the compression ratio to an acceptable level with these pistons. The original pistons fitted to the Fiat 132 engine which I have were flat top pistons giving a compression ratio of 8.9:1 . Fitted with the domed pistons the compression ratio would have been nearly high enough to run the engine on diesel fuel. So it was up to my engine reconditioner to try and lower the compression ratio by machining the pistons and/or cylinderhead. In the end all that was required was removing some material from the pistons only. I now have a compression ratio of around 10.5:1 . I wanted to keep the compression ratio as high as possible with 96 octane fuel without causing detonation problems. This should help the efficiency of the engine thereby giving me slightly more power as well as better fuel economy.
Whilst all the machining was done by the professionals the actual engine building is a job I enjoy undertaking myself. Below is a series of photographs taken during the building process. All these pictures can be enlarged by clicking on them.
I think Fiat Twin Cams are almost the nicest looking engine amongst all Twin Cams with only the Alfa Romeo Twin Cam looking cleaner and simpler. This is one area in engine design were the Japs have a long way to go to catch up with the Italians. The other area is exhaust note. There is no mistaking an Italian Twin Cam from a Japanese one. The Italian Twin Cams sound just right, they make you want to drive with the windows open just to hear that wonderful exhaust note.
