Saturday, November 3, 2012

Weslake/Nourish 8-Valve

It never ceases to amaze me how much I STILL don't know about Triumph's. One example would be the 8 valve Triumph head.


A little history thanks to the Britbike forum:

 Back in the dim and distant, the famous Rickman brothers asked Harry Weslake's comany to devise an 8 valve head for their Triumphs. This was duly allocated the project code WRP103 (Weslake Racing Project I guess). The patterns for the heads were built and assembled from wooden blocks. If you get hold of an early Rickman/Weslake head marked WRP103, this is obvious from the final casting. This was the late 60's early 70's. I had one of these on an 850 Triton and although the internal machining was high spec, the outside was a bit prototype-ish.

When the project was dropped, Dave Nourish took on the patterns and developed/evolved the head under the name "Nourish Racing Engines - NRE. They became a lot better finished with the casting imperfections filled and smoothed out, and are available in either big or regular valve heads (big valves are 1mm larger in diameter).

During the life of the heads there were also a number of rocker boxes fitted.
The original Rickman ones made of magnesium alloy weighing about 9 oz, marked "RICKMAN". Quite rare.The Weslake ones made of magnesium alloy weighing about 9 oz, marked "WESLAKE" Extremely rare.
The new Nourish ones, either plain or marked "NOURISH" weighing about 1lb, made in plain aluminium. Still available new from NRE.

Dave Nourish has the records of the head serial numbers and can date most heads.



 Pretty wild.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have a rickman 8 valve triumph top end on a rebuilt T140 bottom end with a balanced crank what sort of money is it worth?

BitMonkey said...

Wigg,

The 8 valve stuff is a bit after any of the Triumph stuff I follow much. If it's a real Rickman I imagine it's pretty desirable, at least to the ARHMA crowd. I might start with a call to Big D Cycle.

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