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20v motor in an RWD

rogerthechorister said:
I don't understand why the 5-pots seem less fragile than the 6-pots - open to ideas.
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Uh, because they aren't. What kind of internet fantasy lore is that?


Anyways, redblock 16v heads have bigger valves and flow a little more out of the box. The white has more valves. You can do all the math, but in my opinion, it's roughly a wash if they both have a basic port and otherwise stock hardware with an early whiteblock head.

The whiteblock valvetrain is good for higher rpm out of the box though, especially the late head with solid lifters and 6mm valve stems. The late whiteblock head is flat out more modern. Lighter weight, solid lifters, smaller vale stems. These things do amount to a leaner, more efficient package in my personal opinion. Enough to mean much on a 500hp build? Eh maybe maybe not, but every bit helps.

A good setup is usually where a lot of little things were done right that seem insignificant on their own combine (regardless of the platform). Sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.


That said, my personal opinion is that 100whp per cylinder is plying with fire on stock liners, so unless you sleeve it, a 16v redblock has more power potential.

In terms of pure valve area though the whiteblock has more potential but you need a worked head and sleeved block. Way out of the league of most folks' project/budget levels around these parts.


Finally though-

The 6 rapes them both and is less work than the 5. I don't get why people don't do it.

How many people here have cracked 500whp? Only a few - the absolute hottest 16v setups, and a couple very modded 8v's, and I'm not sure if any of them made those numbers on pump.

My 6 was banging out 540whp on pump at 22psi on a relatively small turbo with nothing done to the bottom end except h beams. Stock 1st OS 850T5 pistons. Yeah, super fragile, dude. There is something to be said for more displacement, more valves, and spreading all of that force and heat over an extra pair of cylinders.



In the end though, as I alluded to earlier- no matter what motor gets used, it's ultimately the setup that is generally well sorted and well tuned that makes impressive numbers. People buy real nice hardware and/or underachieve and/or blow their **** up, and people have cobbled setups that rape because they happened to find a combination of parts that work well together.
 
UK experience

Well, in UK experience terms, there was a spate of people melting the 5 pots - possibly due to a rogue garage that did brain dead chipping with the mixture getting too lean - yes there was, I was involved in some of the resulting row about the law of defamation - but apart from that reports of exploding 5 pots are VERY rare. Contrariwise everyone is petrified of getting a 6-pot whiteblock as even the N/A ones are reported to eat head gaskets and crack blocks - and that is standard at 182 bhp or 204 bhp. AFAIK the 6 pot went down to 2.5 litres from 3 litres to give more cylinder separation to reduce H/G failures (although, tbf, the same is said for why the 2.3 redblocks went LPT while the 2 litres stayed HPT).

You can call it "internet lore" - I call it "reading". That seems to be the evidence.
 
rogerthechorister said:
...
You can call it "internet lore" - I call it "reading". That seems to be the evidence.
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Do you believe everything that you read?
Rather than repeating something you read, perpetuating the cycle of misinforming future readers, you ought to have a closer look at Ken's results then compare them with written accounts of whiteblock 6 failures. See what differs in the experiences and in (perhaps more importantly) the sources.
Ken's not the only one who made great power on one of these engines - there are plenty of examples in Europe as well.
 
rogerthechorister said:
Well, in UK experience terms, there was a spate of people melting the 5 pots - possibly due to a rogue garage that did brain dead chipping with the mixture getting too lean - yes there was, I was involved in some of the resulting row about the law of defamation - but apart from that reports of exploding 5 pots are VERY rare. Contrariwise everyone is petrified of getting a 6-pot whiteblock as even the N/A ones are reported to eat head gaskets and crack blocks - and that is standard at 182 bhp or 204 bhp. AFAIK the 6 pot went down to 2.5 litres from 3 litres to give more cylinder separation to reduce H/G failures (although, tbf, the same is said for why the 2.3 redblocks went LPT while the 2 litres stayed HPT).

You can call it "internet lore" - I call it "reading". That seems to be the evidence.
Click to expand...

