An important note for these motors, if you are doing a valve job or anything requiring the head removal, you need to immediately put some pipes over the studs to secure the liners in place so that if someone rotates the engine it will not break the seal on the liners.

As a young gun in the early 80's I was running Alfa twin cams brilliant fun with 5 speed boxes disc brakes all around LSD at the back and twin carburetors so much fun.

Great engines, 2.0 had 130bhp in 1972! chain driven twin cam,wet lined all alloy engine.

Excellent explanation!

You talk about the sleeves corroding into the block. That only happens if someone has disturbed the bottom end, like knocking pistons out. In which case you must clamp the sleeves down 1st. I made updates my own which used the head studs. The worst problem is with corrosion between the studs and the heads. My first of 4 105 series cars (when I was 17) was a 1750. As commonly happens the head gasket was leaking so I went to change it. I couldn't get it off no matter how much I have levered and hit it with a mallet. I rigged up a chain block and pulled until the front wheels came off the ground. Eventually I decided to go nuclear by reassembling everything excepting the head nuts and starting it up - no dice. So then I gave it a good rev, but had made an error of judgement - I had left just a little slack in the timing chain to give it room to move. In the middle of a good rev the timing chain jumped teeth and the inlet valves hit the pistons. Finally the head was free!

Never heard of wet liner engines til last month and now you show one ! Thanks , very interesting , And I must say , what a lovely Ally Head and Rocker Cover !

Very interesting. The xuj9 engine in my Peugeot is a wet liner engine and its given me a lot better understanding of how it works

Do you hone new liners? Or pop them in as they come?

Great stuff and great explanation, the weakness to me in wet liners appears to be the O ring which with heat will inevitably fail. This is one of the rare occasions where a 'lapped' face might be better (such as when you used to lap in valves with carborundum paste). I realise that time is cost and for the original manufacturer probably not viable, but seems to me that a face to face seal with the liner pressing down by the head would give more longevity than an O ring, what say you? The faces of course would have to be a similar metal, but it could be done by putting inserts in the block (like a valve seat) or couldn't it?

Do you think its possible to upgrade from 1600cc to 1800cc with changing only pistons & liners ?

Problems coming from Europe? I wonder what that could be?

Wet liners look garbage any wonder they can't handle any power.