Tornado Seeks New Home!
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?
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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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.