Seriously, this is the engines fault? :roll::omg:
 
rogerthechorister said:
Well, in UK experience terms, there was a spate of people melting the 5 pots - possibly due to a rogue garage that did brain dead chipping with the mixture getting too lean - yes there was, I was involved in some of the resulting row about the law of defamation - but apart from that reports of exploding 5 pots are VERY rare. Contrariwise everyone is petrified of getting a 6-pot whiteblock as even the N/A ones are reported to eat head gaskets and crack blocks - and that is standard at 182 bhp or 204 bhp. AFAIK the 6 pot went down to 2.5 litres from 3 litres to give more cylinder separation to reduce H/G failures (although, tbf, the same is said for why the 2.3 redblocks went LPT while the 2 litres stayed HPT).

You can call it "internet lore" - I call it "reading". That seems to be the evidence.
Click to expand...

The trouble is that stories you "read" on the "internet" are indeed mostly "internet lore". Ultimately, my experience has been that circumstantial evidence about head gaskets, chip tunes gone wrong, etc, posted by people on the internet has no bearing on reality. I could really care less what a bunch of "bros" with "chip tunes" think is better and you shouldn't either. Such "stories" do not represent meaningful datapoints. Just my opinion.


First of all, the 6 went UP to 3.0L in most markets. The latest and greatest 1998 S90 and also Normally Aspirated S80 engines were 2.9's and 3.0's. It was the 2.5L motor's production that was suspended first.

So that kills the first theory based on all of your awesome reading.


Second of all, The 2.3L is an HPT and the 2.4/2.5 is the NA/LPT variant. For 6 cylinder motors these proportions remain the same, so this point is also invalid.

The reason is- there are 2 main bore sizes, 81mm and 83mm. This fact is the same regardless of if they are 5 cylinder or 6 cylinder engines. The 5 cylinder and the 6 cylinder both have 90mm bore centres so no difference there either. Those are real numbers, not "ZOMG that dude's 960 blew a head gasket, therefor the 6 cylinder motors are the worst!"

The only conceivable point you could use to suggest that a 5 cylinder is stronger would be hased on the fact that the crankshaft is shorter and therefore stiffer. Even that is reaching though as there's no real experience that seems to suggest that the crankshaft becomes a weak link and anything below absolutely stratospheric horsepower levels (well into the 4 digits).
 
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No, I didn't say that the 5 pots failures were due to engine weakness. What I said was that those due to mis-tuning were the only 5 pot failures much heard of. I was saying that the 5-pot seemed to have fewer failures than the 6 pot.

The B230FK is not an HPT. It is an LPT with the more restrictive wastegate actuator.

The B6304 was introduced in 1990 (with 204bhp). It was later de-cammed and only produced then 180 bhp. It shrank to become the B6254 with 170 bhp in 1995. With the reduced bore (as well as stroke) there was (obviously) less risk of inter-cylinder gasket failure.

B200 bore was 88.9 mm, B230 96mm. So again the potential for inter-cylinder gasket failure was reduced in the smaller engine.
 
Unless you have very specific reasons for needing the 5-cylinder, the 6 or even the 4 is more bang for your buck in whiteblocks.

I love the 4's, 5's, and 6's, and think they all have applications they're suited to. That being said, the limited knowledge base around actual high performance 5-cylinder tuning adds a significant degree of difficulty to an already mechanically more complex swap.

All that aside, I loves me some 5-cylinder engines.
 
rogerthechorister said:
No, I didn't say that the 5 pots failures were due to engine weakness. What I said was that those due to mis-tuning were the only 5 pot failures much heard of. I was saying that the 5-pot seemed to have fewer failures than the 6 pot.

The B230FK is not an HPT. It is an LPT with the more restrictive wastegate actuator.

The B6304 was introduced in 1990 (with 204bhp). It was later de-cammed and only produced then 180 bhp. It shrank to become the B6254 with 170 bhp in 1995. With the reduced bore (as well as stroke) there was (obviously) less risk of inter-cylinder gasket failure.

B200 bore was 88.9 mm, B230 96mm. So again the potential for inter-cylinder gasket failure was reduced in the smaller engine.
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You're still missing the fact that volvo still makes whiteblocks with the larger bore size to this very day. The made 6 cylinder whiteblocks with the larger bore size right up until they stopped production.

Regardess, both the 5 and the 6 are readily available with the smaller bore size so your point is irrelevant. If a person prefers the smaller bore, it's easy to get.

All that said, the fact that old headgaskets fail is not indicative of anything from a performance perspective. Not to mention I was making in the range of 600bhp on a stock headgasket and stock head bolts... it's a non-issue.
 
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