Lamborghini Miura engine

This Lamborghini Miura engine never ran correctly. There were restoration photos showing the heads off as though it had a valve job so we assumed that the engine was healthy and some other thing like bad gas, poorly adjusted carburetors or ignition woes were causing the poor running. We did a leak down test and found a few cylinders that were weak but not so bad that the engine should run SO poorly. We looked into a few minor issues like carburetor tuning, ignition timing and bad gas but when the engine just wouldn’t run properly we decided it was time to break it down.

We pulled the engine which is extremely entertaining, you have to tilt it 90 degrees to allow the differential housing to clear the frame. What a deal! Once we removed the heads we put the pieces of the puzzle together, the reason we saw the photos with heads off is because the head gaskets were leaking and were replaced. Unfortunately the past mechanic did not notice that 4 out of 12 cylinder liners had huge pitting from water leaking into the cylinders and rusting the bore.

The engine/trans casting is a thing of beauty, such an amazing part that could only come from a company familiar with large complex castings. This part looks a lot like the tractor and industrial castings that I have seen in the past. The Lamborghini tractor influence weighs heavily on the Miura!