Tornado Seeks New Home!
January 24th, 2011 8:00 AM
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American-made overhead-cam engines were almost as rare as reliable South Vietnamese presidents in the mid-1960s, so I did a doubletake when I spotted one in a Denver self-service wrecking yard.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t a Tempest with a Sprint OHC Six, but running across an old Jeep pickup with a Tornado six still made my day.
The Tornado was only used in American-market vehicles for a few years, but IKA of Argentina kept building Tornadoes for the AMC Rogue-based, Pininfarina-restyled Renault Torino until 1982.
Clearly, this engine belongs in some sort of evil-looking rat rod— preferably a member of the proto-AMC family— but what kind? A rusted-to-hell ’25 Nash Ajax, perhaps?
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If nobody has bought that engine by the next time I visit that yard, I'm going to buy the Tornado valve cover to hang on the wall.
+1 on the plastic cover comments. It's an easy way to cover up slop. I had a Nissan Frontier with the VG33 engine. It looked like someone tossed in a taped-up harness and slammed the hood. The bastardization of the VG from a DOHC to a SOHC truck engine was bad enough. The lack of a decent mass produced small displacement OHC engine by GM (until the development of the Ecotec) was laughable. The Chevy Cavalier pushrod 4 mated to a three speed automatic was a sharp contrast to the OHC engines and 4-speed automatics available offshore.